Centrality of Agriculture: Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature 9780773565715

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The Centrality of Agriculture Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature

Bridging the gap between political economy and ecology, The Centrality of Agriculture is a critical review of the history of capitalism and socialism in relation to agriculture. Colin Duncan argues that the important role of agriculture has been overlooked during the last two centuries: it must be restored to a central place in society. Using ecological, historical, humanist, institutionalist, and Marxist methodologies, Duncan argues that the entire project of developing the theory of political economy has been seriously sidetracked by industrialism. Using England as a case study he shows that the relationship between modernity and agriculture need not be so uncomfortable and suggests ways in which the original socialist project can be rejuvenated to make it both more feasible and more attractive. Duncan concludes that no sustainable human future can be conceived unless and until the centrality of agriculture is properly recognized and new economic institutions are developed that will encourage people to take care of their landscapes. COLIN A.M. DUNCAN is an environmental historian living in Kingston, Ontario. He taught modern British history at Queen's University for many years.

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The Centrality of Agriculture Between Humankind and the Rest of Nature COLIN A.M.

DUNCAN

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • Buffalo • London

McGill-Queen's University Press 1996 ISBN 0-7735-1363-9 Legal deposit second quarter 1996 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in the United States on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the School of Graduate Studies and Research and the Department of History of Queen's University. McGill-Queen's University Press is grateful to the Canada Council for support of its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Duncan, Colin A.M. (Colin Adrien MacKinley), 1954The centraliry of agriculture: between humankind and the rest of nature Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7735-1363-9 I. Agriculture - Economic aspects. 2. Agriculture Environmental aspects. 3. Agriculture - Social aspects. I. Title. HD1925.85 1996

338.I'oI

c95-900947-7

This book is dedicated to my parents (1915-93) whose complementary outlooks structured my own

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Contents

Tables and Photographs / xi Preface / xiii Acknowledgments / xvii I

(INTRODUCTORY) AGRICULTURE AS THE PROBLEM: REPLACING THE ECONOMY IN NATURE AND IN SOCIETY / 3

Section I (Preliminary) The Missing Environmental Dimension in Social Criticism / 3 Locke and Marx on Our Effect on Nature / 5 Trying to Digest the Possibility of Our Utter Destruction / 10

Section 2 (Ecological and Historical) The Environmental Implications of Agriculture and the Preindustrial Phase of Their History / 13 The Ecology of Agriculture / 14 Preindustrial Environmental History / 18

Section 3 (Ecological and Contemporary) The Environmental Implications of Industry and Our Living Environment's Capacity for Response / 24 Distinguishing Among Capitalism, Modernity, and Industrialism / 24

viii Contents The The The The

Environmental Essence of Industry 7 2 9 General Theory of Waste Processing / 31 Water Cycle and Soil / 33 General Significance of Biogeochemical Cycles / 37

Section 4 (Practical and Future-Oriented) Towards Agriculture as Our Environmental Monitor and the Centrepiece of a New Form of Polity / 39 Different Levels of Community / 41 Distinguishing Technically among Use-Values / 43 Local Protection of Land by Ecologically Sound Agriculture / 45 Socialism on a Complex Basis / 48

2

(PABULAR) AGRICULTURE PRIVILEGED AND BENIGN: ENGLISH CAPITALISM IN ITS LIGHT-INDUSTRIAL P R I M E / 50

Section i (Sociotheoretical) The Relevance of the English Case for Understanding the Place of Agriculture in Modern Society / 50 The Theory of Purely Capitalist Society / 51 Agriculture in the English Case / 53 The Historical Origins of English Agrarian Peculiarity / 55 Specific Roles of the Landowning Class in England / 57

Section 2 (Agronomic and Ecological) Classical English Farming Practices and Land Stewardship / 63 The Unconscious Ecological Sophistication of "High Farming" / 64 Land Stewardship in a Modern but Preindustrial Society / 69 Political Economy's Comprehension of Agricultural Improvements / 71

Section 3 (Legal and Institutional) The Dynastic Device of Strict Settlement / 75 Dynastic Ambitions Serving the Land / 75 The Rates of Return on Capital and on Wealth / 78

Section 4 (Interpretive) The Place of Agriculture in the Economy of Capitalist England / 80

ix Contents The Position of Landowners in the Economy / 81 Agriculture as Accelerator then Decelerator of Industrialization / 83 The World Economy Turns on its Creator / 87 3

(CONTEMPORARY) AGRICULTURE DISPLACED AND DISARRAYED: THE INDUSTRIALIZING (WORLD) ECONOMY AS THE ONLY PERCEIVED CONTEXT FOR HUMAN ACTIVITY IN THIS CENTURY / 90 Section I (Historico-ideological) Free Trade and the Attack on the Landed Interest in England / 90 Classical Political Economy and English Politics / 92 The Effect of Corn Law Repeal on English Agriculture / 95 Section 2 (Historico-economic) The Rise and Fall of an Ordered World Market in Agricultural Produce and Their Manifold Effects / 99 The Agricultural Explanation of the Great Depression / 99 The Revival of Unsophisticated Farming in the "New World" / 102 The Agrarian Situation in Europe / 103 International Economic Events and Agriculture between the Wars / 103 The State of World Agriculture since World War II / 110 Section 3 (Technical) "Solving" Agriculture's Problems by Deliberately Subsuming It under Industry / 114 Mechanization and Chemicalization Distinguished / 116 Chemical Fertilizers / 117 Chemical Pesticides / 120 Antiecology the Implicit Philosophy of Contemporary Agriculture / 122 Section 4 (Critical) Agriculture and the Socialist Tradition / 126 Eduard David on Socialism and Agriculture / 130 Kozo Uno on Agriculture and Socialism / 132

4

(UTOPIAN) AGRICULTURAL BIOCONTEXTS FOR FUTURE PERSONS: POSSIBLE FORMS FOR COMMUNITIES SECURELY PLACED IN NATURE / 141

x Contents Section I (Philosophical) Types of Relations among Persons, Nature, and UseValues / 141 The Philosophical Implications of Our Environmental Unease / 142 Clarifying the Human Purpose of Socialism / 146 Section 2 (Descriptive) Forms of the New Agriculture for Bioregions / 152 Several Alternative Conceptions of Farming / 153 The Need to Protect Sound Local Practices / 157 Section 3 (Exploratory) Forms of Money and the Division of Labour / 161 Distinguishing the Several Functions of Monies / 164 A New Money for a New Social Form / 170 Establishing and Protecting Local Agricultures / 176 Section 4 (Tentative) Pathways to Utopia / 177 Revolutions and Cultural Change / 178 Flexible Disengagement as a Transformative Strategy / 180 The Culture in Agriculture / 181 Notes / 185 References / 229 Bibliography / 239 Index / 269

Tables and Photographs

TABLES

1

Changes in the Ownership 59

Social Distribution of English Land

2

Social Distribution of English Land Ownership in 1873 59 PHOTOGRAPHS Eduard David xxi Karl Polanyi xxii Yoshiro Tamanoi xxiii Kozo Uno

xxiv

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Preface

This shamelessly synthetic book came to have several aims, but my main and original purpose in writing it was to reverse the tendency of socialist thought over the last century and a half. It is a task that in my view had to be attempted because, as I argue, the entire project of the critique of political economy has been seriously sidetracked for over a century by contingent peculiarities of the sociological genus Modernitas, species industrialis. My work is self-consciously "classical" because I believe the critique of political economy must be ongoing into the foreseeable future. We have in no sense left behind the world of Adam Smith, who started the line of inquiry that came to be called "classical political economy." On the contrary, the key sociological assumptions in Smith's model have never been more nearly or universally true than they are today. Smith believed humankind must consist entirely, albeit notionally, of labourers, capitalists, and landlords. As we near the end of the twentieth century and the number of true hunter-gatherers and independent peasants dwindles to an utterly trivial proportion of the world's population, we must continue his analysis of modernity or else abandon social criticism. It is doubtless just as well if readers driven by more recent intellectual fashions have their suspicions confirmed here. It follows from the definition of modernity elaborated in this text that the cant phrase "postmodern" (which had a clear meaning in its home in the historiography of artistic styles) is virtually oxymoronic. Since the scope of my book is so broad and my methodology so varied - in alphabetical order: ecological, historical, humanist, institutionalist, and Marxist - the rather involved argumentation of

xiv Preface

this text is uneven, in many places very close, in other places merely sketched out. I do not believe however that the general problem addressed here could have been clearly identified, let alone properly characterized, if it had been tackled from any substantially narrower perspective. That said, I am happy to report that I am now at work on a book-length and more narrowly scholarly study that will centre on the sociolegal topics that occupy by far the shortest section of this work (chapter 2, section iii). In that more purely historical work I shall attempt to integrate this legal material more systematically wit some agroecological themes also treated all too briefly here (chapter 2, section 2). The manuscript of this work was essentially completed late in 1989. Two completely unrelated sorts of circumstances delayed its appearance unexpectedly by about eighteen months each. This is unfortunate because the passage of historical time in general since this work was begun, and the rate of publication in the area of environmental studies in particular in the last five years, make it necessary for me to emphasize to readers that this work is first and foremost an argument. Being thus essentially an essay it must give up all pretence at being a comprehensive guide to even the nonspecialist literature in the areas it touches on. Suffice it to say that since I began the work in the early 19805 much has transpired and much has been written that I have no difficulty interpreting as vindication of my points, but nothing has made me wish to restructure my whole discussion. The updating of the originally eclectic bibliography has therefore been highly selective; nevertheless I have tried to set up the scholarly apparatus in this book so as to maximize the convenience of readers. The publishing house must be thanked for agreeing to go along with my perhaps heterodox ideas on this matter. Within the text there are "flags" for two kinds of notes. Roman numerals in lower-case superscript denote the discursive kind of note intended either to elaborate various points in the text or forestall some "obvious" but misguided lines of criticism. Some of these notes are very long. Arabic superscript numerals denote mere references, in some cases mentioning specific pages to acknowledge sources for specific ideas, but more often to be taken as suggestions for further reading. The two kinds of notes are separately presented at the end of the book. The reference notes are given in a truncated style, fuller publication details being located in the bibliography. This is probably as good a place as any to say a few words about possible misunderstandings of the politicocultural aims behind this text. To those old enough to recall (or those otherwise knowledgeable about) fascism, my work might seem in places to be a restatement of

xv Preface

some themes with noxious connotations. I would like to say here, preemptively as it were, that to hold to such an impression would be an error on at least two counts. First, there is the relatively trivial, even academic, point that many persons with fascist leanings made very interesting and profound remarks about agriculture. Unfortunately, since many were naive philosophical holists, they generally believed their agronomic conceptions to be indissolubly linked to their racist notions. On that point they were simply wrong, as a matter of logic. Indeed since racist theories of culture are all internally incoherent (as well as biologically implausible), they strictly speaking cannot entail anything. The second, and much more interesting, point is that the arguments I employ here do not elevate any particular cultural version of agriculture. The cultural point I do want to argue for is simply that the central place in every culture should be occupied by agriculture. In some cultures, this would require more an inauguration than a restoration as such. I feel I should emphasize here that when I say "central," I do not mean merely "fundamental." For fundamentals can only ever be underneath, while centrality remains defined regardless of how many transecting dimensions are under consideration. I resist the fashionable notion of a society in which everything is utterly decentred as a necessarily false god. That is the sort of god whose worship it seems to me requires the coupling of an obsessive interest in the supposed consequences of what people say with profound ignorance of the easily observable consequences of what they do. On that score, so long as the ecological meaning of modern humanity is to be found in fields I am sure I need not fear (although I should perhaps anticipate) contradiction. Those who may prate about some future "postagricultural condition" are, I submit, cruel fantasists. I cannot conceive of any pleasant way to get from here to there.

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Acknowledgments

The debts I incurred during the many years of reading and reflection manifested in this book are varied, in both type and extent. Thanks to, above all, my wife, but also the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Government, and York University (Canada), I incurred no financial debts. I owe an enormous institutional debt to York University, whose interdisciplinary Graduate Programme in Social and Political Thought lives up fully to what I think of as the ideal of the university: a social "niche" in which intellectual freedom is valued above all other considerations. I literally cannot conceive how my experience as a doctoral student could have been better anywhere else. At York I was happy to find my chief intellectual mentor, Professor T. Sekine of the Department of Economics. My debt to him is immense. I also learned a great deal both from his close colleague from the Department of Political Science, Robert Albritton, and from their circle of students, the "Uno Group," which in the form of a semimonthly reading group has included, over the last twelve years, John Bell, Francisco Bozzano-Barnes, Ricardo Duchesne, Rafael Indart, Stefanos Kourkoulakos, Brian MacLean, Makoto Maruyama, Shohoken Mawatari and Takeshi Murota (both academics visiting from Japan), Douglas Scoyne (from the University of Toronto), Bruce Smardon, Stephen Strople, Randall Terada, Marc Weinstein, Richard Westra, and Eric Wright. Four other fellow graduate students particularly stimulated my thinking while at York: Mike Gismondi, Harry Musson, Ken Stokes, and Robert van der Platz. The other York professors with whom I had formal relations and for whose teaching I am grate-

xviii Acknowledgments

ful include Henryk Flakierski (Economics), Judith Adler Hellman (Political Science), Nicholas Rogers (History), Lorie Tarshis (Economics), Tom Wilson (Faculty of Administrative Studies), Ellen Meiksins Wood (Political Science), and Neal Wood (Political Science). Before this project had fully taken shape, Jeanette Neeson (now of the Department of History at York) played a vital role by not trying to stop me from mixing the themes I discuss in this book. It has been my experience that teaching helps one's research (much more than the other way round) and so I must thank Professors Sally Zerker and Mavis Waters (both of the Division of Social Science at York) for whom I served as a teaching assistant while working on this project. Professors Neal Evernden and Paul Wilkinson, both of the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York, made helpful suggestions upon reading an earlier version of this text. Professor Harriet Friedmann of the Department of Sociology at the University of Toronto did likewise in generous profusion. Two anonymous reviewers for the press made many interesting suggestions that I was happy to interpret as intended in the spirit of my work. Ernest Callenbach of Berkeley, California, offered encouragement at an early stage in the manuscript's history. Professor Abraham Rotstein (of Massey College at the University of Toronto) hired me as a private research assistant and guided me into a highly interesting area of research. He pointed out the monetary peculiarity of conventional modernity to me and then sent me to meet Michael Linton of Landsman Community Services, Vancouver Island, from whom I learned what real economic freedom could possibly look like. My debts to various members of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements whom I met at conferences in California are too many to list. One individual whom I did not meet in California, but to whom I owe the fact that I began this work with so much optimism, is Stewart Brand, whose Whole Earth Catalog is a bibliographical treasure-trove for many of the topics treated here. Whatever optimism remains in the final version I owe largely to regular attendance at the biennial international conferences of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy. I cannot refrain from saying that, when younger, I had not expected to face living out the second half of my life amidst the sorry social and environmental consequences of a multitude of foolish investment decisions so expertly facilitated by the neoconservatives who hold a tight grip on the countries comprising the English-speaking world, benighted as they are by constitutional habits that permit (indeed encourage) extremists elected by minorities of their electorates to rule with absolute impunity. I am certain we will all eventually recognize the 19808 to have been a critical period.

xix Acknowledgments

The international rentier class (as a notional whole) came to do things even it will regret for, as postwar history shows, rentier interests alone can stop an extremist government. That is not to say that nothing good came from capitalists during the eighties. For greatly improving the quality of my experience when indulging my favourite distractions and thereby helping me indirectly to complete this text I would like to thank a number of designers: Touraj Moghaddam and before him Ivor Tiefenbrun (for the indoors), and Jeff Magnan and the Naish family and before them Hoyle Schweitzer (for the outdoors). While longer-standing intellectual debts are generally too many and too diffuse to review on occasions such as this, I must single out one undergraduate teacher who early tried to set me on the path to philosophical and social realism: Professor Henry Laycock of the philosophy department at Queen's University. It was partly his influence that led me to work for several years in science. I am very grateful to Dr "Bev" Moseley of the microbiology department of Edinburgh University for tolerating a lapsed philosopher as a research technician on his Medical Research Council project on DNA repair in radiationresistant bacteria. It was only much later that I came fully to realize that microbes are by far the most important living entities. I am happy to carry out my obligation to say that this book has been published with the help of a grant from the Social Science Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Helpful sums were also contributed by Queen's University's School of Graduate Studies and Research and Department of History. I would like also to thank the staff of McGill-Queen's University Press, both in Kingston and Montreal, in particular Professor Don Akenson who was very encouraging from the outset, offering useful advice even before I started writing. Readers owe special thanks to Claire Gigantes, the text's copyeditor. I must also thank the following for lending me photographs for inclusion in this book: Professor Sakurai for the pictures of Kozo Uno; Mrs Tamanoi for the one of her late husband; the International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) for the picture of Eduard David; and Kari Polanyi-Levitt for a picture of her father, Karl Polanyi. I am also grateful to the members of the Department of History at Queen's University for allowing me over the last half-dozen years to try out ideas about British and environmental and intellectual history on themselves and on students. Some will be able to see herein that they influenced my thinking. So will Carl Bray. Thanks also to the tiny and largely transient population of people at Queen's interested in agriculture. I should say that in articles over the last several years I aired some of the themes treated here but always and

xx Acknowledgments

unfortunately without this fuller sociotheoretical context that was their original home. Permission to repeat the substance of some arguments was graciously given by Langdale Press (publisher of Canadian Papers in Rural History), the Regents of the University of California, the American Society for Environmental History, and the Agricultural History Society (also American).

Born in 1863 in the Mosel region, Eduard David worked as a schoolteacher until 1894, one year after he joined the Social Democratic Party. He was elected to the Reichstag in 1903 and served as a deputy until his death in 1930 (apart from a brief period from 1918-20 when he held various ministerial posts). He earned the undying contempt of later international communists for his support of German colonialism and of the Imperial government during World War I. In taking those positions he was hardly unique, but his early attack on emerging Marxist orthodoxy on agriculture earned him a special reputation and not much less contemporary and later contempt. It would be hard, however, to deny that his 1903 magnum opus, Sozialismus und Landwirtschaft (Socialism and Agriculture), which ran to seven hundred pages in the 1922 edition, remains the most thorough analysis of the topic.

Born in 1886 in Vienna, Karl Polanyi was educated in Budapest and spent a large part of the interwar years as a journalist in central Europe, watching the disintegration of nineteenth-century liberalism. This experience provided material for the highly original analysis of its causes and likely consequences that he developed in England and America during the war. Because on most general problems Polanyi stood firmly outside both the liberal and Marxist camps he was accorded little attention by the main ideologues who shaped opinion after World War II. His turn to economic anthropology in the late 19405 and a post in that field at Columbia University led, however, to his strong influence on two generations of (especially American) anthropologists and institutionalist economists. Karl Polanyi died in 1964 in Canada, where he had made his home for most of the postwar period.

Yoshiro Tamanoi was born in 1918. He taught political economy at Tokyo University, retiring in 1978. His earlier work focused on cybernetics and data processing as applied to the problem of connecting a planned economy to some sort of market mechanism. Influenced by the crisis of the early 19705 his thinking shifted to a systematic concern with the material and social bases of complex economies. In addition to making highly original contributions in the area of ecology and economics, Tamanoi wrote extensively about gender and economics. He died in 1985.

Born in 1897, Kozo Uno was a graduate of Tokyo University but he studied in Germany for two years in the early 19203. Although attracted to anarcho-syndicalism, Uno's temperament was hardly that of an activist. Nonetheless in 1938 he was indicted for leftist beliefs. Although eventually acquitted he left Tohoku University (where he had been lecturing on economic policy since 1924) and joined a private economic research institute. He returned to academia only after the war, where he began to reveal his ideas about how best to complete Marx's analysis of capitalism. From 1947-58 Kozo Uno taught at the Social Science Research Institute of Tokyo University, where he organized joint studies on agricultural problems.

From 1958-68 he was a professor at Hosei University. He rose to fame in the crucible of intellectual conflict since his idiosyncratic position initially inspired total opposition from almost everyone in the field. The opening sentence of the article on Kozo Uno in the Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan (1983) describes him as 'originator of theories which exerted a great influence on the Japanese academic world after World War II.' (Vol. 8, p. 173) It may seem surprising but it is not altogether absurd to suppose that the Japanese 'miracle' owed a great deal to widespread Japanese awareness of the Marxian analysis, an awareness that was furthered and encouraged by Kozo Uno's work. Uno died in 1977.

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The Centrality of Agriculture Live as if you are going to die tomorrow, but farm as if you are going to live forever. English Farmers' Proverb''

*Cited by Sir E. John Russell in his article "Agriculture" in the 1972 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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1 Agriculture as the Problem: Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

Given the right amount of work, the mind lives in its place, not merely as owner or user, but as a fellow creature with the other creatures that belong there, the effective husbander of both the agricultural and the natural households. A mind overloaded with work, which in agriculture usually means too much acreage, covers the place like a stretched membrane - too short in some places, broken by strain in others, too thin everywhere. The overloaded mind tries to solve its problems by simplifying itself and its place - that is, by industrialization. Wendell Berry1 SECTION I THE MISSING E N V I R O N M E N T A L D I M E N S I O N IN SOCIAL CRITICISM

Since the time of Robert Owen (1771-1858) it has been a commonplace of social criticism radically to question the place of the economy in society.1 Such questioning of course depended on what we so glibly call "the economy" having first been perceived as an Other, which in turn depended on its bulking ever larger in social life. It was not always thus. As Karl Polanyi has reminded us,2 in Aristotle's time the economy was the same size, so to speak, as a household (the word "economy" deriving from the ancient Greek oikos, meaning "household," and nomos, connoting regulation or management). But certainly by the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in increasing accord with the then newly popular visions of a self-regulating market system, the economy had indeed widely come to be conceived of as a large and distinct entity, at least in the metropolitan centres of Europe and North America. What is more, explicit state policy encouraged the

4 Agriculture as the Problem

economy to expand its presence, and not just materially but also psychologically.3 "Economists," as they came to be called, went so far as to claim (incoherently enough, as Polanyi argued)4 to have discovered specifically "economic" motives in human behaviour. Some, starstruck by mathematics and brazenly assuming quantifiability as convenient, have since gone even further to think all other human motives at least analogous, if not reducible, to the putative "economic motive." Robert Owen and many others were appalled at the immediate material results (especially for the less well placed) of the forcible cultural remoulding of individuals and society entailed by worship of this new "god," but they were perhaps even more deeply outraged by the redefinition of humanity implied by the strange retinue of bullying, psychologistic ideas from political economy.5 These early critics consequently rebelled at what we today might term the economy's "philosophical imperialism." Owen wished to restrain the economy so that it might be made the explicit servant of other, wider human purposes, and not the overweening master that he saw it becoming. The socialist tradition in its various manifestations has kept this theme of Owen's alive to this day. If socialists have always averred that the economy's place in society somehow must be delimited institutionally, they have usually come to this view out of simple concern for humanity, impressed by the contrast between its actual condition and its real potential. Socialists have long struggled with the question precisely how to alter social institutions to suit their avowed purpose, and they have done so to notoriously little effect. What has been worse, as we are now beginning to see, is their perhaps unsurprising historic failure to recognize fully that there might be another entire dimension to the question, that is, a whole series of equally compelling but very differently grounded reasons for "confining" the economy, reasons that, as it turns out, might indeed usefully specify some of the forms the institutional restraining of the economy could (and should) take. The missing dimension is environmental. It will be argued in this book that it is not adequate for socialists (or any others seeking a future society that will be both desirable and sustainable into the indefinite future) to refer to ecological considerations as merely additional "factors." In this discussion they will together constitute one dimension of the problem of the place of the economy in society, in order to signify their equal primary importance with the set of other, more usual, social (or "human") considerations. Although the validity of the arguments to be advanced here in no way depends on any particular level of environmental degradation having been attained, it seems that it is only the recently recognized possibility of

5 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

total human self-annihilation through the ramifying ecological effects of our own activities which has justified raising the status of environmental questions from a mere factor in, to a full dimension of, the question how to improve society. This point, which is perhaps novel (and not just to the socialist tradition) needs elaborating. First I shall sketch the logical outline of our historic inattention to the problem of environmental degradation, indicating all the while that the failings of social theory thus far are particularly evident when attitudes to agriculture are examined. Ultimately, all human activity involves some action upon the world, upon nature (the latter here defined stipulatively as our nonhuman material environment).11 The founding figures in the liberal and socialist traditions, John Locke and Karl Marx, both explicitly remarked upon this simple fact and its implications, as they saw them, for human beings. What neither regarded as fundamental to their inquiries, however, was the question of possible limits to the material environment's overall tolerance of human intervention. Their various respective followers have not as yet remedied this defect. One can make the obvious point that Locke and Marx themselves lived too early to benefit from ecological theory; but it also seems that their separate reasons for not considering nature's limits to be a fundamental issue in theory are interestingly different. It is justifiable to focus on these two alone because it would be difficult to come up with any equally influential commentator on human affairs prior to the twentieth century who was genuinely aware of the environmental dimension of our problems and who built discussion of it at the foundation level into published writings.111 Locke and Marx on Our Effect on Nature

First, it must be noted that Locke and Marx were working on very different problems - indeed, to the most contrary purposes - and in quite different socioeconomic contexts. When Locke discussed the primeval mixing of labour with land in the celebrated passages from the second of his Two Treatises of Government, he had very much in mind his esteemed English contemporaries, the so-called "improving landlords," whom he perceived to be engaged in unambiguously beneficial intervention in nature, causing it to be made permanently more productive. When Locke looked out his window, as it were, he saw only improvement where humankind was actively transforming the world. Marx also directly addressed this general question of the action of humankind on nature, but he tended to cast his discussion at a much higher level of abstraction than Locke ever did and appar-

6 Agriculture as the Problem ently did not ground his views in any particular empirical observations (contemporary or otherwise). Whereas Locke seems clearly to have been thinking of contemporary agricultural practice, Marx (at least in his pre- Capital writings) seems not to have had any specific type of human activity in mind. Here is Locke's gloss on Genesis, in which agriculture was the curse brought on us through Original Sin: "God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e., improve it for the benefit of Life ... He that, in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled, and sowed any part of it."6 Here is Marx expounding (in a manuscript written in 1844 that he never published) his radically different, atheistic view that nature is part of us: "Nature is the inorganic body of man; that is to say nature, excluding the human body itself. To say that man lives from nature means that nature is his body with which he must remain in a continuous interchange in order not to die" (Marx's emphasis).7 As Marx scholar Alfred Schmidt has explained it, for Marx we are different from animals chiefly because all of nature is in principle appropriable by us.8 Every other species has a finite range of objects for its appetites, a range in fact fixed by its particular nature as a species. In order to clarify his point about agriculture and the curse of work, Locke felt obliged to introduce a distinction between, on the one hand, the case of the North American native "Indians" who apparently lived easily inside an unimproved nature (labouring only in the mere act of appropriation), and, on the other hand, the fate of the rest of humankind who seem obliged to improve nature so as to coax fruit from it by the species of toil known as cultivation. In neither case, crucially, does Locke seem to conceive of nature as having anything other than a passive role. He apparently cannot imagine it responding differentially to the two sorts of treatment he distinguished. When Locke goes on to point out, and indeed insist, that "nothing was made by God for man to spoil or destroy"9 he is referring only to the already appropriated fruits of (unimproved) nature, not to nature itself, the source of these fruits. It does not seem to be within his ken that humankind might be capable of destroying nature itself. The American "Indians" can do no harm and the English landlords do only active good. It is striking that Marx's very abstract early thoughts were even less specific than Locke's on the subject of nature's conceivable roles and responses. Marx postulated a need for continuous interchange between humankind and nature, but he also referred to the latter as the body of the former. This extraordinarily ambiguous conception, based as it is on an extremely odd, even perverse, mixture of metaphors, is arguably less apt even than Locke's notion. Marx held to it for at least

7 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society another twenty years, but we can only guess what he intended by it. In one light it seems faintly imperial, perhaps even premonitory of the much later and inherently violent attitude to nature exemplified in Stalinist industrialization (which of course was actually only distantly, if at all, grounded in Marx's own ideas). Alternatively, and more likely, Marx's choice of image may only reveal some harmonious, solipsistic philosophy (probably derived from Feuerbachian sensual materialism).17 In either case, though, an important difference between Locke and at least the early Marx should be registered. Although Locke cast nature in a passive role, he definitely thought of it as ontologically distinct. Thus the concept of its ruination is certainly logically possible in the Lockean view. But if nature is part of our body, as Marx has it, then the notion that we could destroy it is strictly speaking not even conceivable, unless glossed as suicide, which, although an arresting notion in itself, would require taking quite an interpretive liberty. Marx's metaphor is too abstract and general for us to be confident where it may take us. Certainly we do not have in this passage from Marx's early manuscript writings any analogue for Locke's distinction between agriculture and mere acts of appropriation from nature. One misses Locke's distinction particularly strongly in the opening passages of The German Ideology (a manuscript written jointly with Engels only a few years after the passage quoted above). In that context a conceptual discussion of the implications of different kinds of possible relations between humankind and nature would have been most in place. Indeed, the omission is alarming since Marx and Engels say there that human beings apparently distinguish themselves from animals only after they have started to "produce their means of subsistence" (original emphasis)10 This leaves North American "Indians" as Locke conceived them with a most uncertain status. The omission is also surprising because by Adam Smith's time it had become a commonplace of social thought that, contrary to the Lockean view, hunter-gatherers led miserable, exhausting lives. Only recently have some anthropologists returned to the Lockean, optimistic interpretation and reclassified hunter-gatherers under the quite different rubric of "the original affluent society."11 Agriculture per se is introduced by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology as merely the highest level of "the undeveloped stage of production."12 Apparently they thought that this part of the story of humankind, when agriculture first comes into being and early dominates social forms, is only a prologue. The entire preindustrial period forms a unity, and the advent of industry (coincident with that of capitalism, apparently) is when the important historical rupture in our relations with nature occurs. If that was their view at the time, it was

8 Agriculture as the Problem

remarkably naive, for arguably it is when agriculture became common that the relationship between humankind and nature underwent its single most radical change/ Certainly it was a massive shift. Marx unfortunately did not develop his earlier conceptualization of the human-natural metabolism in any systematic way. It is clear however from the famous parts of the Grundrisse on precapitalist economic formations, written more than a decade after The German Ideology, that he had by then come across, or decided to take explicit note of, the distinction (so clear in Locke) between mere appropriation and actual cultivation. But, significantly, Marx did not then alter his assessment of the timing of the crucial historical break in modes of human-natural interaction. Marx kept to his strange notion of nature as somehow simply part of our body and that apparently is what kept him tied to the chronology in The German Ideology. Indeed, his use of the metaphor seems to shift as though to emphasize that point. The metaphor is now apparently intended to help explore a contrast between our condition before industry, when we could not experience nature as an "Other," and that after the advent of industry, when we have no choice but to confront nature as an external condition, as no longer part of our body.vl Marx spells out rather explicitly in a passage on one of the early forms of commune the implication that in the whole preindustrial phase of human history (a fortiori including the preagricultural period) there can be no problem for us with nature: "The earth in itself - regardless of the obstacles it may place in the way of working it, really appropriating it - offers no resistance to [attempts to] relate to it as the inorganic nature of the living individual, as his workshop, as the means and object of labour and the means of life for the subject."13 When looked at from any contemporary perspective informed by ecological theory, this is surely a remarkable claim. One is inclined to point out that if the relationship is really an interchange (or metabolism), there must be effects both ways, even prior to industry. What is to guarantee that nature can always absorb whatever treatment humankind metes out to it? For, from the initial postulating of a human-natural interface, any fully secularized discussion of its effects ought immediately to fork into two paths: the effects on humankind and those on nature/11 There are of course hints in Marx's subsequent, published writings that he certainly did see early warnings of the environmental destruction that after the advent of capitalism might be licensed. There are passages in the first volume of Capital, the only one he published, where he alludes (evidently under the influence of the agronomic strictures of the eminent chemist Justus von Liebig) to the need to return nutrients to the soil after their removal in the form either of

9 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

food, or material for clothing.14 In this context Marx accuses capitalism in particular of sundering this necessary cycling of matter, of having an innate tendency to rob the soil of its fertility because it so exaggerates the distinction between town and country (and its attendant uneven population distribution). He went so far as to make the sweeping claim that "all progress in capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art ... of robbing the soil."15 This hasty historical summary is quite untenable in general and indeed is probably nowhere less appropriate than in the case of England, the ostensible case study for Capital?111 That said, it can be suggested that Marx was somehow on the right track in using the concept of materials cycles. It is not at all clear, however, in fact somewhat unlikely, that he was thinking in terms of what some now call "living" cycles of matter, a concept I will explore in the next section. What Marx seems worried about in Capital is only the mis-placing or "robbing" of matter, not damage to the ability of the soil to carry out any wider ecological functions. The case of Marx thus supports the view that in order fully to elucidate the effect of agricultural production, a materialist philosophy has to be supplemented by concrete propositions from ecological theory. It is also not unreasonable to point out that even though Marx lived too early to wonder whether capitalism could destroy nature utterly, his notorious general belief that capitalism could and would be superseded by a better, more rational, social form logically belies any notion that he thought we were on the threshold of utter catastrophe. What remains disturbing about those passages from Capital is that most of Marx's readers were (and are) liable to be left with the impression that the really dangerous disruption of nature was introduced by capitalism and, therefore, by parity of argument, industrialism. It has since been amply and repeatedly demonstrated that manifestations of our capacity to damage our environment long predate capitalism and are not crucially dependent even on urbanization, as Marx himself evidently discovered from reading his German contemporary, the botanist and agronomist Karl Fraas, the year after the first German edition of the first volume of Capital was published. Marx reported in a letter to Engels that he got from one of Fraas's books the then apparently rather new or at least little-known idea that, unless controlled, agriculture per se sets in motion a chain of destruction.16 Fraas's particular reasoning, however, which mostly applies to cases such as the ancient civilizations east of the Mediterranean basin, ought to have alerted Marx to the peculiarities of the English case, where there were no such signs of desertification, and where even destructive tampering was postponed later than perhaps anywhere else, especially relative to the degree of "developmenf'of the society.

io Agriculture as the Problem

In any case, regardless of how we interpret the hints in Marx that some new developments in the realms both of theory and concrete human practice were causing him to think in more alarmist, or at least realist, terms about the general relation of humankind to nature,1* it remains unfortunately the case that he apparently never revised his earlier philosophical conception of the human-natural metabolism in their light.17 Indeed, if Engels's manuscripts are any guide to Marx's thought, we have some reason to think that he remained to the end of his life a victim of the pious but groundless view, so widespread in the nineteenth century, that knowledge naturally grows equally fast in all fields, and that frequent intellectual harvests are then always rationally pooled and a relevant digest made available for use in the ever-extending sphere of our interactions with nature.x As Engels put it in his unfinished Dialectics of Nature (immediately following a discussion of soil erosion in the ancient world intended to prove that nature can "take revenge on us"): with every day that passes we are ... getting to perceive both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. In particular, after the mighty advances made by the natural sciences in the present century, we are more than ever in a position to realise, and hence to control, even the more remote natural consequences of at least our day-to-day production activities. But the more this progresses the more will men not only feel but also know their oneness with nature.18

Marx and Engels did not see how fragmented and, consequently, how irrational as a whole intellectual enquiry really always has been.19 In that same letter to Engels, Marx confidently accused Fraas of being too much a bourgeois to see that "conscious control" of cultivation is all that is needed.20 We of course have no idea how Marx himself thought such control could be exercised, but certainly most of his influential followers have been unable to see, as few others today do either, that the phrase "control over nature" is really a bold oxymoron. Control over ourselves is the real problem that must be addressed. The idea that failure to control ourselves could lead to a total, catastrophic loss of control over nature is the crucial and new idea with which social critics must henceforth grapple.xl Trying to Digest the Possibility of Our Utter Destruction Given the European intellectual heritage in social and political thought as represented in a clearly optimistic way by Locke for the right and somewhat ambiguously by Marx for the left, it is hardly surprising

ii Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society that the socialist tradition in particular has maintained that the problem is how to protect humankind from its economy, or how to re-embed the economy in society, to use Polanyi's apt image. The whole problem of our interface with nature could only be a mere factor in, not a full dimension of, social criticism. If however one takes seriously the idea that nature is not infinitely malleable, then one has to consider the possibility that, inadvertently or otherwise, it may be made actually hostile, not just less hospitable, to human life. If this possibility is real, then socialists are revealed as having been purblind. Concern for the quality of human life above all could become in fact (and in logic) quite beside the point. In criticizing Locke and Marx here the real possibility of causing irretrievable damage to nature (from the point of view of Homo sapiens, if not of microbes) has been alluded to several times, but not yet argued for. In order to begin building constructively on this critique of Locke and Marx it is necessary first to lay out a series of ecological arguments in a historically informed way. It will be explained in the next section that in historical fact, and as much recent ecological theory would have led one to expect, agriculture as a human activity has caused on occasion extreme damage, at least on the local scale, in the premodern period. Although George Perkins Marsh had already demonstrated this to a fairly wide readership in the late nineteenth century in his Man and Nature, the point only forced itself on the attention of the twentieth century's general public with the creation of the American Dustbowl. It was that disaster that sparked Walter Lowdermilk's important journeys for the (American) Soil Conservation Service to the lands east of the Mediterranean basin to investigate earlier cases of desertification.21 In this century, of course, agriculture is not the only cause for environmental concern. There are also the different and potentially more globally threatening environmental implications inherent in industrial activity. These were beginning to be visible in Marx's day and, alarmingly, have recently eclipsed (from the public viewpoint) the now equally severe consequences of our contemporary agricultural activities. A relationship between the two sets of problems is often suspected but not clearly discerned. All these misaligned perceptions call for theoretical treatment. In section 3 of this chapter I will venture some remarks about the nature of "modern" societies in order to help advance a sociologically radical distinction between agriculture (defined as our interactions with the living parts of nature) and industry (defined as our activities performed on nonliving material). Agriculture at least looks like a form of metabolism, whereas industry does not. In the light of geophysical and geochemical theory we can see that the distinction has profound

12 Agriculture as the Problem

implications for properly conceptualizing our effects on the planet as a whole. The overall result of all this grounding of social criticism in ecological theory is the suggestion of a new social paradigm for modern interaction with nature which is outlined in the final section of this chapter. The key point is the need to monitor the environmental effects of industry and to limit them, by making ecologically sensitive agriculture the central element in an economy embedded both in nature and in society. Consideration of the factors involved points us to yet another disturbing aspect of our interaction with our environment. Our more prodigal habits with stocks of nonliving material since the widespread adoption of industrial methods of production mean we have also been gratuitously beggaring future generations of human beings even when not damaging nature itself. If we manage successfully to contain our economic activities future generations will thank us on several counts. Before concluding this introductory discussion I here avow my hope that, once they have become better informed on environmental matters, socialists of all stripes (and perhaps other people as well) will opt to set up a humanly sustainable future, not just a more humane brief epilogue for humankind. In any vision of a desirable future society, sustainability has to be built in.xn Since all the ecological arguments rehearsed in what follows have apparently never before been systematically advanced within a context of social criticism informed by social theory and concrete historical knowledge, dialogue within and without the socialist tradition has been frustrated. Too often effort has been wasted in lamentations about the effects of what is baldly labelled "technology." Ecological theory can tell us the world can have no fear of technology in general. It is always particular practices that cause damage, and so concrete ecological propositions have to be introduced into the current public discussion, especially ones concerning agricultural practice. We have to accept that the problematiques originally set by Locke and Marx are not in themselves adequate. An entire dimension was missing. Overall then this work should be counted as an attempt to remedy the deficiency synthetically. Although centred on agriculture, the whole argument is intended as an explanation of a possible meaning for the word "socialism," a meaning that I hope Owen would have recognized more easily than either Stalin or the Fabians. I hope to make clear by the end of this text that socialists ought to be distinguishable by the quality of their attention to the institutions in which our mutual interdependence manifests itself.xm As indicated above, the more purely ecological arguments relevant

13 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

to the general problem are presented in the rest of chapter i and their presentation culminates in a set of conclusions about the central importance of a suitable agriculture to any sustainable economy. Chapter 2 (on England) builds on this perspective but with the particular intention of showing that there is nothing inevitable about the current capacity of modern society to destroy its environment. Contrary to much prejudiced opinion, it is possible for agriculture to be central without having to revert to some premodern social arrangement, as naive anti-Agrarians suppose.xlv The case of England until near the end of the nineteenth century illustrates the point: a highly modern society engaged in agriculture in the fullest interventionist sense and yet benign in its environmental influence. Chapter 3 carries the story forward up to the present, attempting to explain the origins of, and briefly describe, the dangerous environmental predicament we are now in, especially with respect to agriculture. Deliberately reversing the dramaturgical logic of gloom (as section 4 tries to do within this chapter), chapter 4 optimistically outlines how we might usefully think about restructuring our institutions in the light of the lessons of chapters 2 and 3, the positive and the negative lessons. A better world is certainly not an impossibility. It is, however, completely beyond the scope of this work to discuss its probability. SECTION 2

THE E N V I R O N M E N T A L

IMPLICATIONS OF AGRICULTURE AND THE PREINDUSTRIAL PHASE OF THEIR HISTORY

Agriculture is most usefully defined as the cultivating (or tilling) of soil marked out in fields with a view to some organized harvesting of vegetable matter. The use of fields as such (i.e., with one crop at a time per field) is a vestigial function apparently of the early southwest Asian predilection for small grains that naturally tend to grow in stands.22 The origins of agriculture, thus defined, are uncertain.™ One major authority, Carl O. Sauer, averred that it probably arose as a more or less accidental adjunct to the domestic rearing of animals.23 Another, more recent, scholar, Mark Cohen, argues that the original agricultural "revolution(s)," dated at around ten thousand years ago, came about as the solution to an early so-called "food crisis" due to population growth.24 However, regardless of whether agriculture is seen as having caused the first major leap in population, or whether it is judged to have arisen as a response to population pressure, it constituted a decisive break with previous modes of interaction between humankind and nature. This rupture had many effects and gave rise to many problems.

14 Agriculture as the Problem

Prior to the emergence of agriculture, it was possible (as Locke noted) for hunter-gatherers to live by directly culling food from the various cycles of living things in nature, without having to engage in activities aimed at directly causing these cycles on specific sites. Recent research has suggested that many hunter-gatherer cultures made extensive use of fire to alter those cycles both in kind and frequency over large areas, but it is unduly stretching the concept to describe that as "production.>>XV1 Basing his analysis on various calculations relating to hours of effort and adequacy of diet, Marshall Sahlins attained some scholarly notoriety for his colourful suggestions, referred to earlier, that the stone-age model of "affluence" may have seen the heyday of human idleness. Very little work was required in order to live comfortably, so "leisure" time was extensive. However, such a relaxed way of life depended on access to enormous areas of land. A significant rise in population density depends on humans taking a much more active part in influencing the availability of items they can eat. The required extent of intervention depends on, inter alia, the characteristics of the local ecosystem. In general, as population density rises, more effort must be expended per capita (in both calorific and psychical terms) in procuring food, and generally also more land per capita must be put under some system of organized production.xvn Such constraints are behind the original examples of environmental degradation caused by humans. In a sense, agriculture in itself is necessarily a retrograde activity, from an environmental point of view. Agricultural ecosystems are vastly simpler and less stable than the ecosystems in which hunter-gatherers operated. Explaining this, and the previous point about population density, calls for ecological theory. The Ecology of Agriculture Agricultural ecosystems are immature and inherently precarious because of the biological phenomenon of succession. This concept can be explained by supplementing Eugene Odum's convenient analytic summary with Donald Worster's historical survey of ecological ideas.25 It is simplest to start with the classic case of the fate of abandoned farm fields. It has been observed that an old, unused field undergoes a series of invasions by various "communities," each composed of several kinds of organisms (plants, microbes, animals, birds, insects, etc.). Each such set of organisms alters the local soil and other conditions (e.g., microclimate) on that site by its living presence, thus creating a new and distinct set of ecological niches for the next set of

15 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

species, with plants always playing the more fundamental role. The upshot is a succession by more or less discrete stages that tends to a relatively stable and complex final community known as the "climax."5"111 The whole set of stages constitutes a "sere." A sere and its associated climax community are generally quite specific to the overall local terrain and climate, the earlier stages being a function more of soil type and the later ones more of climate. To give some examples from terrestrial (as opposed to marine) ecosystems, in some cases the climax is tropical forest, in some it is grassland, in yet others it may be a mixed temperate forest. Through the course of succession, total biomass (the weight of living organisms present) and the standing mass of organic matter (the decomposing remains of the no-longer living) increase in quantity. Because of the inherently dynamic character of vegetation, nature "fills up" any place it can. The diversity of species present on a site also tends to rise through the course of a sere.xlx Such diversity contributes to stability in the face both of invasion by other species and even, to some extent, of sudden insults such as fire, drought, etc. This last point was shown by comparing the fates of recently abandoned farmland and old biologically complex grassland regions during the droughts in the Great Depression in America. However, while diversity is a valuable quality in an ecosystem, it does not follow that a climax community is a good source of food for such "invaders" as human beings. The net amount of annual biological growth (or "production" of biomass) on a given site does not continue to increase as succession proceeds. Rather, it comes to be more or less equal to total respiration (or "consumption") per unit time. Considering the whole biological community on a given site over the course of a year, what is consumed comes to equal what is produced. The ratio of net biological production to total biomass present decreases with succession and is in any case soon at low levels. It may even be zero over an annual cycle. A large proportion of the biomass in many climax communities is woody matter and thus quite inedible by us (although otherwise very useful). Thus, for humans living on land occupied by climax communities of organisms, it is necessary to have access to large areas. Very little in the way of human food can be culled from a climax community per unit area on a sustainable basis. The phenomenon of agriculture is basically that of an active reversal of, and ongoing counterthrust to, the ecological process of succession carried out on selected sites by human beings. The earlier stages of succession are characterized by considerable net biological production on an annual basis. This is what humans need if they are to be able to have

16 Agriculture as the Problem

"harvests." A major food source for human beings is seeds. These are produced in bulk by annual plants in particular that, being annuals rather than perennials, have been obliged by evolution to put a great deal of biological effort into seed production. Perennials tend to produce a smaller mass of seeds and are therefore less favoured by us as a food source. Our reliance on seeds illustrates the point about the unsuitability of climax communities strikingly: perennials characterize climax communities whereas annuals predominate in earlier stages of succession; since succession is an inexorable phenomenon, there is a constant pressure on the land to revert to the path towards climax. Agriculture has to be a continuous struggle against this constant, invading, directional force. Furthermore, by virtue of its holding land under the occupation of simple (not very diverse) communities, agriculture keeps land more exposed to the threat of potentially catastrophic insult than it otherwise would be. Despite the toil and trouble involved in procuring sustenance in the form of seeds, all complex human societies have made them their central calorie source. Very likely this is simply because seeds are easy to store successfully.^ Evidently the ease with which an endlessly repeatable annual harvest can be obtained from a given area of land is partly a function of the total supply on that land of the mineral nutrients needed by plants, and also of the annual supply and distribution of rainfall and sunlight, etc. Agriculture simply is harder on some types of land than others. But it is always a struggle, and the struggle is harder, ceteris paribus, the greater the number of humans that are to be supported thereby. There is no need to enter into the acrimonious debate about how many people constitute "overpopulation" in some absolute sense. It suffices for the moment to point out that the production of food requires more work per capita as population rises. It is incontestable that the resulting environmental interference increases in gravity as well. The classic and slightly less explicitly interventionist alternative to agriculture, pastoralism, involves the milking or direct eating by humans of animals that all their lives "harvest" for their masters over relatively wide forage areas. This system of procuring food may be easily carried out on lands characterized by versions of grassland climax (perhaps modified by regular use of fire to reverse succession temporarily). Many common domestic animal species are, unlike us, able to digest cellulose. This means they can widen the range of plant species we can (albeit indirectly) live off. As with hunting-gathering however, the area of land required for the pastoral approach is large, and it also rises with population. Moreover, overgrazing (always a temptation) may so weaken the grasslands that they succumb to drought.

iy Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

Still, when there is space enough, pastoralism is in principle a viable system requiring little "work," only motion in the form of cyclical migration. This way of appropriating nature gives rise to the classic nomadic type of human society.™ It may be noted that, in general, the mixture of grass species adapts over time to pressure from the animals (both their nibbling teeth and their hooved feet). Some have speculated that wild or semitame herbivores may have inadvertently drawn human attention to wild stands of cereal plants and thus sparked the idea of agriculture. There exists yet another basic way human communities may get food. The swidden (or "shifting" cultivation) system is a hybrid approach, partaking of both the stationary and nomadic alternatives. Where population density is low, it may be possible to move from one set of fields to another, fresher location. There is generally some extra drudgery involved in doing this, due to the repeated need to clear new land. In much of the tropics, where soils seriously lack organic matter, shifting cultivation may be the only workable strategy. The high levels of moisture and temperature greatly favour decomposers and so the available nutrients on site are almost all continually cycling through the various living organisms that compose the overall biomass. There is no considerable accumulation of organic matter in or on the soil in such places. If it is desired to plant a crop (i.e., a field of a plant), it is necessary to "slash and burn" an area of forest in order to bring the nutrients down to the soil. The sustainable technique involves getting a few years of crops from an area so treated and then letting it quickly revert to tropical forest. If the laterite soils found in much of the tropics are left exposed for too long, the nutrients are apt to wash away or become otherwise unavailable to plants; hence irreversible ecological damage may occur from overly intense or prolonged cultivation on such soils. As with hunting-gathering and pastoralism, then, a large area is needed to support any very considerable number of people living by swidden cultivation; that is, population density cannot be high. Inasmuch as agriculture proper (field cultivation) is a continuous struggle against succession on a given site once cultivation has been started, it requires that human communities be relatively fixed in place. There can be little doubt that the implications in terms of social consciousness and environmental attitudes of the change from mobile to stationary ways of life associated with the advent of agriculture must have been extensive and deep. Many historians and other social thinkers have engaged in bold speculation about the origins of our environmental violence.26 The list of culprits thus far has included Christianity, capitalism, and the "Scientific Revolution." Relatively few

18 Agriculture as the Problem authors have focused on the conjuncture when agriculture first appeared as the crucial break. Paul Shepard deserves at least brief mention in this context for having done just that. He has developed a highly provocative (although unfortunately untestable) thesis to the effect that our species is ill suited to the kind of psychological development patterns usually undergone by children in any but hunting-gathering communities. We are unable to achieve what he terms a mature relationship with the environment in settled societies. Therefore, he argues, ever since the advent of agriculture, it has been very difficult and rare for human individuals to pass successfully from adolescence through to adulthood. In sum, Shepard is inclined to trace our environmental destructiveness over the last ten thousand years to our being severally and collectively arrested in adolescence.27 One may wonder about Shepard's sources for his portrait of psychological development in the case of hunter-gatherers, and thereby question his entire thesis about the inherent unsuitability of stationary (agricultural) society for human beings. But although many authors before Shepard have emphasized the enormity of the change wrought by the adoption of agriculture, he has done well to highlight the environmentally dubious character of that shift. In tracing in rough outline the environmental aspects of the European trajectory from ancient agriculture towards agriculture under capitalism, it is however worth mentioning another interesting point made by Shepard. Preindustrial Environmental History Shepard insists that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity are all religions that were deeply marked by the experience of having arisen in company with subarid systems of agriculture in southwest Asia. Cultivation under such conditions is notoriously precarious and the fragility of the overall ecosystem is very high. According to Shepard, the psychohistory of European peoples in particular has been structured by the early desert experience of nature as an ungenerous, indeed, an almost lifeless, entity. This sense of existential angst in nature can only have been exacerbated by historical experience (viz. the Exodus). Also, as others have noted, the rise and fall of civilizations in the Mediterranean basin carried the sombre undertone of a long secular trend towards irreversible environmental degradation. The general pattern of destruction was referred to by G.P. Marsh in Man and Nature and has been more recently elucidated by Carter and Dale and also by Edward Hyams.28 It can be summarized schematically as follows. The dry, rocky terrain associated with the Mediterranean basin

19 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society today is essentially a human artefact. At one time the coastal regions were under a mantle of vegetation that was destroyed, region by region, by the long series of ancient Mediterranean civilizations. With the exception of some cases that strikingly prove the rule, these civilizations doomed themselves to collapse by a simple course of environmental degradation. Each started out on the coastal plain and prospered until it began, apparently under the pressure of population growth, to clear the slopes of the hills and mountains behind it. As the upland forests were felled for fuel and new farmland, grazing was extended up these slopes. The ubiquitous and omnivorous goats of these civilizations prevented the regeneration of the forests of trees and bushes whose roots had previously kept in place the mantle of soil covering the slopes. The close cropping of vegetation so habitual to many of our domestic ruminants is generally lethal to ecosystems composed of primeval flora. Once the original forests were gone, the harsh Mediterranean winter rainstorms dislodged the soil, which proceeded to flow down the slopes in rivers. The result was an immense burden of silt that clogged the irrigation systems of the downstream coastal farming regions and the harbours of the coastal cities. Swamps developed near these cities and malarial-type diseases weakened the communities further. As the coastal and plains farming began to suffer, pressure to clear yet more ground in the mountainous hinterland increased. This vicious circle was self-exacerbating. With the hill soils gone, the barely adequate Mediterranean annual rainfall was no longer retained in the uplands for gradual release to the lowlands through the course of the year, as it had been before. It now simply tended to flow straight over the rocks and back down to the sea in swift torrents, every year carrying away yet more soil from lower down than the year before. Further, the local climate was affected by the absence of the moderating forests. Overall rainfall levels fell while the distribution of precipitation became more skewed and the range of temperature extremes extended. The resulting irreversible environmental degradation is behind the collapse of the ancient civilizations. Region by region, human beings degraded the Mediterranean basin as an hospitable ecosystem for themselves. This agrarian pattern of population pressure leading to upland soil erosion and, therewith, eventual sociopolitical collapse also occurred in many other parts of the world, notably China. The key, and very instructive, Mediterranean exception is ancient Egypt, which, like the regions drained by the Tigris and Euphrates and also the Indus, was blessed with an unusually wide and flat riverine plain. The Nile flooded the Egyptian plain annually, covering

2O Agriculture as the Problem

it each time with a thin but fresh layer of fertile silt from deep within the African interior. This, coupled with a generally "man-proof topography (as Hyams put it when contrasting the Nile with the otherwise similar Tigris/Euphrates and Indus basins),29 enabled Egypt to maintain agricultural production at ever-higher levels for a very long time without having to attack and denude its immediate hinterland, as happened elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The result was that Egypt was able to last much longer as a distinct civilization. The highly expansionist Roman Empire was one of the factors that eventually brought Egypt down. Rome is a striking case, because it sustained itself essentially by raiding societies residing in ecosystems distant from its own. The upshot of the extra agricultural demands this created further exacerbated the whole process of environmental degradation described above and undermined the exception that had been Egypt. By the time of the fall of Rome it had thus become much harder for "dynamic" (outward-looking, growing) societies to emerge around the Mediterranean basin. In due course, the centre of cultural and commercial gravity shifted north, to the very different ecosystem of the dense temperate forests of western, northern, and central Europe. It is striking how long it took for centres of power to arise away from the Mediterranean, with its easy sea travel.30 Why did so little historically "happen" at first and for so long in these northern European forests after the fall of Rome? A full answer would obviously be very complex, but among sociocultural explanations, ecological arguments must be given their place.™1 In the narrower context of this discussion they alone will be considered.™11 It seems clear that for a long time the population in the rich ecosystem of northern Europe was scanty and could afford to use "lazy" hunting-gathering and shifting-cultivation modes of procuring sustenance. It has been argued that, until the development of the deep plough, it was in any case out of the question to cultivate such heavy, damp, clay soils, densely tangled with roots. Mediterranean agricultural techniques and implements had been developed for quite different soil conditions. Discussing what he termed the "Agricultural Revolution of the Early Middle Ages,"31 Lynn White pointed out that the Mediterranean "scratch" plough was a light and shallow plough just adequate for disturbing the predominantly light soils of the Mediterranean-basin region. It required cross-ploughing of cultivated fields because the soil was not in fact turned upside down as with later ploughs. This requirement to cultivate in a criss-cross pattern led to the typically squarish shape of Mediterranean fields. The scratch plough was quite unable to make any significant impact on the dense soils north of the

2i Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

Mediterranean. For a long period, then, tillage in the north was effectively confined to the less fertile but drier uplands with their lighter soils. As Cooter and Raftis have more recently emphasized,32 swidden farming was widely practised in the forests and probably provided a comfortable standard of living for the thin population present at the time. As Cooter reminds us, however, too fast a return to a previously cultivated area requires the clearing of dense bush (characteristic of the earlier successional stages of regeneration after the last pass). Such work is much more arduous than the killing of trees in a large mature temperate forest with its relatively open forest floor, where one can simply ring the bark and then wait a few years. Lynn White's discussion makes clear that while it is difficult to be precise in the matter of origins, it seems that by the time of Charlemagne, the Germanic peoples were making extensive use of a new kind of heavy, wheeled plough. This had sharp blades attached at the leading edges that cut the dense mat of roots. A curved board then guided the turf up into the air and let it fall upside down to the side of the track. A great deal of tractive effort was required to pull such an item through the soil. Generally a team of eight oxen was used. This was difficult to turn through 180 degrees, and since in any case the need for cross-ploughing was obviated by such thorough disturbance of the soil, the convenient shape for a cultivated area was an elongated rectangle. If only because it was often difficult for single peasant families to afford large teams of animals, a degree of cooperation in farming the laboriously cleared fields was practised. It is thought by some that the origins of the manor as a social form are connected to this type of ploughing. Originally, it seems that individuals were assigned strips of land in each of several fields according to their contribution of animals to the ploughing team. Every year by turns one field full of strips was thrown open for the common grazing of the beasts on the fallow. In turning the soil over towards the centre by repeatedly ploughing round and round each long strip, the fields gradually came to be characterized by long ridges (one per strip) separated from each other by deep "furrows." In planting crops all over such a varied topography a kind of "insurance" for the community against crop failure was acquired. In wet years the plants in the better-drained soil on the tops of the ridges thrived. In dry years the plants in the damper hollows could survive. It has been argued that peasants also had an additional sort of insurance as individuals, inasmuch as the holdings of any one individual were typically scattered over all the fields attached to the community, and therefore over all the local varieties of soil and drainage conditions present in the area it occupied.33 Such energetic

22 Agriculture as the Problem

and complex cooperative cultivation was associated with the clustering of population in dense units. These tillage communities with their intensive use of land often had difficult relations with the pastoral groups that continued to inhabit the forests, letting their animals forage widely for nuts, roots, and leaves. The tillage communities also experienced population growth. In the seventh century in what is now Germany, the increase in population as measured by the extent of "assarting" (the clearing of new fields) was considerable. Lynn White inclines to the view that a frankly exploitative attitude towards nature is evinced by this spreading of assarts and by the new, more disruptive tillage methods. He is perhaps confusing quantitative with qualitative change, for, in contrast to the forest clearing on the hillsides around the Mediterranean basin in ancient times, nothing catastrophic followed from the new, northern European kind of disruption. Wholesale removal of vegetation in the North was carried out mainly in the fertile lowlands, and in any case the rains were gentler and less likely to accelerate erosion. Thus, it may be that the relative lack of environmental damage done by the people of medieval Europe is due primarily to the forgiving nature of the terrain in the ecosystem they occupied. At any rate, other aspects of Lynn White's early medieval agricultural "revolution" make good ecological sense. The key early-medieval innovation in White's story is the change from the two-field system of rotations characteristic of classical Roman agronomy to the German three-field system. White points out that the change required considerable upheavals in landholding patterns. He asserts that real momentum was gained only after the invasions by Magyars and Vikings in the late ninth and early tenth centuries had already disrupted the existing social arrangements. The two-field system of the Romans involved autumn planting in one field (in anticipation of the winter rains), while letting the other field lie fallow. The next year the fields reversed roles. Contrariwise, Baltic peoples had had the habit of planting crops in the spring since it was their summers that had rain. These two patterns of spring and autumn planting were married, as it were, under the Germanic system. The new system involved having only one of three fields lying fallow during any year. The most recently fallowed field was planted in the winter to grains (winter wheat and/or rye), and the field that had most recently borne grain was then planted in the spring one year later to summer crops (oats, barley, peas, lentils, broadbeans). The fields intended to carry crops were ploughed immediately before seeding and the fallow was ploughed once in June before the weed plants could contribute mature seeds. That there were only three

23 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

ploughings over the three-year cycle implied more crops for a given amount of ploughing compared to the two-field system. This had the effect of further stimulating assarts (which, like ploughing, require much arduous work) and thus allowing population growth. By the twelfth century, in many areas, communities were indulging in double ploughing of the fallows for weed control and as a way of rebuilding fertility. Aeration of the soil allows the oxidation of organic matter, which makes soil nitrogen more available to plants (i.e., in inorganic forms). This is very important as the conversion in soil of the various forms of nitrogenous compounds into nitrates is the slow process that generally regulates, and limits, the rate of growth of plants. The use of legumes such as peas had been known by the Romans to be beneficial for the soil but they had not made it standard practice to plant them. Plants in the legume group are characterized by symbiotic relationships on their roots with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, especially useful for the three-field rotation, which is more demanding of the soil. Legumes also add beneficial vegetable protein to the human diet, a good complement to the carbohydrates of the winter crops. The change in cropping also had implications for the animal population that could be sustained. Oxen prefer grain and horses thrive on oats. Oat crops were common in the three-field system, but had been an impermissible luxury in the two-field system.The greater production of oats along with developments in harness design allowed an increase in the use of horses and thus faster and better-timed ploughing. The general increase in the animal population allowed more manuring of the fallow fields. Animals are capable of bringing nutrients to the arable fields from wasteland, and from streams by means of meadow grasses. The farmland was thus actually improved, which also helped yields per unit of land area, hence population, to climb. Other effects of the use of the faster horse were marketing over wider areas of farm produce, and the "balling" of isolated peasant households into nucleated villages. This phenomenon was especially marked in Germany where outlying homesteads were abandoned while their accompanying fields were kept in use. White makes the point that this relative "urbanization" of the population must have had some implications for environmental attitudes, but he is rather vague about the precise import of such cultural change. In any case, it is striking that the new farming system was not adopted everywhere. Indeed, European farming systems probably diverged further during the late Middle Ages. Wealthy Italians investing heavily in agriculture on consolidated holdings in the north of Italy in the period after 1,000 AD tended to stay with the old Roman system In the Netherlands a unique kind of farming with no rotations held

24 Agriculture as the Problem

sway. There a very damp climate produced ample, continuously renewed, lush pasture that allowed for intensive manuring of cultivated, but no longer fallowed, fields. In the south of France and Italy, land parcelling went too far for the cooperative three-field system to work. The Danes introduced the three-field system to England in the ninth century. However, the English case began to display unique features. Unlike in France, where lords earlier commuted labour services to rents, feudal lords in England tended to intensify their demands on labour. This had a special effect in stimulating attention in England to technical improvements in farming, which in turn had long-term repercussions, ultimately issuing in the emergence of industrial capitalism. It is clear, however, that long before the widespread adoption of industrial techniques in "manufacturing," Europeans had developed a thoroughly ambiguous relationship with the environment in their farming. In many cases agricultural practices were embedded in environmentally benign social institutions. Some of these will be illustrated and analyzed in the next chapter. But in order to complete the exposition of ecological principles needed to elucidate the environmental implications of economic activity, this discussion must now consider the general environmental meaning of industrial production.

SECTION 3 THE E N V I R O N M E N T A L IMPLICATIONS OF INDUSTRY AND OUR LIVING E N V I R O N M E N T ' S CAPACITY F O R R E S P O N S E Any explanation of the environmental implications inherent in industrialism requires some prior conceptual, specifically historicosociological, discussion inasmuch as the family of terms around the word "industry" comprises so many unconnected meanings, some leading in an entirely technical, others a purely social, direction. It is quite senseless with such "keywords"34 to try to resolve the ambiguities in such a way that will satisfy all conceivable sociological purposes. Rather, I shall merely try to make distinctions that highlight the problems I am concerned with here. Distinguishing among Capitalism, Modernity, and Industrialism As I hinted at the beginning of section i, it can be said that political economy, indeed the very idea of formal study of "the economy," was born at the same time as capitalism. But at least two other putative siblings have been perceived in that litter: industrialism and modernity. While some historical sociologists insist that these terms are mere

25 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

synonyms each denoting the same phenomenon, most social theorists see them as discrete. Friedrich Engels was exercised by some aspects of this taxonomic problem when he introduced his celebrated distinction in Anti-Duhring between political economy in the broad and narrow senses.35 Engels felt a need to distinguish conceptually between these phenomena. He saw that political economy developed with capitalism but that it was not coextensive in range. What he called political economy in the narrow sense is the attempt to describe the workings of capitalism. Political economy in the broad sense attempts, in the light of the results of its narrower counterpart, to analyse economic matters in general, including both pre- and postcapitalist social realities. Of particular interest in this connection is Engels's inclination to suppose that the more comprehensively socialized concept of production developed under industrial capitalism would be useful forever after. In his technologically determinist fashion he held capitalism responsible probably for introducing, and certainly for accelerating, the development of industrial methods of production. In common with most other Victorian factory owners he thought that this was unquestionably a positive achievement overall. History proper, for Engels (as for Marx, as earlier noted), began with agriculture and moved onto a new, higher stage with industry. But surely one must distinguish sharply between, on the one hand, capitalism as a social system that accelerated the modernization of the world in the sense of causing an increase in human interdependence, and, on the other hand, industrialism as a qualitatively new type of human-natural metabolism. For in a curious and highly relevant way, capitalism and industrialism are capable of greatly exaggerating each other's effects. But synergism does not demonstrate identity; it only falsely suggests it. In fact, the synergistic effect is not inevitable. For purposes of ecological clarity, then, we must conceptually isolate industry per se from its contingent sociohistorical garb. To this end first let us create and clarify a useful concept of modernity which of course has to be much more general than the concept of capitalism (a fortiori, than that of industrialism). The relevant essence of modernity may best be discovered by a process of conceptual distillation. The concepts of individualism, urbanization, monetization, and even democracy, all of which are usually connoted by "modernity," quite early on in the process turn out to be theoretically insubstantial and thus vaporize. This is because these concepts are only contingently related to each other. What is common to them all, however, and remains in the pot after the distilling process is over, is the notion of human interdependence above and beyond the ties of kinship and acquaintanceship. We rely

26 Agriculture as the Problem

in respect of the mundane details of daily life on people we do not know. Adam Smith had the substantive economic aspect of this in mind when, in preindustrial Britain, he focused with extreme clarity on the social division of labour. After listing the items in a modest household he commented: "We shall be sensible that without the assistance and cooperation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilized country could not be provided, even according to, what we very falsely imagine, the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated."36 While it can be made very clear what Smith was referring to in the uniquely commercialized context of eighteenth-century Britain (which, according to scholars, boasted the highest number of shops per capita in history),37 the shorthand phrase "division of labour" is in general dangerously loose. For instance, a clear division of labour may exist between town and country without its being anywhere near so marked within the country itself (arguably the condition of much of France in Smith's day). What Smith was speaking of was a thoroughly generalized division of, for the most part, highly specialized labour performed by persons who had no direct personal access to land. This arrangement had penetrated the whole of English society some centuries before Smith wrote,38 which helps explain why he took it so much for granted. The key to modernity is surely just such indirect, and therefore inherently social, relations between people and use-values (the things they use). Production and consumption are socially separated activities. People play economic roles complementary to each other. A useful formal (but happily not static) definition of modernity could therefore run something like this: A society is modern to the extent that its households consume little of what they themselves produce and produce little of what they themselves consume.**™ Now, there are many aspects of human interdependence that do not relate directly to specialization in the production of goods.xxv It has been suggested that in feudal societies, for example, long-distance trade in goods was a liberalizing influence because it was the vehicle for the circulation of ideas (especially new ones), and thus for increasing intellectual interdependence. In modern society, by contrast, we need no longer wait on the trans-shipment of goods to move ideas. Modernization thus has a tendency to end intellectual parochialism. While it will later be seen that the continuance or rekindling of some forms of parochialism might be desirable, one can see that modernity in itself is in general a neutral if not benign influence - although it is hard to look with a completely unjaundiced eye on the irrational penchant for innovation for its own sake, which has certainly been asso-

27 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

elated with modernity thus far and which, when coupled with a short time-horizon, leads to needlessly destructive because needlessly rapid social change. For the moment however, having driven something of a wedge between the concepts of modernity and industrialism, I shall return to the question of the synergism but nonidentity between industrialism and capitalism, taking the latter as a particular form of modernity. Under capitalism the ruling principle is the endless self-expansion of value. Wealth cannot be allowed not to grow. So if industrial modes of production happen to come on stage at the same time as capitalism, then so inevitably does the institutionalization of a pressure infinitely to expand industrial production. This we recognize as our predicament today. Contingently, easy access to the most convenient fossil fuels, especially since World War n, has greatly exaggerated this tendency. It is all the more significant, then, that one of the first modern societies was Smith's England. It became modern and also, it can be argued, to a considerable degree capitalist long before it became substantially industrial. That it did so is the reason its history is so important. But perhaps the undeniable ring of paradox to this claim has first to be accounted for. Arguably it is an artefact (by default, as it were) of relative inattention to agricultural history on the part of political economists. Agricultural history has been a ghettoized subject since it began, and is still so today. It is now clear that Marx and Engels, in common with their nineteenth-century contemporaries such as Richard Cobden, the English middle-class activist (from whom in many ways they took their lead), underestimated the extent of technical development in agriculture in early modern England. The old view was that the era of Parliamentary Enclosures (starting around 1750) coincided with a so-called "agricultural revolution." But as the latter's chief historian, Eric Kerridge, never tires of explaining, enclosure per se has nothing to do with improved technique, and no "revolution" can be conjured out of the post-seventeenth- but pre-twentieth-century agronomic evidence.39 It was also common in the nineteenth century to understate the extent outside London of the commercialization of early modern English society, which, as indicated above, has recently been shown from several angles to have been far greater than previously suspected.40 The error of emphasis may also stem partly from the baseless nineteenth-century prejudice (further entrenched in this century) that commercialization presupposes widespread urbanization, when all it requires is easier transportation - which can be functionally equivalent to urbanization. In this respect, it has often been remarked,41 England was extraordinarily blessed from a topographical

28 Agriculture as the Problem

point of view."™ In any case, the upshot of all these errors of emphasis and fact was a tendency to overestimate not only the extent of industrialization in England by the middle of the nineteenth century but also its tendency to continue. This latter misperception has long stood unchallenged, though fairly recently Perry Anderson, in particular,42 has based a synthetic alternative interpretation on the labours of historians of, among other things, the persistence of hand technology in industry,43 the spatial and sociological distribution of middle- and upper-class wealth,44 and the crucial nonindustrial role in the English economy of the City.45 The reasoning of the old orthodoxy ran roughly as follows: England must be (or be becoming) overwhelmingly industrial (and that must be its dominant characteristic) because it is so patently capitalist. Behind this lay an unargued-for, and highly dubious, simple identification in the minds of most urban Victorians of industrialism with capitalism. The arbitrary, disproportionate interest of historians in the so-called "Industrial Revolution" greatly exacerbated this confusion in the public's mind. One result was the long-tolerated but incoherent accounts of agricultural history that all assumed agriculture must have undergone a similar "revolution."46 As Cannadine has recently shown,47 the various generations of historians of the Industrial Revolution actually have only one interesting feature in common - they all tell us a great deal primarily about themselves and the interests and preoccupations of their own days. As guides to the past each should be handled with caution; indeed, one must read them all in order not to be seriously misled. These points could well bear extended examination, but my purpose here is merely to clear the historiographic mists away so that the purely technical (i.e., thermodynamic and geochemical) aspects of industrialism can be seen clearly. While the propriety of so sharply distinguishing capitalism from industrialism, and each of these independently from modernity, must be taken somewhat on faith at this stage in the argument, it should be pointed out that these distinctions matter not merely as a matter of intellectual housekeeping. For what we would surely like is to drop capitalism, control industrialism, but retain modernity. If these three are not kept apart conceptually, it will not be possible to devise a desirable socialism in practice. The burden of this work is to argue, however paradoxically, that the agricultural control of industrialism is the key problem for socialism. The continuation of our current unbridled production of material goods by means not integrated carefully with our living environment will place an intolerable burden, both cultural and ecological, on any kind of socialism. But the control of industrialism cannot

29 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

be achieved by merely arbitrary means. It has to recognize some facts about the material world, facts already, if inchoately, recognized by agriculture. The Environmental Essence of Industry

When the concept of production in industry is examined closely, it becomes apparent that industrialism implies a qualitatively distinct mode of interacting with nature. There is a sharp difference in principle between industrial production and agricultural production. As shown in the last section, the latter can hardly claim to be immune to ecological considerations inasmuch as it inevitably involves some harnessing of the biological "production" that occurs regardless of our intentions (or indeed our presence). Industrial production, however, has been making just such a claim, implicitly, and often explicitly. It tries to convince on this score chiefly by ignoring its inevitable generation of waste. In this industrialism shows its hubris. Galbraith observed some time ago that our chief problem in the future is more likely to be waste disposal than shortages of fuels and materials.48 Galbraith's remark, which has great force even in the short term, particularly struck a group of Japanese students of the human-natural metabolism. In the rest of this section some of the ideas they developed will be set out.49 Production as developed under industrialism is most usefully conceptualized as a series of transformations performed on lifeless matter comprising both inherently nonliving matter (e.g., minerals) and long-dead matter (e.g., fossil fuels). It is to activities thus distinguished as fundamentally abiotic that I intend to refer when I use the term "industry" and its cognates.*™1 It is worth noting that this definition is not entirely unprecedented. Alone among political economists, the Physiocrats early discerned that we enter a different mental universe from the agricultural when we consider manufacturing. Their doctrine that only in agriculture do we see the creation of new wealth - that manufacturing involves only the formal manipulation of pre-existing wealth, never its extension in quantity - has generally been mocked by economic thinkers as a travesty of value theory. However, from a materialist perspective informed by ecological theory, their point seems less nonsensical. Unfortunately, their protoecological idea is no longer widely recognized in any form. On the contrary, the highly abstract input/output analogy (originally from mathematics?) is the image currently in vogue for industrial production. That model assumes that there is no direction to the transformation of nonliving matter. What is performed on it must

30 Agriculture as the Problem be in principle reversible, just like mechanical encounters in Newtonian physics. But this ubiquitous self-image of production as it takes place outside the world of living things, that is, with radical ecological indifference to place, must be a lie in the most literal sense, because it ignores the implications of entropy inherent in waste. In the view of one careful Japanese student of the problem, the late Yoshiro Tamanoi, entropy and waste in general are essentially the same thing. According to Tamanoi's thermodynamic critique of the lifeless conception of production that inheres in industrialism, the identification of production as a species of (reversible) Newtonian operation ruled out any real recognition that production cannot not produce waste. In the deepest sense industrial production can never be reversible. It is always performed on some living matter since it can never not affect living things. The effects of entropy can never be finally contained. A fortiori they cannot be isolated from life. The real situation is actually far worse than the Physiocrats feared. So far from its being enough to claim, as they did, that manufacturing creates no new wealth, it typically has always created in its waste products some, as it were, antiwealth. Twentieth-century economists buried waste under the spuriously universal category of "externalities," which they are still apt to define, with breath-taking triviality, as being typified by such problems as the unfortunate effect on a neighbour's access to sunlight of building a high fence.50™111 Serious attention to the problem of waste disposal was thus pushed to the periphery of economics and ignored by the overwhelming majority of its practitioners. In this purblind attitude is evidence of what I identify as the characteristic industrial flaw of systemic ignorance of ecological context. We have tried to persuade ourselves that there is such a thing as an effect that is not also, in turn, a cause, by essentially ignoring effects we do not wish to see. Engels's optimism on this score (quoted earlier)50 could not have been more misplaced. The environmental solipsism of industry must be confronted both theoretically and practically. If wastes are to become harmless, they must be processed somehow, and that takes time, nature's time and, if conscious effort is involved, our time too. It follows that particular care must be taken not to damage those natural entities that do any "automatic" processing of waste, nor of course to go beyond the rate at which they can do it. At this point there comes to light the industrial flaw of arrogance, which is complementary to the flaw of ignorance outlined above. Our contemporary arrogance is manifest in our discounting of nature's capacity to help solve some of the problems we create, even as we further institutionalize our penchant for endless industrial production.**1* These flaws are not necessarily fatal, however. After all, as implied in the earlier discussion of the ecology of agriculture, we are not the

3i Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

only organisms to generate waste. All organisms do so, and all organisms in one way or another recycle waste. What, if anything, is different about the waste we produce, or is it just a question of concentration, of scale and time-frame? In preindustrial society, when productive activity mostly relied on materials drawn from current life processes (e.g., natural fibres and wood fuel), waste processing essentially looked after itself, from a biological point of view.300' Can our current wastes be expected to succumb to the natural metabolic disappearing act that agricultural waste used typically to perform? To answer such questions adequately, Tamanoi suggested we must first consider the problem of waste disposal at a theoretical level. In this connection he developed further the implications for political economy in the broad sense, of the thermodynamic analysis of our waterplanet conceived by the Japanese physicist Atsushi Tsuchida. Their joint argument will be outlined in what follows. The General Theory of Waste Processing

Given that they necessarily generate waste, it is fortunate indeed that all forms of production always take place in a living context. A transformative process (living or industrial) that generates waste can only get rid of it when the system producing it is "nesting" inside a living system. Indeed, the capacity to process waste is a central part of the definition of a living system in this conception. Dead matter has no capacity for disposing of waste and must rely on life. Living systems come in nesting sets (in one sense there ultimately exists only one living system: the Earth). Waste is passed from the inside of one living system to the next living system outwards, and so on, continually. This process takes time since each living system has its own rate of, and therefore finite capacity for, waste processing. The time taken by living systems to process waste poses absolute limits for our production, since the disposal process cannot be accelerated indefinitely. It would be best if human society were to nest itself properly inside living systems and allow nature ample time. This obviously applies, inter alia, to the processing of chemical wastes that may be locally present at levels incapable of being adequately processed by nature's local representatives unaided.™1 But, perhaps surprisingly, the particular kind of waste that Tsuchida, as a physicist, focused on first in order to illustrate the concept of a living system was waste heat. It is a concomitant especially of industrial activity, most of which involves the application of heat to transform matter. The heat sources in use typically include past solar energy "stored" in wood, coal, gas, and oil, and also, more recently, the energy of nuclear decay. With the partial exception of wood, these fuel sources have in common that they are

32 Agriculture as the Problem

all nonliving. The power source does not come from current ecological cycles. As is well known, the demand for energy sources in convenient, concentrated forms (distinguished as "fuels" to follow Peter Chapman's useful suggestion)51 rose enormously with the advent of industrial methods of production. Tsuchida wondered how it was possible to get rid of all the waste heat generated in such an historically concentrated period. The matter is all the more puzzling given that large-scale consumption of fuels has been extremely spatially concentrated as well. Consider for example the heavy cluster of plant in the Ruhr Valley over the last century and a half. Tsuchida started work on this problem by observing an analogous but more fundamental problem of heat disposal that applies with respect to the energy our planet receives from the sun. We receive so much that the temperature on Earth ought to be higher than it actually is. There is a purely natural global entropy problem that dwarfs in significance the more local environmental problems we can cause, since it ought to be everywhere far too hot for life on Earth. Where does the heat go? Since the only plausible answer is outer space, the next question concerns mechanisms for the transfer of heat from the Earth's surface, where it is registered, to the upper atmosphere, where it can disperse. Tsuchida determined that the only candidates for this crucial role of heat conveyor are the water and air cycles. In the process of water evaporation, heat is transferred from the surface of the Earth to the upper atmosphere. This is because water is lighter than air (the molecular weight of the latter being eighteen, the former twenty-nine, on average).52 Once so far aloft the water vapour cools and, as a result, undergoes a change of state, giving off heat that is then able to radiate thermally into outer space. In the air cycle based on the familiar convection of warm air, air molecules undergo a similar process of adiabatic expansion and cooling in the lower pressure of the outer atmosphere, thus also releasing heat to outer space. As a result of both these processes heat can be lost from Earth. This cools the Earth enough for life to be possible. Since life is partly defined as a process generating waste heat that has to be excreted,53 and since the water cycle has a heat-disposal capacity some four times that of the air cycle,54 it is essential for living things to nest within the water cycle in particular. Deserts, for example, are characterized precisely by a paucity of life. The water cycle clearly has long had some considerable capacity for heat disposal but equally clearly it is a limited capacity inherently compromised by the phenomenon of natural forest and grassland fires. We, of course, are the industrial species that adds extra heatdisposal problems by releasing heat from sequestered sources such as

33 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

oil that would otherwise not be tampered with. Tsuchida is concerned lest we overload the natural heat-disposal system by our industrial activities. Far from facing an imminent shortage of energy, we are more likely to run into trouble soon by overconsuming fuels in a given period of time. We could generate an insoluble global-entropy problem as a result. We must also be careful that we do not damage some of the earthbound mainstays of this heat-disposal system because that could reduce its capacity and thus lead to the same crisis by a shorter route. Tsuchida points to forests as the mainstays of the water cycle. The Water Cycle and Soil The water cycle and life have coevolved. The water cycle is what allows life to exist at all, but equally it is plant life that keeps water cycling over land. Plants, being autotrophic (capable of living off inorganic, that is, nonliving, sources such as simple gases and mineral-bearing molecules), are the foundation of all other (heterotrophic) life forms. In the most fundamental life-supporting chemical reaction, photosynthesis, water appears on both sides of the chemical equation but there is a net sequestration of atoms from water within the structures of the new organic molecules, as depicted in the schematic formula below. CO2

+

carbon dioxide

2 H2O

water

->

(CH 2 O)

organic molecule

+

O2

+

oxygen

H2O

water

By contrast, in respiration, which reverses photosynthesis, formerly sequestered water is released, as oxygen is taken from the environment and carbon dioxide is generated. The main agents of the water cycle on land are the forests. Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of forest on Earth, the tropical and the temperate. In terms of contribution to the global water cycle, the tropical forests are the more significant. Constituting only one-third of the forested area on Earth (and thus even less of the total surface under vegetation), tropical forests nevertheless make up four-fifths of the Earth's land vegetation. Being damper, they also are less subject to natural fire. There is a relationship between, on the one hand, the quantity (or biomass) of vegetation, the living reserves of life, as it were, and, on the other hand, the amount of rainfall in an area. This correlation is exaggerated when the rainfall is evenly distributed throughout the

34 Agriculture as the Problem year. Even a short annual dry spell considerably hampers forest growth.55 As noted in the previous section, greater quantities of biomass tend to be found in primary (or climax) communities than in the secondary stands of vegetation that colonize an area that has lost its primary cover. As one would then expect, the greatest absolute quantities of biomass per unit area are to be found in primary tropical forests, where there is very heavy rainfall distributed evenly throughout the year. Such forests also exhibit the greatest species diversity of any ecosystem on Earth. They have as a result a great ability to buffer themselves against local, small-scale environmental shocks. They are however rather vulnerable to outright destruction. The complexity of species interdependence and the longevity of life cycles of many of the key species mean that it takes many centuries for such climax communities to be fully re-established (assuming of course that the relevant germplasm remains extant). For the water cycle to perform its heat disposal job, stable but high absolute levels of both production and respiration are required, and they must be linked in a given region if the water cycle is to continue. If materials harvested (by animals, including humans) from a given region undergo respiration elsewhere, then the water cycle in the region will be weakened. Depending on the geographic fate of the respired material, the effect globally could be a diminution of the water cycle over land. Tropical forests are thought to be already only about half as extensive as they used to be. More than half of what remains is in Latin America, the rest being in southeast Asia and Africa, with outlying patches on islands. The significance of the Amazon basin for the water cycle is made clear in the following remarks by tropical forest expert, Norman Myers: In Amazonia more than half of all the water circulating through the basin's ecosystem remains within the forest zone, thanks to the forest's evapotranspiration function: rainwater is absorbed by plants, before being "breathed out" by them again into the atmosphere. Were a large part of the forest to disappear, the remainder could well become less able to retain so much moisture, meaning that it would become a drier forest. As more of the forest was cleared, the dessicating process would become more pronounced, reducing the moisture stock of the entire basin and undermining the unparalleled vigor of Amazonia's plant life. The repercussions could extend further afield.56 Without forests, desertification occurs and the experience of the past indicates that this is usually irreversible. Once the water cycle has quit an area it does not come back. The pattern of effects of deforestation is not the same, however, for tropical and temperate ecosystems.

35 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

In the Mediterranean (temperate-zone) debacle described already, once the topsoil had washed away from hillsides and there was nothing to hold the moisture in place and even out the rate at which it left the slopes, the local climate changed. What had been a pattern of more evenly distributed rainfall was replaced by the now-familiar one of dry summers and torrents of rain in the winter. The former topsoil turned up in river estuaries, where it had accumulated too deeply in the deltas and thus been impregnated with seawater, rendering it for the most part unusable for farming. The key element in this story is the topsoil. If it could have been kept on the hillsides after tree felling (by terracing, for example), then a vegetation cover might have been eventually re-established. The situation after the felling of tropical forests is strikingly different and rather more severe. This is due to the virtual absence of topsoil in tropical forests. To make this clear we must review just what makes good topsoil. As mentioned earlier, the warm, moist conditions in tropical forests greatly favour the growth of microbial decomposers of vegetable matter. Relatively soon after falling to the forest floor, vegetable matter is broken down and the useful nutrients are absorbed again by living plants. As a result, there is little chance for a buildup of decaying (organic) matter on the forest floor. Where conditions are less favourable for microbes, as in the temperate zones, the accumulation of decaying matter can be such that a considerable proportion of the total local stock of nutrient material is to be found in the soil, not in the living biomass present. The lower rainfall means the nutrients have a greater tendency to stay there instead of being leached away. Topsoil is high in organic matter and thus possessed of stores of nutrients - dead reserves, as it were, of life. The abundant organic matter also has some relevant physical effects. The water-absorptive capacities of a soil go up with the organic-matter content. In temperate zones possessed of good topsoil the water cycle takes a detour through the soil, remaining available for the use of plants even well into a dry season. Since plants get their nutrients in solution, the importance of organic matter's capacity to hold water has to be underlined. In many tropical places the meagre soils also have some unfortunate geological characteristics. High laterite content renders some tropical soils into concrete-like surfaces in the event that the vegetation cover is removed and they are exposed to drier conditions. Such eventualities are practically irreversible. In temperate zones where good topsoil is present, careful tending of the land can cope even with the effects of total deforestation. Obviously this becomes more difficult and risky if the tree felling is

36 Agriculture as the Problem

carried on up the slopes of hills. But the presence of topsoil unquestionably gives us a certain latitude for exploiting the land. On the other hand, good topsoil forms at a very slow rate, and so it should be clear that the conservation of topsoil should be an absolute priority for any society that hopes to be sustainable. As the distinguished American soil scientist Hans Jenny puts it for soil in general, "Soil is a natural resource. On human time scales its mass is nonrenewable."57 Inasmuch as ecosystems in temperate regions are more resilient in the face of agricultural attack by humankind, it seems that we have a reasonable chance in such zones of being able to maintain the local water cycle properly even when we deforest on a major scale, as we did for example in Europe and China, but only so long as we preserve the topsoil. As for tropical zones, humankind should try its best to leave them undisturbed. Apart from the crucial role of tropical forests in the global water cycle, their extremely high levels of species diversity make them uniquely useful as a genetic resource for such purposes as finding natural predators for insect pests, breeding resistance to plant pathogens, discovering new foods, extracting new medicines, etc. People can obtain all these benefits from tropical forests without disturbing them unduly. What is dangerous is to suppose that in tropical regions we can safely indulge in agriculture in the original sense of the term, the cultivation of fields. Unfortunately this practice is spreading on a large scale in, e.g., Brazil.58 The swidden (slash-and-burn) technique, which was used for millenia in tropical regions, did not depend on establishing permanent fields and the areas cleared were typically very small and noncontiguous. The tropical forests could withstand this so long as people did not return to the same spot for a long time, which they were less likely to do while population density remained low.59 It ought to be needless to say that that time is long past. Likewise the complexity of the social implications for the large populations near such areas today hardly needs emphasizing. The general lesson from this analysis of the water cycle is that we must cease being indifferent to the real diversity among ecosystems, as the industrial mentality made us. We depend on the water cycle; we must come to an understanding of the pillars on which its capacity depends and be careful not to undermine them. We are here confronting the factors that demarcate the maximum dimensions of sustainable human productive activity. Of course, as water is not the only thing recycling naturally to process wastes in our environment, analogously, the water cycle is not the only cycle we must be careful not to overload or undermine.

37 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society The. General Significance of Biogeochemical Cycles

The geochemist James Lovelock has attempted to develop a new general theory of life based on his work on the atmosphere. His theory about the working of the Earth's atmosphere is compatible with Tsuchida's water-cycle theory, but on a level of more chemically detailed implications. Lovelock focused on the fact that, while the chemical composition of the Earth's atmosphere constitutes an impossible physical equilibrium, it has been constant even over "geological" stretches of time. He suspected that the side effects of living processes have been actively maintaining the atmosphere's unlikely composition upon which life itself depends.*™1 He found a great deal of evidence for the view that the planet as a whole is now constituted as a self-regulating system run as it were for and by life (it was not originally and will not be forever). He termed this entity "Gaia," after the Greek quasi-religious, quasi-philosophical concept of the living Earth.60 His crucial "geophysiological" insight could also be expressed by insisting that there is really only one ecosystem, the whole Earth. We need not here enter into the detailed implications of Lovelock's hypothesis, but it is worth noting that he identifies the tropical forests as major caretakers for the atmosphere. Soil bacteria and various algae and other microbes in coastal and other wetlands (particularly in the central latitudes) also play major roles. According to Lovelock, the planet can cope with much of what we term industrial pollution (such as the spewing forth of "unnatural" levels of carbon dioxide as a result of fuel consumption) provided that the key living regulatory agents mentioned above are not overly disturbed. Lovelock believes the attempts to farm the tropical forests and wetlands could be our undoing. In other places we can disrupt the original, climax ecosystems with relative impunity, although it would seem to follow from his idea (as well as Tsuchida's) that the more plant life there is on the planet, the better. It is because the world ecosystem is capable of tolerating great variability in some of its constituent parts that there is no such singular thing as "the balance of nature." If we take Lovelock's hypothesis as true, then we have to jettison that metaphor on the grounds of its bogus precision. Indeed, we have no choice but to assume that there are several possible states of equilibrium for nature that still leave room for us since we long ago disrupted the pristine condition of nature, chiefly by our growing numbers. It is surely significant that, even though (perhaps especially because) Lovelock takes an unusually optimistic view of the capacity of the planet as a whole to cope with the effects of large-scale industrial

38 Agriculture as the Problem

production, he believes that modern farming pressures pose a grave threat. It is also striking that he should highlight certain types of place as more important than others. In some of them (e.g., the wetlands), the causes of what might elsewhere appear to be very severe but purely local disruptive ecological effects (for instance, the disturbing of fish population dynamics) could have catastrophic global repercussions. These points have practical implications that it would only be prudent to consider, while we wait for more scientific research to be carried out on this putative global self-regulation. It is worth pointing out that over enormous sweeps of geological time there occur other cycles that very slowly, but very significantly, alter fundamental conditions on the planet.™011 Within that broader context even Lovelock's Gaia is a merely temporary "arrangement." Such considerations, while fascinating in themselves and fruitful in terms of research, go well beyond the practical scope of this book. I hope readers will agree that it is asking too much even of political economists to come up with a set of attractive economic arrangements suitable for human use and yet also able to undergo deep glaciation.xxxiv The general practical message of the family of ideas expressed by Tamanoi, Tsuchida, and Lovelock can be summarized in my view by enunciating the principle that, henceforth, industry must be subordinate to agriculture, which must be everywhere locally attuned to the environment. Making ecologically sensitive agriculture the central cultural element in human society is the only way to ensure that we do not unknowingly wreak some local havoc that later turns out to be global. Today we live in absolute violation of that principle. Contemporary agriculture is not merely remarkably insensitive to its environment but in both practice and theory it actually and self-consciously mimics industry's bogus claim to be immune to ecological considerations. Agriculture in preindustrial times was episodically capable of local environmental devastation, of a sort that, cumulatively, sometimes had global implications. The dangers inherent in an agriculture that deliberately apes industry, however, are much more disturbing. The indifference to local ecological peculiarities of place that characterizes industry makes it a dangerous model for theoretical agronomy. Indeed, the whole notion of "general principles of plant production" is an antiecological concept. But because agriculture is inherently involved with life processes (however unwillingly today), it is at least in principle easier to make it susceptible to explicitly ecological considerations. Industrialized agriculture is thus the Achilles' heal of industrialism. Industry unbridled could so weaken the planet's life-sustaining cycles as to endanger us, especially if it weakened or overloaded the water cycle. Agriculture in itself always was capable of causing

39 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society such destruction and industrial agriculture is positively and increasingly liable to do so. But ecologically sensitive agriculture could show up the general fallacy of industrial immunity. It could be a living demonstration of the twin errors of supposing that wastes do not need processing and that the world is homogeneous. In its ideal form, ecologically sensitive agriculture could actively cooperate with those waste-processing living entities upon which our lives in fact depend, even while supplying us with food, fibre, and maybe even fuel (although renewable supplies of the latter are unlikely to be available in large enough quantities,61 at least so long as population levels stay as high as they have been for the last few centuries). Following ancient Chinese practice, coastal and inland fishing (maybe even deep-sea fishing) could be included under the rubric "agriculture." Fish generally are sensitive monitors of water quality and currently suffer mightily from agricultural pollution. The agriculture being proposed here could be a monitor and guardian of the environment even while necessarily disrupting it. The proposal that modes of farming adapt themselves more finely to the ecological peculiarities of place transcends the sterile debate between the ideal of situating human beings in more or less pristine climax communities only, and the even more extreme "principle" that because humans can do something, they should not hesitate to.62 We cannot turn mere conservation into a general rule of action. We have to interfere mightily, and so we must do it wisely. As soon as we try to determine how to institute the principle of industry as subordinate to ecologically sensitive agriculture, we are confronted by the socioeconomic implications of doing so. But we may actually take comfort from this seeming restriction. That is the ultimate message of this work. It is the express theme of the final chapter and will be briefly introduced in the next section. SECTION 4 TOWARDS A G R I C U L T U R E AS OUR ENVIRONMENTAL MONITOR AND THE C E N T R E P I E C E OF A NEW F O R M OF POLITY

If it is accepted that a generalized and complex interdependence among households is the essence of modernity (rather than the production basis of the economy having shifted from agriculture to industry), then one real, substantive economic problem is the separation of production from consumption.*50" For as this separation progresses, the viability of society becomes both less transparent and more precarious. How society reproduces itself becomes a puzzle from the point of view of any individual household. Eighteenth-

40 Agriculture as the Problem

century statesmen also found it was a new worry for government to consider. The possibility of successful interdependence is partly what Quesnay's famous "Tableau Economique" set out to prove.300"1 In ignorance of the history of the problem most of us now take social viability utterly for granted, but it was something marvelled at by Adam Smith, who visited Quesnay and admired his work. Considering this matter it is easier to see why the abstraction and study of "the economy" did not occur prior to modernization. "Economics" in the formal sense had not been necessary so long as the oikos was the nomos, so long, that is, as the management of a household could be self-referential in the sense that it did not depend on what was happening in other households. Now the quintessentially modern separation of production from consumption can be compensated for institutionally in a variety of ways. Capitalism, for example, has commercial relations mediate almost all cases where a concrete use-value passes from producer to consumer. Under such a regime, if the commodification process is unbridled, then the sphere of commercial relations is constantly open to expansion. State socialism, by contrast, had almost all concrete usevalues pass through the grid of the all-encompassing central plan (at least, that was the intention). In the debates that have been ongoing since the interwar period about the problem of allocation in a complex society, it has been assumed that the two social institutions, plan and "market," represent the only two alternatives. This assumption has barely been questioned by most participants (with a few carefully ignored exceptions) .XXXV11 It will be exposed as a fallacy later in this work in an extended discussion of the implications of a complex division of labour. First, however, it must be noted that so far we have discussed only the social aspects of the separation of production from consumption. The separation also of course has its purely geographic (or physical) aspects. Put another way, there is social distance and there is physical distance. Broadly speaking, it has been widely conceded that increasing social distance inevitably makes a society more anonymous and even creates a sense of alienation, whereas increasing the geographic range has generally been thought to have no ill effects .xxxvni Rather the reverse. Doctrinaire liberal spokesmen for "free trade" have, since at least Ricardo's time, often insisted that peace as well as prosperity can come from increasing the extent of world trade in any and every kind of good. My intention here is to question on ecological grounds this indifference to spatial considerations and thereby to strengthen the arguments for the possibility of transcending altogether the dilemma of plan versus "market."

4i Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

Let us consider in greater depth the principle enunciated at the end of the last section. The notion that industry henceforth should be subordinate to an ecologically sensitive agriculture has several implications, and some of them are geographic. Ecological sensitivity depends on fine adaptation at the local level. It demands that we stop pretending that for all substantive economic purposes it is safe to assume the world is homogeneous. On the contrary, we must recognize that the world is divided into bioregions with distinctive characteristics that should constrain our activities in specifiable, particular ways. The liberating aspect of this complication conies to light when we reflect that these various bioregions are inhabited. Modern society has hitherto prided itself on the fact that it is a very complex entity while at the same time believing itself to be a monolith composed of atomized individuals - a paradox that fascinated Adam Smith. If we try to conceive of a new social arrangement that would systematically recognize the ecological fact of variability among places, then we will find social reality precomplicated, as it were. There is in the ecological structure of our inhabitable world a framework already to hand on which to start hanging the institutional fabric of a desirable socialism. Different Levels of Community

The claim that the bioregional heterogeneity of the world is a liberating complication and not a constraint on our freedom may seem more convincing if we reflect on one of the chief theoretical difficulties in the socialist tradition, and how unsatisfactorily it has been treated. It is a matter of simple observation enunciated baldly by Aristotle that, whatever else they do, human beings always live in communities.XXX1X In modern society these have come to be for most persons typically no larger than the so-called "nuclear household."*1 One of the striking things about these tiny communities is that although people may misbehave towards each other within them, the intrusion of so-called "economic motives" is not allowed. Human relations do not therein take the form of commodity relations. There may be oppression but it is characteristically not of the socially reified variety. Now socialists, more or less aware of this, have long held out for the transformation of society at large into one single community or "family," to be run by all in such a way that only simple and direct relations will obtain between human beings. One long-standing trouble with this idea is that it has been very hard to see how such a scale of community could have any concrete meaning in terms of human experience. If we take from the theologian Martin Buber the point that experience must be concrete to be fully human, then due to scale considerations alone, we seem doomed to remain in merely "imagined

42 Agriculture as the Problem

communities,"63 composed mostly of "strangers," to use Michael Ignatieff s anguished term.64 There is a partial way out, however, and my purpose here is to urge that this partial way promises enough to be worth pursuing more fully. Again, it is a matter of simple observation that when they share a particular more or less clearly defined purpose, human beings have often shown themselves capable of cooperating on a very large scale (e.g., wartime cooperation, or single-issue political struggles such as Chartism or the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament).65 What has not been shown is simultaneous cooperation in enormous groups across the board on an enormous range of topics. While the socialist vision of one community may not be strictly impossible, and while we cannot say what may happen in the future, it is surely rather fantastic to expect the spontaneous self-assembly into one family of all of humankind. Indeed, it appears from experience that to unite as one family on any kind of practical basis we must first disassociate into smaller groups.*11 We know that some, albeit few, purposes are shared by all, others are not. An effort should be made, then, to envisage a social scaffolding such that each person or household is a member simultaneously of several communities, each on a different scale. Broadly, the scale could be imagined to vary in direct proportion as the purpose of that particular level of community is clearly defined (or otherwise circumscribed). The smaller the scale of community, the more the very setting of ends can and will be a function of simple human considerations. The more abstract and remote from personal factors the end in question, the larger the potential community that can bear it. Democratic centralism is easier to achieve and becomes more human when either the scale of relevant community goes down, or the range of issues shrinks.*111 But the arbitrariness of this requirement to form subgroups as bundles of purpose, so to speak, poses problems of implementation. There must be some compelling rationale for at least one level of subgroup formation other than, for example, the ethnic accidents of cultural history.*1111 In the concept of adapting human productive activities to local ecosystems there is a benign, generalizable rationale ready to hand. "Bioregions" can be constituted out of contiguous ecosystems at whatever level seems appropriate ecologically.66 For instance, local ecosystems could be confederated according to which watershed they chiefly participate in.*1™ Since people inhabit bioregions in any case, and I am arguing they must come to take some direct responsibility for their maintenance, this surely provides a catalyst for forming the subunits of a sustainable society. Further, given that people tend to identify with place (even despite the current-

43 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

ly high levels of mobility), this affords a harmless, indeed positively useful, outlet for the pervasive but not always beneficial so-called "urge to belong." In any case, it has become clear since World War n that the principle of grounding community identity in ethnicity cannot survive the phenomena of mass migration and cultural integration so marked in what used consequently to be called the "New World." Detailed discussion of the institutionalization of these ecologically grounded principles of socialist construction will be deferred, however, since the problem also has its more technical aspects, which must be introduced. Distinguishing Technically among Use-Values

Practically speaking, what is involved in adapting our productive activities to local ecosystems? First of all it involves sloughing off the mentality of the capitalist producer (aped by many central planners), who is interested only in the expansion of overall "value" produced, and who is thus inherently indifferent to use-value (the irretrievably heterogenous, useful characteristics of goods). Environmental realism, by contrast, argues that distinctions have to be introduced among concrete use-values. These distinctions run in two parallel series. There are both "technicosocial" distinctions and "technicoecological" distinctions to be made. I shall consider the former first. Discussing some possible principles of socialist construction, the Japanese-Canadian political economist T. Sekine has introduced a most useful distinction between what he called "quantitative" goods and "qualitative" goods.67 He suggests that the former category includes multipurpose supplies (piping, rods, beams, etc.) and tools of stock specifications, which could perhaps be mass produced at the state level. However, goods in the qualitative category, which comprises personally adapted final-consumption goods (jewellery, shoes, clothing, chairs, etc.), should ideally be crafted by persons living in the same community as the prospective final consumer (or having some other sort of personal contact with them). Using Hazel Henderson's related concept, the point can be paraphrased by saying that some goods are suited to going out in "long loops" into society, others should be sent on "short loops."68 Sekine's aim in introducing the idea was to help solve the problem of how to make labour once again "life's prime want" in any modern context characterized by a complex division of labour. But Sekine's proposal on its own does not adequately deal with the ecological considerations I have described. It would appear that most, if not all, foodstuffs, fibres, and fuels produced through agriculture would count as quantitative goods, accord-

44 Agriculture as the Problem

ing to his technicosocial criteria. This would imply state production, and therefore likely not production by locally adapted methods. So an exception must be made on technicoecological grounds for agricultural products within Sekine's suggestion. Far from being arbitrary, this exception is susceptible of a special justification. Staying within Sekine's frame of reference, it may be noted that although foodstuffs typically are not personally adapted goods, they are in fact the most intimately consumed. It is now recognized that a great many problems of environmental pollution manifest themselves first, or most strikingly, in the food "chain," of which we as human beings are among the last links. This point, publicized dramatically not long after World War n by Rachel Carson particularly with respect to pesticides,69 had already been argued for, on more general grounds, by the early pioneers of the so-called "organic" farming movement. Lady Eve Balfour and Sir Albert Howard were the two most notable English proponents of the view that human health depends fundamentally on the condition of the soil from which people take their nourishment.70 The American dental researcher Weston Price also made much of this general point in his remarkable comparative studies of peoples recently exposed to "modern" diets.71 To generalize further, all forms of environmental pollution or degradation, regardless of how global in effect, are always ultimately local in source. So if it is at the point of production that environmental problems arise, then there is a very good reason for arranging the economy in such a way that local producers consume what they produce, to at least some considerable extent. Wendell Berry attributes much of the postwar decline in American food quality to the fact that farmers no longer eat much of what they produce.72 These considerations about food production are consonant with the general argument that agriculture must become our environmental monitor. Agriculture is absolutely inevitable so long as population levels stay as high as they have been for the last couple of centuries.*^ Agriculture is also inevitably disruptive of natural ecological cycles. It is especially prudent, then, to make the inevitable disrupter into the monitor and guardian. Separating production institutionally from environmental responsibility (as we do today) makes it very hard to exercise that responsibility effectively. If we make producers dependent to a significant extent on their own local food production, then they will have a built-in incentive to watch over that part of the environment in which they are actively interfering. In this connection Sekine has advanced a remarkable political idea about how we might make industry subordinate to local agriculture, so that its environmental effects can also be monitored by those engaged in agricultural production.

45 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society Local Protection of Land by Ecologically Sound Agriculture

Sekine suggests that land ownership be vested exclusively in local communities, which would rent out the land to whatever social entities carry out industrial production. If the communities are made very largely dependent on these rents (for, e.g., local-government purposes), then they will have a strong incentive to ensure that the lessees do not degrade the local environment. The overall goal is to embed the proper maintenance of the environment in our social institutions. So long as environmental maintenance is left to the arbitrary will of the state and undertaken on an ad hoc basis, it won't become automatic. Local communities dependent on rent from land could ensure through clauses in the leases that producers, both industrial and agricultural, maintain or, better still, improve the condition of the land they rent. Then, so long as the local food production remains safe and sustainable, it will be possible to tell "automatically" that the land is being maintained. This requires that the agricultural techniques specified in the leases be as finely adapted ecologically as possible. Industrialized agriculture, which relies very largely on off-farm inputs, cannot monitor the environment successfully. Farming done on the inside, as it were, of local ecocycles will be sensitive in precisely the requisite way. Such farming will also help us procure various renewable resources for manufacturing, some fuel, and also provide a system for the processing of much waste. This idea may seem impossibly radical but that is only because in relative terms agriculture is in such an ecologically unsophisticated state today. It used to be otherwise, especially in England before the advent of free trade, as the next chapter shows, and it could be so again. The point can be elaborated by first recalling the defining characteristics of agriculture. In the simplest terms, agriculture consists in removing the mature living community from a local ecosystem and substituting for it a less mature one that has a relatively high net biological production per unit time and area; that is, it is able to be culled over and over again. As indicated above, agriculture in itself raises many problems, including exposing the water cycle to danger. When the mature ecosystem is removed there is an onrush of species seeking to colonize the "vacant" niches. This creates work for humankind, inasmuch as not all (if any) of them are desirable. Thus, the task of "weeding" is generated.*1™ Agriculture must struggle against the directional pressures of species succession since only the mature community has any inherent stability. But there are always at least two options when the former, mature system has been displaced.

46 Agriculture as the Problem

On the one hand, humans may fill the devastated ecosystem with relatively permanent inhabitants whose annual production can be harvested without killing them, and that compete reasonably effectively against the undesired interlopers. This option, of which tree crops are the most striking example,73 has been scandalously underused in modern times, perhaps because it requires foresight, since the species involved tend to take a while to come to maturity (a human generation or two at the least). The other, more commonly adopted course is to populate the ecosystem with fast-growing immature species communities. These tend to comprise annuals or other species that are destroyed in the act of being harvested. As mentioned earlier, among plants whose seeds are our intended goal, annuals usually generate the greatest yield per year (although experiments in breeding perennials that bear larger seeds have been underway for some time now in Kansas and are beginning to show real promise).74 The great trouble with annuals is the task of re-establishing the community afresh every year. Moreover, the annual crop approach thus implies a long period when the ecological niches are left vacant, between harvest and the maturation of the next crop. This is a time of especially great vulnerability to invasion by other plants and animals. Typically, a "community" composed of only one species is introduced by humans into land made botanically "empty" by burning, ploughing, or some other destructive technique. There follows the constant battle to keep this absurdly unstable "community" in possession of the land in question. The barren period, in addition to disrupting the water cycle temporarily, is also a time of proneness to soil erosion, which can threaten the water cycle severely. The classic example is the American dustbowl of the 1930s,75 but the same phenomena are occurring in many parts of the world today, including North America again.7 Surprisingly, very little attention has been paid to techniques that get more production from a given amount of work by using combinations of species that are more stable and expose the land less. High current population levels dictate that we cannot now take advantage of such systems on a large scale, although their use is probably the only sensible thing for areas prone to catastrophic soil erosion. In most places we will have to rely on the immature model for the foreseeable future. Many of the immature systems in wide use today are so productive on an annual basis that we simply cannot do without them until population densities diminish again."1™ The pressure to get a high annual cullable production has driven us to rely on methods of agriculture that require more work, and this is especially true when

47 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society

soil conservation is a priority. As already explained, the more people there are, the more agricultural work must be done to feed each person. But it is unwise to underestimate the ingenuity with which human beings can get inside relatively stable and productive ecosystems and keep them going without much toil. In this connection it is worth pointing out that even now, we can reasonably expect substantial side benefits to accrue from trying to work with living processes, rather than despite them. For example, it has been found that the ability of plants to concentrate remarkably diverse materials can be deployed in water-purification schemes.77 There is good reason to suppose that harnessing living entities to waste disposal in general is a strategy likely to yield immense benefits. All that is needed is a simple shift in perspective. As Lovelock has said, "In a sensible world industrial wastes would not be banned but put to good use."78 It would be unwise, however, to adopt a Panglossian position based on such happy thoughts. For we have so far not confronted one of the consequences of industrialism that makes it almost certain that life in the future will be much more toilsome than it is now. The agriculture(s) of the future will sooner or later have to provide a great deal of the materials and energy that we are now in the habit of procuring almost exclusively in the industrial style, from petroleum especially. For example, in the distant future we will probably need wood more, not less, both as a fuel and as a material. The burden on the land will correspondingly be greater. This is because our uncritical adoption of the industrial conception of production has led us, over the last few hundred years, to resort habitually to nonrenewable materials and fuels, partly as a cheap way of underwriting population growth. We have indulged in a veritable spree of entropic degradation not only of petroleum stocks but also of our mineral supplies.79 For example, never again will we find non-offshore iron ores of the richness (hence cheapness) of those we used up in the nineteenth century. That binge is bound to place an enormous extra burden on the agricultures of the future, over and above food production. Since we cannot re-collect the iron ore that has been dissipated as rust, we will need to rely on the ability of plants locally to reverse material entropy and "gather" carbon for us into usable forms.*1™1 Although this profligacy of the last two centuries can be interpreted as a species of violence to future generations, it cannot be criticized as inherently damaging to nature. Future generations will have two completely different kinds of reason for reviling us, for we have degraded the Earth ecologically and used up all the best raw materials and most of the best fuels. A system of morality in which

48 Agriculture as the Problem

members of future generations were regarded as full human beings would be hard at first for us to digest.*11* It would disrupt traditional socialists as much as their opponents. Socialism on a Complex Basis

I would like to suggest, in sum, that the proper scaffolding for a wellfounded, hence potentially permanent, socialism would be a complex pattern of federated interacting elements of the world's dispersed population, each of which would be aware that they severally and collectively live within a living environment into whose local cycles they must insert their agricultural and industrial activities. There would be a complex division of labour but it would involve several scales of social entity - neighbourhood, municipality, region, and so on up to global levels - many tied to places. To derive the benefits of life in a modern society we need not opt for the purest, most extreme version of modernity: the kind of capitalist society we currently occupy. The fine structure of the sort of society I am here proposing would in fact be more complicated than the standard modern monolith composed of effectively identical atoms. Once production of basic necessities was largely assured on the local level, social energy would be freed up pro tanto for larger-scale cooperation on economic questions that were less locally nuanced, and thus more purely "quantitative," and also on more purely political problems. This conception, which accords centrality to agriculture, must explicitly deal with the obvious, albeit misconceived, charge that it tends to counsel an antimodern, even "peasantist," approach to social questions. It is possible to deal with this anti-Luddite argument in at least three different ways. First, one can simply rise to the defence of the peasant's suspicious outlook on the industrial world as did Chayanov, and later, Mitrany.80 Much can be learned from such efforts that is useful for purposes of socialist construction, but I will not employ that approach here. One could also revive the first theorists of modernity and emphasize the preindustrial nature of their social context. For example, among the first prominent theorists of modern society the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, who have been acutely described by Meek and others as, in effect, the founders of sociology rather than of economics, as most naively think 8l - Adam Smith gives an account of economic affairs that is recognizably modern but also, upon serious examination, overwhelmingly agrarian in outlook.1 Consider the following passage from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations a book not currently thought to be completely out of date:

49 Replacing the Economy in Nature and in Society According to the natural course of things, the greater part of the capital of every growing society is first, directed to agriculture, afterwards to manufactures, and last of all to foreign commerce. This order of things is very natural, that in any society that had any territory, it has always, I believe, been in some degree, observed. Some of their lands must have been cultivated before any considerable towns could be established, and some sort of coarse industry of the manufacturing kind must have been carried on in those towns, before they could well think of employing themselves in foreign commerce. But though this natural order of things must have taken place in some degree in every such society, it has, in all the modern states of Europe, been, in many respects, entirely inverted. The foreign commerce of some of their cities has introduced all their finer manufactures, or such as were fit for distant sale; and manufactures and foreign commerce together, have given birth to the principal improvements of agriculture. The manners and customs which the nature of their original government introduced, and which remained after that government was greatly altered, necessarily forced them into this unnatural and retrograde order.82

The third and, in my view, most convincing approach is a direct resort to descriptive history informed by social theory. The key point is denial of the claim that all cases of modernity depend(ed) necessarily on marginalizing agriculture. The next chapter contains an explicitly historical approach to the theoretical question about the place of agriculture in modern society. The overall goal of circumscribing the economy's place in society and embedding it (and hence us) more securely in nature demands clarity on that very issue. English history can illustrate all the important aspects. To anticipate further, it will be argued that the nonmonolithic nature of modern England's classridden society was probably what safeguarded for so long its esteemed and yet remarkably benign agriculture. What we need now are analogues of the institutions in question that are not class-based. Only if sustainability is institutionally embedded can it be genuinely trusted to continue.

2 Agriculture Privileged and Benign: English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

The basis of mid-Victorian prosperity - and indeed of society - was a balance of land and industry, an ever enlarging market for English manufacturers, and a still restricted market for foreign produce. G.M. Young1 SECTION I

THE RELEVANCE

OF THE E N G L I S H

CASE FOR U N D E R S T A N D I N G THE PLACE OF AGRICULTURE IN M O D E R N SOCIETY

The place of agriculture in modern society has evinced, and continues to evince, great variety, both historically and geographically, and not through chance alone. In the last one hundred years deliberate integrations of agriculture with industry have been attempted along markedly divergent policy routes by sundry anxious nation-states. This empirical diversity has its counterpart in the rich variety of approaches apparent in social theory whenever the role of agriculture in "development" is addressed.1 For example, even though the differences are obvious enough between English and American agriculture (with respect particularly to rural social structure and land-ownership patterns), it has long been standard practice for historians and sociologists blithely to apply the term "capitalist" to both cases, presumably on the grounds that both agricultures have been overwhelmingly oriented towards commerce. The dangers of so simple an approach can also be seen from the other end of the nominalist spectrum in, for example, Roy and Betty Laird's realist comparison of American and Soviet agriculture, which can be used as a good

51 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

argument for considering the former to be a better example of truly socialized agriculture than the latter ever was. Their point can be supported equally by reference to either historical or contemporary facts. In discussing modern agriculture it is advisable to acknowledge frankly that we are faced with extreme variability among the specimens. To no small extent that diversity has been intractable because of our severe taxonomic poverty. If one just accepted that and then tried to follow the suggestion that the essence of modern society lies in the radical separation of production from consumption (however compensated for institutionally), one might ultimately be tempted to construct a matrix of Weberian ideal types to illustrate the various places possible for agriculture in modern society. Within this matrix could be located the English and American arrangements along with the Prussian, French, Dutch, Spanish, etc., all of which differed in many fundamental respects: social structure, land-tenure system, relationship to the world economy, etc. The taxonomic situation with respect to industrial production poses a striking contrast. One does not think of the factory production of steel girders as substantially different in the French, as compared to, for instance, the Danish or the Italian cases. Social theorizing about industrialism correspondingly presents a fairly monolithic aspect.11 This deep asymmetry at the level of social theory between modern agriculture and industry itself suggests that the construction of a probably confusing matrix of ideal types might not be the best possible way to try to comprehend the place of agriculture in modern society. I hope to demonstrate in this chapter that, if constructive use is made of the methodological innovations developed by the midtwentieth-century Japanese political economist Kozo Uno,111 something both much simpler and much more illuminating can be done. Since it is not clear, however, whether Uno's own thoughts on modern agriculture tended in the direction argued for here, it is necessary to warn that it is Uno's method only that is being borrowed. The Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society Bearing in mind the opening sentence of the first chapter of Marx's Capital - "The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as 'an immense accumulation of commodities'" - Uno developed the notion that a "thought experiment" that carefully explores the implications of certain formerly actual trends in English history can uniquely lead to an adequate theoretical conception of the workings of a society where all usevalues would take the form of commodities. Uno insisted that such

52 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

an extrapolated "purely capitalist society" has never quite been realized, but if it were, it would surely represent the acme of the separation of production from consumption. It would thereby count as the logical terminus, as it were, of what I call the characteristic tendency in modern society. Perhaps the most striking thing about the concept of a purely capitalist society is that any such thing would be possible at all; I alluded to Adam Smith's wonderment at this idea in the last chapter. With production and consumption so profoundly separated, complex and chronic problems of direct social organization are bound to arise. It can be shown theoretically that such difficulties can only be evaded if the economy (which under this condition would be occupying almost the whole of society anyway) is set up so as to be self-regulating. But if most social relations were thus both indirect and automatically regulated, modernity would be bound to reveal a latent inhuman aspect: social interdependence without politics. The ideological (and even "ethical") self-image of capitalism is violated if there is direct intervention in the economy, whether by persons or by the state. This classical minimalist policy constraint of strict nonintervention was the philosophical fount for the logically discrete but linked steps involved in Uno's extended definition of the liberal capitalist ideal of a viable but "automatic" economy. Only if the economy was conceived as fully able to run itself, only if it was thus given the benefit of the doubt, could it reveal how it could possibly do such a thing. Precisely because his theory of how a purely capitalist society could work is so abstract, Uno had to clarify its relation to history. To this end he developed what he called "stages theory." Capitalist history can be periodized in three stages: mercantilism, liberalism, and imperialism. The first is a preindustrial stage. It is only in the next, the liberal stage, that capitalism begins to coincide with industry and, most nearly, with its abstract theory, and so can most fully unfold its inner capabilities.1V On these grounds it has been urged by Uno's student, Sekine, that industrial capital is therefore the very type of capital. Yet although it seems clear that Uno thought industrialism coincided with the liberal stage, it can be argued that the very need for a stages theory in itself constitutes something of an obstacle to any absolute identification of capitalism with industrialism. I have already discussed some reasons for keeping the concepts separate in the previous chapter and I will take the argument further presently/ For the broad purpose of theorizing about modern society in general, the key point is that Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society can provide a fixed, but nonarbitrary, standard or reference point. It is a fixed standard because it is derived as a synthetic definition possessed of the

53 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

most rigorous internal coherence. It is nonarbitrary because, although it is rooted in the history of the English case, it does not permanently privilege any particular set of (contingent) historical or environmental facts, the way Weberian ideal types necessarily do. It may seem paradoxical, but the basis of Uno's methodological distinctiveness lies in the way he "found" the starting point of his theory in history. Uno held that, during a brief period in the nineteenth century, there were in England several trends tending towards the realization of the theoretical object of the theory of a purely capitalist society, where wealth would indeed present itself just as "an immense accumulation of commodities." For a number of reasons, countervailing factors developed (in some cases matured), and England left the trajectory towards a purely capitalist society/1 However, no other social formation at any time has come as close as nineteenth-century England did. That is why the English case is so crucial for understanding modernity. In particular, that is why it is the test case for assessing the capacity of modernity to handle agriculture. Agriculture in the English Case

One of the main reasons why English society found itself on a purely capitalist trajectory and stayed on it as long as it did was that it had an internally consistent and very productive agricultural system of a particular type. Although (as I shall explain) Uno held that there is an inherent incompatibility between capitalism and agriculture, he also believed English agriculture came nearest to illustrating how a purely capitalist society can incorporate agriculture. In fact, Uno thought England was the only country to come anywhere near doing so, and it will be emphasized in what follows that England had embarked on the "right" course long before industrial methods of production became endemic. In order to clarify these uncompromising claims, the principles of agriculture in a purely capitalist society will be exhaustively elucidated in this chapter. The most notable (and, on the face of it, surprising) requirement for capitalist agriculture is the explicit separation of ownership from direct usufruct of the land. It obtained in a remarkably pure form in England and remained the chief distinguishing characteristic of the English case until well into the twentieth century/11 Partly since that separation actually predated capitalism, the peculiar place of agriculture in classical English capitalism was heavily buttressed by unique and certainly ancient social institutions, which made it very secure in comparative terms. Over several centuries the English case shows us at least one way a modern society with a minimalist state apparatus

54 Agriculture Privileged and Benign could organize its agriculture without having to rely either on peasant institutions (inherently nonmodern remnants from the precapitalist past implying widely distributed ownership rights to much of the land),vm or on the deus ex machina of abundant tracts of virgin soil (as in the New World, where "brand-new" social institutions were developed overnight, as it were). It is hardly surprising that in modernizing nation-states less passionately committed to liberal capitalist ideals than England, the position of agriculture was very different. It looks rather as though the institutional supports in such cases (in terms of class structure and legal arrangements) could be, and typically were, cobbled together on an ad hoc basis. Agriculture's place in such societies consequently tended to be unclear, insecure, even vulnerable. This became very obvious as the nineteenth century drew to a close, and a chaotic pattern of international trade in basic foodstuffs emerged. It seems that it is a matter of historical happenstance that the requisite agrarian conditions for embarking on the trajectory towards a purely capitalist society obtained in England in such an especially pure form. Since, as noted, these conditions long predated the emergence of several of the other recognizably capitalist features of English economy and society, e.g., the factory system, it would be interesting to enquire into this somewhat paradoxical but evidently spontaneous genesis in a preindustrial context of the social institutions best suited to this most thoroughly industrialized as well as capitalist of societies.K In this chapter, however, the main focus will be on some very specific, apparently even more fortuitous legacies from early modern English agriculture, ones not emphasized by Uno (or anyone else, for that matter). For, in addition to being the progenitor of an agriculture uniquely suited to the eventual goal of a self-regulating economy, the mercantilist period bequeathed to nineteenth-century capitalist England what is perhaps the most ecologically benign among all the highly productive farming systems the world has seen. The especially sound English agronomic customs were institutionally reinforced by certain details of the land-ownership arrangements, the origins of which were of course not themselves capitalist. The social record of English agriculture as distinct from its ecological record is less impressive, to put it mildly,x and it is clear that the whole system came to be undermined in the middle of the nineteenth century by deliberate changes of government policy. These were undertaken for noble reasons, on the whole.xl However, they were carried out by persons whose ideology dictated only a certain range of unimaginative remedies for the difficult and pressing, but fundamentally external, social problem of the Irish famine. Moreover, the persons

55 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

and groups most vocal in lobbying for these policy changes had other, wider motives as well. Unfortunately, the final environmental consequences were wider still. Their complex manifestations constitute the general theme of chapter 3. Within the present chapter, it should be regarded as a peculiarly happy circumstance that classical English agriculture came to be so amenable to the theory of a purely capitalist society and also so ecologically benign, given the great failure of social theory hitherto to attend seriously to environmental questions. For if, as Uno's work implies, the English case holds the key to modern social theory in general, then an examination of English agriculture can help to shed light on two vexed matters simultaneously. I shall not here embark on a defence of Uno's method,2 except to say that it is worth pursuing this promise of a possible shortcut both to a conception of agriculture's place in what was for a time the most extreme case of modern society (the one tending to maximize the social distance between production and consumption) and to at least one example of modern agriculture successfully embedded in nature. The account that follows is partial and should be taken in some respects as a fable. It deliberately abstracts from such factors relevant to the full history of English capitalism as the international movements of capital and labour. Further, it is only when (in chapter 3) I come to discuss the decline of English agriculture in the face of the world economy in the late nineteenth century that the agricultures of other self-consciously modern (or modernizing) societies will be introduced. They will be found to contrast strongly with the English case, especially as regards their tractability for self-consistent capitalism and their ecological impact. The Historical Origins of English Agrarian Peculiarity

Why and how did English agriculture come to occupy the privileged place it held in English capitalism? The answer lies in the nature of the regime that preceded industrialized capitalism. How to characterize this regime is a very nice question. Scholars have long searched for the genesis of English capitalism and each generation of them has generally seen fit to push the starting point further back in time.3 There is a growing awareness of the long duration and, in several respects, uniqueness of the English spontaneous path to modern society. Certainly the extensive, indeed pervasive, division of specialized labour noted by Adam Smith led to a considerable demand for commercially marketed foodstuffs as early as the sixteenth century. As Keith Wrightson says of even the small farmers of that time, "for most, market opportunities were the first factor to consider in their

56 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

husbandry."4 But perhaps no one has done more to draw attention to, in particular, the crucial agrarian differences between the anciens regimes found on the one hand, in England, and on the other hand, on the Continent, than Robert Brenner.501 He first presented his arguments in a 1976 issue of Past and Present. There ensued an international scholarly debate but it was largely focused on the social rather than agronomic implications of Brenner's thesis. Brenner argues that English industrial capitalism was based squarely on what he terms "agrarian capitalism," which he claims was thriving in early modern England.5 This concept of "agrarian capitalism" represents a departure from most previous theorizing about the origins of capitalism,6 which had tended to concentrate more on the genesis and development of (largely urban-controlled and overwhelmingly overseas-oriented)5"11 mercantile interests, in textiles especially. There is indeed no incompatibility between Brenner's emphasis on developments in the arable regions and the older focus on merchants and what are now usually called "protoindustrial" phenomena (the English variants of the "putting-out" system). Clearly the approaches should be complementary. Strikingly, however, in the debates coming out of Brenner's analysis,7 the connection with mercantilism has not been explored in depth. This may be because Brenner cast his argument not so much as a full account of developments within England but as a heuristic contrast between England and the Continent, with particular respect to rural class struggles (especially between lords and peasants). It is clearly with that purpose in mind that he developed the term agrarian capitalism, with its contentious, if not fully intended, connotation of theoretical comprehensiveness. Since my purpose in this discussion is relatively narrow, I will not here follow Brenner and his many critics into the problem of how to describe the nature of the preindustrial economic regime in England as a social whole.xiv For the discussion that follows, in any case, Brenner's narrative summary is more valuable than his theoretical constructions. Put simply,** Brenner argued that the relative weakness of English peasants in early modern times had led to their rights over land being successfully denied and usurped by great landlords, especially in the arable regions. In France, by contrast, a more entrenched peasantry secured their tenure of land against the lords. This is ultimately the chief reason why France developed so largely into a land of small, prosperous (family) farms, whereas England saw an early preponderance of fairly big (consolidated), purely commercial rented farms. By the end of the process, as it were, in the middle of the second half of the nineteenth century, the important and typical class of farms in England ranged from one hundred to four hundred acres.™ As Bren-

57 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

ner emphasized, the operation of these considerable farms depended on the emergence of a new and unique rural social structure in England. This was the triadic class system, consisting of landlords as owners, capitalist tenants as managers, and the landless poor as labourers, a system taken utterly for granted by Adam Smith. The situation in France, for example, even in regions where there were tenants, was not quite the same because there, tenants did not operate consolidated farms as such.8 In most of the rest of Europe, farming was still under the direct control of great landowners or else in the hands of land-owning peasant families.™1 Accepting Brenner's historical judgement that only the English case exhibits triadic capitalist class relations in its agriculture, it becomes especially interesting to see from the theoretical side how closely English agriculture fit the model of a purely capitalist society. It can be shown that for a time it did fit closely, but it must also be acknowledged that the historical process whereby England came so near to enacting the theory of political economy was very messy, perhaps only theoretically interpretable at all, in retrospect. Specific Roles of the Landowning Class in England

In his Principles of Political Economy: Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society, Uno argued that since land cannot be produced (capitalistically or otherwise), and since it is always ultimately from land that labour appropriates products, any system, such as capitalism, that involves the private appropriation of the products of labour must presuppose the private appropriation of land. This appropriation can take many forms. The purely capitalist form in particular requires, perhaps surprisingly, that land be owned by a class standing quite outside the capitalist production process. Only in England did this situation obtain on a significant scale, and, as it happens, the landowning class in England was the aristocracy, defined here as both the titular peerage and their wealthy, more humbly born emulators, the "gentry." That the landowning class also happened to be the ruling class led to much of the complication of nineteenth-century political history (to say nothing of later historiography). Of course Uno's theory could not (and need not) specify the social stature of the class of landowners. For example, landowners need not be noble by birth and thus privileged to rule, as was concretely the case in England. Care will be taken in what follows to distinguish between the behaviour minimally expected of landowners in the theory of a purely capitalist society, and what the England landed interest actually tended, however contingently, to do with its time and wealth.

58 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

The English landed classes have a complex history. Their devoted student Lawrence Stone has explained it using vivid metaphors of buses and hotels (all instances of which have a recognizable permanence despite the continual change in occupancy).9 Although they were no strangers to social mobility, English landowners inhabited an enduring social structure over many centuries. It was a structure to which they caused additions to be made (notably in the various enclosure movements that engulfed more and more of England in successive waves). But the outstanding fact is that the additions further strengthened and clarified the structure itself. Over the centuries since the Reformation, the tenurial composition of the English farming class changed, but the concentration of ownership steadily increased. By way of illustration I present in Table i a tentative summary of what we know about those historical processes. Contrasting sharply because of its greater precision, Table 2 shows the clearest snapshot ever taken of the English landed classes, the 1873 New Domesday Survey, as it was called. It remains to this day the only comprehensive survey of English land ownership carried out over the entire period from 1086 to the present. As it happened, New Domesday was done on the eve of the only "revolution" in English land ownership since early modern times, and so it can count as a perfect endpoint for the story of the effect of the landlord class on English farming. Tenancies and agronomic practices will be considered in detail in the next section, but in order to give some immediate idea of who was overseeing the actual farming of all this land, it should be pointed out that from 1790-1830 eighty percent of English farming was carried out by tenants.10 The theoretical requirement that land ownership be separate from land management is due to the need of self-regulating capitalism to abstract from the natural differences in quality of land, if all capitalist producers are to compete as equals. Mere competition cannot eliminate differential profit rates among capitalist farmers who own lands of differing quality. Capitalists owning good land may not bother to invest in new technology and will also feel less compelled to leave the sector in the event of a downturn in trade. Without the discipline of real competition the social allocation of resources is bound to be suboptimal. Competition must be the rule if the economy is to be both self-regulating and efficient in its own terms. As Uno explains it (drawing on classical political economy, especially Smith's and Ricardo's contributions as synthesized by Marx), it is in the theory of rent that we see how capitalism can ensure fair competition among capitals and thus redeem its claim to elicit the best possible allocation of social resources. A separate, noncapitalist

59 English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime Table 1 Changes in the Social Distribution of English Land Ownership Percentage of the cultivated land owned (various dates)

Great landowners Gentry Peasant "owners"

1500 1559

1600 1641 1681 1790

10+?

1873 1927 1966

30?

15+? 30-40

15? 35?

15-20 15-20 20-25 40-50 50+? 50?

45?

45?

45?

35-40

30-35

15-20

24 45

20? 40?

10-15 10+?

20+?

40?

70+?

Source: Constructed from information in F.M.L. Thompson, "The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England Since the Sixteenth Century." Since an effective land registry only emerged in the twentieth century, many of the question marks can be expected to persist. Note: "Peasant Owners" is a deliberately obscure formulation. In 1500 most were farmers with secure but base feudal tenures. Over the next century many of these became labourers, many tenants-at-will, and some freeholders. Over the eighteenth century this ownership class came to be composed largely of noncultivating owners possessed of not very large estates. Table 2 Social Distribution of English Land Ownership in 1873 Numbers

400 1,228 2,529 9,585 24,412 217,049 703,289 14,459

Class

Acreage

Peer(esse)s Great landowners Squires Greater yeomen Lesser yeomen Small proprietors Cottagers Public bodies Waste

5,728,979 8,497,699 4,319,271 4,782,627 4,144,272 3,931,806 151,148 1,443,548 1,524,624

Total

34,523,974

Source: Adapted from Brodrick, English Land and English Landlords, 173, 187. Note: "Great landowners" were commoners owning at least 3,000 acres with a rental of at least £3,000 sterling. "Squires" owned estates of 1,000-3,000 acres and larger, the rental of which did not, however, reach £3,000 sterling. "Greater yeomen" owned 300 to 1,000 acres, "lesser yeomen" owned 100 to 300 acres, "small proprietors" owned i to 100 acres, and "cottagers" owned less than one acre.

class owning the land can collect a differential rent (that of the "first form")11 and thereby reduce the capitalist farmers to a common level, regardless of the quality of the land they severally farm. For this to work there need only be a free market in leases, not in land titles. This noncapitalist class of owners that stands apart culturally can put its wealth to a wider variety of uses than can capital itself, which is by definition obsessed with its project of self-expansion. From

60 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

theory we can see that the attitudes of the landed classes may at times resemble the attitudes of strict capitalists, but need not. To illustrate from history, the members of the English aristocracy could serve merely as lavish consumers (as many did, and as Parson Malthus requested) ,xvm or, alternatively, they could dabble in investments themselves (as some did, and as Prime Minister Peel requested). It is important to note that landlords do not compete with each other, and so even when engaged in "maximizing" their revenues, they have no reason not to share innovations. Quite the contrary. This stands in complete contrast to the situation facing innovative entrepreneurs in manufacturing. As the popular history books emphasize, many "improving" landlords went far out of their way to publicize the results of their successful experiments, whereas industrial inventors were (and are) obsessed with secrecy.12 When landlords improve the productivity of the land itself, the country as a whole gains, and certainly no individual capitalists gain differentially. Such a result is clearly politically beneficial for capitalism, and it was especially so during periods of so-called "food riots." Moreover, under this system kindnesses of another kind (viz. occasional discretionary rent relief] could be and frequently were bestowed by the landlord class to compensate for some of the profit variability with which agriculture, thanks to climate cycles, is inevitably afflicted. It would be quite wrong, however, to give the impression that having land ownership out of the hands of capital itself brings only benefits to capital. In Uno's account, capital pays a price for having its workforce kept from direct access to the land by a special class of private owners. In the first place, "absolute rent" can be collected on all land in use, and this is a sheer cost to capital, as it ultimately adds a further component to the cost of labour power. In certain circumstances even "monopoly rents" on specific tracts of land may be chargeable (for, e.g., unusually fine vineyards). Additionally, in general the presence of at least some suitable but uncultivated land is needed as an overall governor on the share of surplus value accruing to landed property. But the English arrangements also imposed a far more insidious source of costs to capital. Historically, and as theory leads one to expect, it was standard for the capitalist tenant to supply most of a farm's working capital, generally reckoned as some multiple of the rent payable annually on the farm, perhaps one rent equivalent for livestock, one for seed and feed, one for the wage fund. The situation was much more complex in the case of responsibility for fixed-capital investments. If capitalist tenants undertook technical improvements that were embodied in the land itself (such as drainage, certain forms of soil fertilization, the

61 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

construction of fences or buildings), they always ran the risk of not getting the full return on their investment. If the improvement was permanent, or not fully exhausted when the lease came up for renewal, the landlord was in a strong and apparently fully legal position to appropriate all further returns on that investment by raising the rent commensurately (the "second form" of differential rent). Many landlords took advantage of it, and this aspect of the land-ownership system became a highly contentious issue in late-nineteenth-century English legal history. Unfortunately, nothing could guarantee that a farmer would be able accurately to gauge his or her investment to the length of the lease. Too many of the relevant factors were (and still are) incalculable. This particular problem was greatly exacerbated in the nineteenth century by the move to much shorter, even annual, leases as a result of the uncertainties caused by the Napoleonic Wars. Uno, following Marx, pointed out that the existence of such a chronic disincentive to agricultural investment meant that as a rule, the organic composition of capital tended to be lower in agriculture than in industry .^ This made it harder to lower the cost of labour power in general, which is of course very much a function of the cost of production of food. This theoretical emphasis by Uno on a factor contributing to the relative stagnation of agricultural technique is in striking contrast to Brenner's more enthusiastic attitude towards the early historical role of his agrarian capitalism. Brenner seems to have attached little significance to the fact that the roles of tenant farmer and landowner can be distinguished sharply. Certainly Uno was only trying to explain how fully developed capitalism can function under the stringent theoretical assumption that only capitalists invest in means of production other than land, whereas in Brenner's early modern period in particular, the improving landlords themselves also invested in farm improvements to a considerable extent.13 They were stimulated to do this by at least two things. For one thing England had an unusually extensive (indeed, national in scale), juridically free home market.14 It also had a considerable export trade in agricultural commodities.15 From 1550-1639 and from 1760 until the end of the Napoleonic Wars, there occurred marked agricultural "boom" periods/6 and landlords invested in agricultural improvements at the time with enthusiasm. Within Brenner's special period the disincentive to investment even by the farmers themselves must have been correspondingly less.3™ Twenty-one-year leases were common in the seventeenth century, and not unusual until early in the nineteenth century.17 Perhaps carried away by the busy phenomena of economic growth and change, Brenner made a point of claiming that it was an especial-

62 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

ly capitalist dynamic that appeared in English early modern farming. With his explicit and, as we shall see, overhasty analogy with Marx's analysis of the situation facing nineteenth-century industrial capitalists, he suggested there was a powerful, inherent tendency to innovate in production techniques. The key point, however, is that Brenner overplayed his theoretical hand. The contrast he draws between Britain and France cannot be sustained on the score of agricultural productivity. But it can rest quite securely on considerations of social structure. Those are sufficient in themselves to generate the difference Brenner observed between the paths of development in France and England. In his important survey of the economic-history literature, P.K. O'Brien turned attention away from technical change and suggested that ultimately the main contribution of English early modern agriculture to industrial development was that it sequestered the land, keeping it out of reach of a later, exploding population.18 It's not that agriculture ejected people directly into industry; it simply ceased to absorb them after a while, and that was enough to distinguish England from the Continent, especially given England's uniquely explosive population growth, so striking in the late eighteenth century.19 Although French family farming may well have been as productive and innovative as English, it would be a serious mistake to downplay the peculiar character of English agricultural innovation. In England it took special forms, with a distinctive chronology. Brenner was somewhat insensitive to the import of some of the details of this process, perhaps because he was too quick to assimilate the process of technical improvement in agriculture to that seen in industry and thus mischaracterized the nature of technical progress in English agriculture. He was right to draw attention to the phenomenal effects, but he did so for misguided reasons. Keith Tribe has argued that the discontinuous, even cyclical, nature of agricultural production made it, not industrial production (which is typically continuous), the first ever locus for attempts to detect and measure changes in productivity due to changes in technique.20 In this regard the long leases of early modern times must have been particularly encouraging. The tendency for the minimum average size of farm to increase must also have helped because of the need to have so many fields in which to try out complex patterns of crop rotation. It is of great importance that, until well into the twentieth century, the crucial new techniques that were being tried and evaluated for their effects on yields were not mechanized ones. Brenner apparently failed to notice the enormous difference this makes both on the ground, so to speak, and at the level of theory.

63 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime SECTION 2

CLASSICAL ENGLISH FARMING

PRACTICES AND LAND STEWARDSHIP

In the 19703, Michael Postan, the eminent English economic historian of the Middle Ages, revived the argument, long believed refuted, that medieval agriculture in England saw periods of steady decline in productivity due to the exhaustion of the soil.21 Postan claimed that an as yet unreversed, secular, upward trend appears to have set in only in the sixteenth century. It is interesting to consider Postan's views on this in the light of the claims made on behalf of English farming by the closest student of its techniques, Eric Kerridge. Kerridge says that the only period of agronomic upheaval in English history that justifies the term "agricultural revolution" was essentially over by the middle of the seventeenth century, and he insists more specifically that the key was the introduction of what was called either "up-down," or "convertible," husbandry. This basically involved extremely long patterns of crop rotation, up to twenty-year cycles, with the land taking extended, beneficial rests under covers of mixed grasses. This replaced the older, medieval division of land into permanent arable (albeit itself on a two- or three-field rotation) and permanent pasture. A typical medieval farm might have had half its acreage in permanent tillage and half in permanent grass. The new regime had one-quarter under permanent grass and three-quarters in arable, of which latter two-thirds would be under temporary grass. In this new system, then, the amount of land sown to grain at any one time might be a mere half the medieval value, but the productivity per unit of land area sown to grain was about double, and many more animals could be kept on the absolutely increased acreage under grasses. Although ploughings were less frequent with so little time spent in tillage by each piece of land, the horse-to-acre and labourer-to-acre ratios did not change much, especially in this early period, remaining around one to ten.22 Other innovations such as liming, special irrigated fields (known as "floating meadows"), and the draining of sodden areas likewise contributed to the overall virtual doubling of yields from their medieval levels of well under ten bushels of wheat per acre, to around fifteen. Interestingly, and rather embarrassingly for Brenner, many of these new farming practices were very costly and did not at all allow labour to be shed, as Tribe has recently re-emphasized.23 Rather, they often required additional labour inputs, and in large quantities. Clearly such improvements do not fit the pattern of industrial laboursaving technology so characteristic of our current economics and

64 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

anachronistically posited by Brenner as a hallmark of early modern farming in England. It is more illuminating to say that it was the land itself that was improved, not so much the average productivity of labour. Incidentally, Brenner is not the only one guilty of anachronism in this field. Even though he argued that it took centuries of trial and error to establish, for example, the correct ratios of land to animals for the many ecologically diverse regions of England, Kerridge has taken pains to emphasize the supposedly modern capitalist mentality of the farmers involved. His evidence for this is their grasping nature.24 A careless reader, unaware of the theoretical complexity of capitalist agriculture, might fail to remember that industrial capitalists never operate on century-long investment cycles and that overhasty analogies with industrial capitalism therefore obscure as much as they illuminate. Kerridge has said relatively little, moreover, about landlords as distinct from farmers. In that respect he is like Brenner in downplaying the importance of the distinction between their respective economic roles. The Unconscious Ecological Sophistication of "High Farming"

The next major period identified by historians as a "revolution" ran from the eighteenth century to the early nineteenth.25 It culminated in the system that came in the Victorian era to be known as "high farming." This putative revolution was actually concentrated in the South and East and it involved the classical so-called "Norfolk system" made famous to readers of English history by Rowland Prothero (Lord Ernie).26 It centred on the famous four-course rotation using sheep in effect as mobile fertilizer factories. By day the sheep extracted nutrients from grassy hillsides, bringing them down in their guts to the arable fields, where they were "folded" by night. The sheep were made to excrete these same nutrients over the entire field over a sequence of nights as the sheepfolds (actually movable fences) were systematically resituated every day. The typical rotations included turnips for winter feed, and clover crops to feed both sheep and soil. As E.L Jones and A.M. John explain,27 this complex, multicrop process was undertaken chiefly to support the production of wheat (called "corn" in England), not sheep (although lambs were thereby made available for the hillier, rougher sheep-raising counties in the North and West where the wool of mercantilist fame had been produced). The simplest, most typical version of the quite regionally varied fourcourse rotation involved four fields passing repeatedly and sequentially through a series of wheat, turnip, barley, and clover crops.28 The remarkable thing is that the careful control over animal wastes and

65 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

the use of leguminous and other cover crops in this system enabled it to maintain the condition of the land indefinitely even while production levels climbed. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars wheat yields were commonly up to thirty bushels per acre (forty on the best farms).3™1 One interesting consequence of this land-improving sheepcorn husbandry was a permanent improvement in the productivity of the cheaper-to-plough lighter soils that had hitherto been too infertile. High farming was achieved by what must be distinguished as biological or ecological, as opposed to industrial (chemical), methods. This point requires some elaboration since it impinges even on such things as farm size. For this improved system did require a certain minimum acreage. However, the point does not hinge on the usual sort of economies-of-scale argument. The subtleties of the relation between farm size and technique are best explained in fundamentally ecological terms. As a mid-Victorian summed it up with only some exaggeration, the choice reduced to one between "large farms, much manure and numerous stock or no cultivations."29 In order to explain this seeming dilemma let us take, as a given, some minimum quantity of wheat that had to be grown on a farm in order to generate worthwhile receipts (sufficient to support the farmer's family in the middle-class comfort it had come to expect). The system in use dictated that a certain quantity of wheat requires first and foremost a certain corresponding amount of manure. To generate that required, in turn, a definite number of animals. Maintaining the beasts called for a specifiable stock of feed (both summer and winter varieties). The production of these feed stocks took up field space. Thus, the acreage actually planted to wheat at any point in the arable regions devoted to wheat was probably something like a third or a quarter of the total acreage being farmed there. The task of effectively supervising from horseback such complex cropping probably governed the maximum size of farm. Unfortunately the statistics on farm size were not well gathered for my purpose, especially for the earlier periods. Later historians concerned with social issues have not always seen clearly why it matters agronomically. We do know that in 1851, one-third of the cultivated area in England was in farms of over three hundred acres, one-fifth in small farms of less than one hundred acres.30 Without the regional dimension in these gross figures, however, we cannot see their ecological basis. There are better figures for slightly later in the nineteenth century.31 If they are used in conjunction with the farmingregion maps developed for an earlier period by Thirsk,32 the following coarse but revealing picture emerges. In the enumeration of 1885, two-thirds of all holdings over five acres were in the five- to fifty-acre

66 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

category. As I will show, such tiny farms cannot have accounted for much of the national agricultural product, although they were scattered everywhere in England. Areas of such "morcellement" were particularly concentrated in the fens, in the hilly Pennine fringe regions of Lancashire and the West Riding (near the newly emerging industrial towns). By contrast, there were 19,400 holdings of three hundred acres or more (occupying at least six million acres, or one-fifth of the whole of England). These were chiefly found in the band of eastern counties down from East Lothian and swinging west to Wiltshire (constituting about one-quarter of the area of England), which is where most of the arable land was, and where the median farm size was 120 acres. That same median farm size also obtained generally in the extreme East and Southeast, which also included stock-feeding (as opposed to stock-rearing) areas, as well as arable farmland. In the rougher, hillier, pastoral West, which was devoted more to stockrearing, the median was sixty-five (Cheshire, Cumberland, and Somerset alone having any considerable number of farms over three hundred acres). The heavy clay lands of the broad river vales and great plains were neither fertile enough for smallholding, nor sufficiently friable for full-scale arable farming. These regions were consequently given over to fifty- to two-hundred-acre farms for stock, or some rigidly traditional mixed husbandry. To a remarkable extent, then, the various regions, with their different ecological characteristics, dictated the type of farming and therefore also the size of farms. To take another example of the implicitly ecological (as opposed to industrial) basis of the approach to farming found in England in this period, consider the problem of pest control. What is now called biological pest control was integrated into the structure of the rotations and didn't require extra activity or inputs. The oral historian of English farming, George Ewart Evans, realtes in his Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay a striking account of a new agricultural "adviser" suggesting to his farmer charges that they alter a "time-honoured" rotation and substitute a ryegrass-clover mixture for a clover crop as the planting immediately prior to wheat. "But the farmers were not to be convinced; ryegrass was a bad preparation for wheat. Miller consulted his chief, Professor Seton, who advised silence; and eventually it transpired that the farmers were right. Both ryegrass and wheat are among the hosts of the frit-fly, and in autumn, when a ryegrass ley is ploughed, the maggots migrate from the grass to the wheat seedlings, often with devastating results."33 These crop-rotation cycles became part of the very stuff of rural life and it requires of us perhaps a special effort to understand that the perception of loss, when this system passed away, was not merely

67 English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime

sentimental. A.G. Street, the famous interwar farmers' spokesman, reminiscing in his Farmer's Glory about the pre-war approach common in the region where he grew up (where the methods in use during his boyhood clearly went back to the eighteenth century), emphasized the inseparability of the farming method from a particular, stable way of living. The farmer's plans were not conceived of as something to alter year by year. Rather, they were embedded in the longer, inevitable cycles of.climate. I may add that they also assumed an essentially reliable market. The point I would again stress about this type of pre-war farming was that one didn't consider whether the crop one was sowing would pay a profit over the cost of production or not. That never entered anyone's head. In good seasons farmers did pretty well, and in bad ones, presumably not quite so well ... The fact was that the four-course system allied to a Hampshire Down flock paid pretty well in those days, and was the accepted practice of the district. Farms were laid out for it, and were let on the understanding that the customary rotation would be followed. And once you were fairly into that system, it swept you with it, round and round, year after year ... One never got away for a moment from the atmosphere of farming. Both farmers and labourers might have been justly called narrow-minded clods by townsmen in those days, but as guardians of the soil in their particular district they were unbeatable.34

But, according to Street, the wisdom of such practices could not (or would not?) be verbalized by its practitioners. In reference to his employees, once he took over his father's lease, Street had this to say: "They were, without exception, very definite about things. They never explained anything. They just said so. And usually I found out that these statements were correct. Our old dairyman once said to me: Tis no good buying cattle from down stream fer these meadows. They don't do up yer. You wants to goo up stream and get 'em.' Ten years afterwards I bought a lot of cattle from down stream, and they didn't do."35 One has to suppose that there could be some ecological explanation of that old man's words, which reflect his own ultimately very detailed knowledge of the particular environment in which he grew up. Many accounts tell us that the dismantling of this farming 36 system gave rise to intense irritation among such old labourers Ironically, it may be that the very age of the system contributed to its vulnerability in a more technocratic age. The reasoning behind such literally embodied knowledge built up over centuries for each different ecological area may not be accessible to the memory of any single person, if it is lodged only in customary practice. For one striking

68 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

feature of this farming was its complexity, how very much skilled labour it required. In general, the more sophisticated the farming, the more labour was required per unit of land area, and the more profitable was the operation.37 Here is a description of the steps that followed the spreading of manure over a field in the production of just the turnip crop: "Harrows followed the seed drills and then came hoers, hand hoers to single along the lines and horse hoers to control the weeds between the rows. Finally the crop must be lifted and topped, and part, if not all, carted to the homestead for the winter feeding of stalled or yarded cattle."38 This account, moreover, leaves out the preparatory ploughing and cross-ploughing of the field. It is important to note that the labour requirements in this farming system are not as seasonally skewed as in North American farming. There were several labour-demand peaks over the year, not just one. It should be noted, however, that there was considerable variation by farming type in the ratio of labourers to farmers. For England as a whole, in 1831, the average figure was 5.3, including highs of 8.7, 8.4, and 7.2 for the arable counties of Bedford, Essex, and Norfolk respectively, and a low of 2.5 in more pastoral and remote Cumberland.39 The level of mechanization in this type of farming was negligible. The only important agricultural device that owed anything to the socalled Industrial Revolution raging in urban England in the nineteenth century was the metal-improved (but of course horse-drawn) plough, which was standard equipment by mid-century. The harvest, the time of greatest labour demand, was only generally mechanized by the i89os.4° The use of improved, labour-saving harvest handtools had actually fallen back for a while after the Napoleonic Wars.41 Again, then, even for this late period, Brenner's analogy with industrial innovation is strikingly inapt. It is unfair to single out Brenner, of course. Most of the eulogizers and demonizers of the Industrial Revolution have misled generations of students with that careless analogy. For example, it should go without saying (but I am afraid cannot yet) that the mechanization of threshing (which wreaked social havoc early in the nineteenth century) does not strictly count as an agricultural innovation at all since it only affected the processing of what was produced and nowise the production process. Not only could it not cause any increase in the amount of produce but it was a gratuitously disruptive example of mechanization, since it tended to throw people out of work during the precise season when the pool of available labourers was largest (due to there being relatively little field work to do), and also when the people's needs were larger. Whatever conclusion one draws from the whole sordid story, it certainly should not be counted as any straightforward example of technical innovation

69 English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime in capitalist agriculture per se, even though it was carried out by capitalist farmers. Land Stewardship in a Modern but Preindustrial Society The relative absence of mechanization in modern English agriculture is all the more remarkable because England was far ahead of the rest of the world in terms of the degree of urbanization of its population. In 1800, England's population was thirty percent urban,42 compared to only ten percent for France.43 These statistics likely understate the situation because probably most of the burgeoning population, even in nonurban areas, was not occupied in agriculture in the strict sense, but in rural manufactures.44 In this context it is worth quoting Defoe's famous early-eighteenth-century description of the hilly regions blessed with coal and running water where this prospering part of the population lived, and where each house was possessed of three or four enclosed fields of two to seven acres for growing vegetables and keeping cattle: Having thus fire and water at every dwelling, there is no need to enquire why they dwell thus dispers'd upon the highest hills ... Among the manufacturers houses are likewise scattered an infinite number of cottages or small dwellings, in which dwell the workmen which are employed, the women and children of whom are always busy carding, spinning, &c. so that no hands being unemploy'd, all can gain their bread, from the youngest to the antient ... After we had mounted the third hill, we found the country one continued village, tho' mountainous every way, as before; hardly a house standing out of a speaking distance from another, and we could see that almost at every house there was a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of cloth ... from which the sun glancing, and as I may say, shining (the white reflecting its rays) to us, I thought it was the most agreeable sight that ever I saw, for the hills, as I say, rising and falling so thick, and the valleys opening sometimes one way, sometimes another ... look which way we would, high to the tops, and low to the bottoms, it was all the same; innumerable houses and tenters, and a white piece upon every tenter.45 It seems that even in this expanding sector a curious ecological balance was observed, at least until the advent of the coal-and-steam revolution associated with factory production. Here is the overall assessment given in 1950 by a notable historian of the English landscape, Jacquetta Hawkes: Recalling in tranquility the slow possession of Britain by its people, I cannot resist the conclusion that the relationship reached its greatest intimacy, its

70 Agriculture Privileged and Benign most sensitive pitch, about two hundred years ago. By the middle of the eighteenth century men had triumphed, the land was theirs but had not yet been subjected and outraged. Wildness had been pushed back to the mountains, where now for the first time it could safely be admired. Communications were good enough to bind the country in a unity lacking since it was a Roman province, but were not so easy as to have destroyed locality and the natural freedom of the individual that remoteness freely gives. Rich men and poor men knew how to use the stuff of their countryside to raise comely buildings and to group them with instinctive grace. Town and country having grown up together to serve one another's needs now enjoyed a moment of balance.46

All other great English historian of the landscape, W.G. Hoskins, spoke in similar terms of this apparently ecologically balanced age.47 The farming was approaching the pinnacle of ecological sophistication while manufacturing remained relatively benign in its effect on the environment. On this point one can call William Cobbett as a contemporary witness. No naive "romantic," Cobbett was remarkable in many ways but one of the most striking things about him is that he loved landscape beauty and domestic practicality in equal measure. Anyone who reads his 1826 account of his ride in the Valley of the Avon48 must arguably agree that, as he saw it, people living well in such a place can have little, if any, use for the rest of the much-touted "economy." Cobbett combined a keenly up-to-date political sense with an anguished awareness of senselessly foregone agronomic possibilities. Cobbett's ideal England needed only better and more just political and agrarian laws, not a new technical basis in industrialproduction methods. It seems safe to venture that they would have struck him as an especially wicked because indirect kind of solution to social problems. Concerning this general question of the relationship between agriculture and industry in modern society, it has recently been argued that before the advent of mass petroleum refining (and, hence, petrochemicals), industry in general was positively bound to depend on agriculture as a source not only of fibres but also of raw materials for producing oils, soaps, etc. Early coal-based industries (which, unlike oil-based ones, could be and were locally supplied in England) could hardly dispense with agriculture, or rule it unilaterally, the way modern industry does.™1 The notorious acceleration of the commodification of labour in England in the period immediately following Hawkes's "moment" of intimate balance (which Cobbett saw needed political reform) was partly due to the fact that production techniques at the time made relatively little use of energy-rich fuels. Early factory production needed to commodify all the labour power that was avail-

7i English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

able and so was happy to move ever more people out of the countryside and into the towns. Cobbett can teach us exactly why this rural exodus should be seen at best as a "technical fix" to a political problem. Later, towards the end of the nineteenth century, as more sophisticated uses of fuels and raw materials allowed labour-efficient machinery to proliferate, this pressure further to commodity labour eased.™111 That fraction of the population that had comprised the rural poor now turned into, or provided the recruits for, the urban poor, socalled "outcast London." Chronic urban underemployment was the backdrop to Victorian and Edwardian "prosperity" until World War i changed the whole situation.49 However, it should also be pointed out that to some extent the sheer growth in the English population that eventually accompanied the Industrial Revolution was bound in itself to upset the eighteenth-century "balance" between agriculture and industry. In an ingenious contribution, F.M.L. Thompson has shown that had the production levels attained in 1901 been achieved by means of pre-Victorian techniques the direct burdens on English land would have been vastly greater, implicating between ten and fifty times the area actually affected.50 (It seems however that his calculations include the prodigious allocation of resources to the late-nineteenth-century arms race and so we cannot draw simple conclusions from them about the contribution of industry to standards of living.) That English farming had functioned so long and so well as the basis for so much industrial activity with only a very small proportion of the population being engaged on the land, and that it had been so productive without being mechanized, underscores the importance of the land itself and the way it was being treated under the classical English system. Is it, though, a mere fluke that this country, later and for so long perceived as having been on the road to industrialization, was based on a benign, nonindustrial agriculture? This question is of great relevance to the problem of sustainability. In the next section, I will explore the idea of S. Shiina that the long-enduring strength of the English tradition (over some three centuries) of careful land stewardship is susceptible of a special explanation that comes from a rather surprising and neglected quarter, namely, legal history.™7 For it is not possible to derive from the logic of capital in itself any particular ethos of land stewardship, good or bad. Political Economy's Comprehension of Agricultural Improvements

It is useful to clarify that, although theory can assure us that the English exhibited more closely than any other rural social system the

72 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

arrangements that alone suit the case of a purely capitalist society, the actual farming techniques themselves (which capital used and which constituted the crucial environmental variable) cannot likewise be specified in the abstract. From the point of view of capital in general, it is perhaps an accident that English agriculture was both ecologically benign and highly productive. Indeed, as hinted earlier, Uno, on whose conception of a purely capitalist society I have been relying, thought that there was a general internal incompatibility between capitalism and agriculture. His view on the face of it sits oddly with the English case as presented thus far, where agriculture could hardly have been more obliging to capital. But the sense of paradox can be dispelled by suggesting that Uno was probably unaware of the truly high level of English agricultural productivity particularly in the preindustrial period. Likely he was misled by the historiography produced by the heirs of the bourgeois radicals who so misled Marx. Uno consequently failed to see that his generally valid argument - that capital cannot simply rely on agriculture - was, as it happens, not put to the test in the English case. I shall explicate Uno's argument further here. Uno held that the full capitalist dialectic of cooperation-manufacture-mechanization seen in industrial production cannot take place in farming and that therefore agriculture is bound ultimately and everywhere to be a brake on advanced capitalist development. The logic of capital cannot itself do anything to guarantee that nature is as tractable as it would like to assume. Indeed, capital has reason to be more confident about its ability to subdue labour than nature: people can be moulded more easily than geography; or, to use Uno's terms, the "internal contradictions" of the capitalist attempt to subsume usevalue under value may be easier to solve than the "external" ones.50" According to Uno, capital's usual and quite logical response, where possible, is to source foodstuffs and other organic raw materials from agricultures outside its own domain. Capital will, so to speak, kick agriculture out of the polity, if it conveniently can. It is necessary to point out here, first, that in the English case such extreme behaviour on the part of capital was not necessary. The agriculture in question historically did not hold back capitalist development; quite the reverse.50™ The second, more theoretical, point is that one surely should expect the problems between the logic of capital and the facts of nature to be most acute in marginal cases, not in the best one. England came the nearest to exhibiting what would happen if value were utterly to vanquish use-value, so it should hardly be surprising that its agriculture should be the most accommodating.

73 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

Developing further this exploration of Uno's doubts about capitalist agriculture, it is not at all clear exactly which concrete problem Uno thought agriculture under capitalism could not solve because of its relative incapacity to generate increases in labour productivity through mechanization. It is probable that an overhasty analogy between productivity advances in agriculture and in industry is the hoary culprit behind even Uno's suspicions about the limited capacity of agriculture to cope with the pressure to improve. Of course, it is difficult for labour productivity to be improved in farming; and if there is neither an interested social grouping keen to improve land productivity, nor its functional equivalent, endless tracts of virgin land, then a problem in the level of agricultural production will ensue.30™1 So long as the old bourgeois radical perspective held sway and it was falsely believed both that England was becoming unable to feed itself in the midnineteenth century and that this was the fault of the landlord class, then it was easy to conclude that when England eventually did undermine its agriculture by repealing the Corn Laws, it was because industry had had no other option. This entire argument is a tissue of errors. In fact, England was not experiencing food shortages. Far from being obstructionist, the landlord class had good reason to take a great deal of the credit for that. In any case, Corn Law repeal was sought more as a way to wrest political than agronomic power away from the landed interest. The story Uno thought was generally true but that was false for the English case probably does fit much of the European (and perhaps the Japanese) experience, where there were difficulties in sufficiently improving agriculture. I shall now consider the usual complaints levelled at the agricultural sector by industrialists and their economist spokesmen. In modern history, whenever they have had real choice, peasants have chosen in the main to stay on the land, even in cases where they could have been "spared" for industry. Georgescu-Roegen has tried to explain this point to his fellow economists using their own peculiar terminology by saying that the marginal productivity of peasant labour quite unencumbered by capital is zero.51 But the inference that improving labour productivity in agricultural operations (by means, presumably, of investment in machinery) is the way to generate an absolute increase in agricultural production does not follow. Making people leave the land can nowise improve its productivity. Indeed, an increase in agricultural labour productivity can occur without there being any increase whatsoever registered in the amount of produce. In the 19305, for example, Stalin greatly lowered agricultural production while probably marginally increasing productivity.52 The key

74 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

question is the following: does industrial capital in general want more marketed produce, or just more labour, from the agricultural sector? As already mentioned, industrial capital's need for labour is, ceteris paribus, a contingent function of the standard techniques of production at the time; the desire for a greater quantity of marketed agricultural produce is usually incompatible with the desire for more "freed" labour (at least before the advent of chemicalized farming). So, which is it to be? It is not clear which of these two possible problems (too little food or too few labourers) Uno thought English capital was facing at the time of Corn Law repeal. Uno was probably ill served by the historiography of English agriculture available to him when he was developing his interpretation of the actual state of affairs. Moreover, his suggestion that English agriculture had to be jettisoned by English industrial capital in any case remains theoretically ambiguous. I hope to have amply demonstrated in this section the transformative character of the significant improvements in land productivity that occurred as a result of English capitalist farming. But further theoretical reflection on the role of the landowning class raises the question whether English agriculture, as it was actually evolving in the course of capitalist development, might not even have had the potential to constitute a coherent, if somewhat paradoxical, nonindustrial social order complete unto itself. I will explore this possibility briefly, if only to underscore the enormous significance of the story of English land stewardship. Recall that the attitude to their wealth on the part of the English landed classes was not systematically capitalist. They accumulated wealth, not capital per se. It is possible to conceive, then, of a society that would be capitalist in social structure but quite nonindustrial. So long as the landowning class regularly creams off (by means of periodic rent increases) the great bulk of relative surplus value that accrues in farming operations as they are improved, then a society that is in some respects "capitalist" but unsuccessful at accumulating capital can result. In the theory of a purely capitalist society, which was, after all, developed for the industrial case, it is the periodic overaccumulation of capital that spawns the bouts of technical innovation that result in general increases in labour productivity after the crisis is over. Thus, in a sense, the society I am sketching here would be stabler than any industrial capitalism. Uno's point is turned on its head. On this account, capitalist social relations are more, not less, compatible with agriculture than they are with industry. This purely theoretical, paradoxical case may seem bizarre, but it is not without implications for research on the course of capitalist development in

75 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

concrete history. For it is striking that regardless of how capitalist English farming was, it was never the strategic centre of the accumulation of capital as capital. Farmers never became grossly wealthy as so many captains of industry notably did, and the landlords only episodically treated as capital the enormous fortunes they made renting land to capitalist farmers. This reductio ad absurdum in the realm of abstract theory may help us to recognize that in the English case, from the point of view of the countryside, the Industrial Revolution of coal and steam irrupted in the first instance as an astounding irrelevance. It was essentially an impertinence, and one that English rural society simply refused to accept, whether politically, ideologically, or culturally.xxvm The crucial point is that the English landed interest refused industrialism, but not from a position of weakness, as did European peasantries and, later, the American family-farming constituency. On the contrary, the English landed interest spoke from a long-entrenched position of unquestioned strength. As the next section shows, this strength was maintained by means of the remarkable legal restrictions under which members of the landlord class tended to put themselves. These restrictions resulted in a powerful de facto institutionalization of sound land stewardship. SECTION 3 THE DYNASTIC D E V I C E OF STRICT SETTLEMENT

Dynastic Ambitions Serving the Land

It rapidly became the practice of the English landed classes after the Civil War deliberately to tie their lands to their (extended) families through the legal instrument known as a strict settlement.53 Briefly, this arrangement turned the living recipient of rents into a mere tenant, in effect, of the next heir, whether already born, conceived, or possibly neither. The device was a revival, after an interlude of unusual freedom in the disposition of property from 1540 to 1650, of the medieval entail. English law had come to abhor perpetuities but was able to countenance a compromise whereby estates could be settled strictly for up to three generations at a time, with every conceivable eventuality allowed for.54 In practice, estates were usually resettled every generation. The device was integrated with the English tradition of primogeniture since the patrimony was always settled on the first male child when possible. It was remarkable, however, for also routinely including some explicit provision for younger sons, daughters, and widows. Fundamentally, though, the life tenant was prevented by a strict set-

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tlement from selling off the central core of the landholdings, which usually comprised the bulk of the estate, or from otherwise subjecting them to "dissipation" or "waste," i.e., cutting timber without provision for replacement, converting arable land to permanent pasture, etc. The payments made out to younger sons and others were to come from income or from selling off lands not contiguous with the main estate. It was possible (by means of a private act of Parliament) to break entails, but the psychological attitude of the landowning classes generally forbade this, and the somewhat flexible extra provisions (the above-mentioned ones for the other family members) included in strict settlements tended precisely to make it unnecessary anyway. Lawrence Stone and Jean C. Fawtier recently studied the institution of strict settlement in their book on the English aristocracy, An Open Elite? Their conclusion about its effect was that "the long-term interests of family continuity were best served by intermittent legal flexibility and permanent psychological strictness, which is exactly what these arrangements provided."55 It was by such means that the landed classes maintained their property holdings in land. This was quite unlike the urban case of the bourgeoisie, who tended (in selfrighteous accord with their liberal, individualist ideology) to practise partible inheritance.5*5 It is also the case that lower in the social scale within rural society, partible inheritance was the rule. Indeed, Margaret Spufford suggests that the failure by English peasants in the seventeenth century to use unigeniture abetted the process of concentration in land ownership, of which the gentry and aristocracy were of course the main ultimate beneficiaries.57 There were lots of small parcels to be bought up piecemeal and added to a settled estate. Being perpetually mere stewards for the next generation, the members of the English landlord class whose estates were settled thereby incidentally prevented themselves from taking the short-term view on land use. Arable land especially had to be passed to the heir in a condition at least as good as before. To a remarkable extent this class lived in the most literal accord with the current Green Party slogan "We do not inherit the Earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children." Needless to say, the full story is a bit more convoluted. The effect of strict settlement was complicated by the fact that not all landlords were exclusively reliant on agriculture for their wealth: depending on their geographical location, some might have coalfields under their land; others might have acquired sinecures. Nonetheless, since agricultural rents constituted such a major portion of their income for most landlords, they had a direct interest in enforcing land-use clauses on their tenant farmers."^ For example, as late as the i86os, farmers in England could be sued by their landlords for

77 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

growing two successive crops of wheat on the same land.58 Although there clearly is a connection between strict settlement and ecologically sound restrictions of this sort, it is not easy to say how explicitly the landlords themselves construed their role as land stewards.50™ For their part farmers appear to have internalized the restrictions imposed on them.xxxl Recall their reputed motto, gratefully adopted for this book: "Live as if you are going to die tomorrow, but farm as if you are going to live forever." The scholarly literature on the subject of strict settlement has ignored these ecological aspects of the topic. Moreover, only estimates are available for the amount of land under strict settlement. According to F.M.L. Thompson, it was about half the area of England (although he notes that many have thought the proportion was much larger).59 It appears that strict settlement was more commonly used for larger estates, becoming less frequent lower down the social scale.60 Thirsk, however, mentions that in the eighteenth century it was not unusual for even yeomen to settle their estates. Whereas the private purpose, as it were, of the institution may have been merely to protect against extravagant heirs (especially when the latter had creditors)61 while still providing for the whole family, the effects were wider and diverse. The benign ecological consequence was likely a mere by-product, but the societal effect was to ensure that the landed interest constituted a class with great economic staying power, and we may take it that this was an explicit aim of strict settlement. It is worth noting that the device arose at the end not only of decades of extreme political turbulence but also of the first great agricultural boom in England. This "reconstructed" aristocracy had actually been growing and strengthening itself (especially in relation to other classes) after the end of feudalism in England.62 With the passing of feudal privileges at law, the resurgent aristocracy lacked "automatic" access to differential power,63 but they were probably all the more inclined as a result to pursue power through stable wealth. The fact that the development of strict settlement also coincided with a demographic crisis, which lasted from 1650-1740 and resulted in a sharp rise in the proportion of families lacking male heirs,64 may also be a factor in its adoption - and may also account for a significant fraction of the cases where it was not adopted. It seems that strict settlement may have had an effect on family structural dynamics, perhaps allowing increased opportunities for the expression of affective sentiments, although the point is contentious.65 Another reason for the development of a device that increased social stability is the general seventeenth-century English reverence for tradition (e.g., the cult of "the Ancient Constitution"). At the time

78 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

the word "innovation" was a powerful term of abuse. The aristocracy of the day have been referred to summarily as "men who believed that their ancestors participated in the government of England from its very beginnings, who desired - above all else - to retain the same power and privilege for themselves and their posterity."66 That this was not mere literal conservatism becomes apparent if one considers the relationship between landed estates and postrevolutionary constitutional issues as perceived so clearly by one of the most powerful Whigs ever, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, throughout her long life (i66o-i744).67 The Rates of Return on Capital and on Wealth Widespread resort to strict settlement was also significant for economic relations among the various strata of the wealthy classes as a whole. Wealth tied up in agricultural land generally earned a lower return but it tended strongly to stay in agriculture. Indeed, in the seventeenth century it was commonly held that commerce was suffering because so much money was being newly invested in land by merchants seeking security and prestige. The return on investment in agricultural improvements to the land was particularly high from 1640-1750. While it seems to have been clearly established that landed wealth stayed in agriculture, the flow of working capital in and out of farming has gone relatively unstudied. Certainly tenant farmers moved capital from one kind of agriculture to another in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as I will later describe.68 For the Victorian period, Holderness has found mention of people entering farming from other backgrounds.69 Davidoff and Hall point out that during the Napoleonic Wars there occurred "a virtual rush of people like journalists, shopkeepers, even army officers 'running helter-skelter' to be farmers."70 There is also no question that it was not uncommon for farmers to change farms, or crops, in response to market demand,71 even as far back as the seventeenth century.72 Returning to the classes that owned land, it seems that by the eighteenth century they came to perceive government funds and land as alternative secure investments, equally attractive from the purely chrematistic point of view at least.73 Perhaps, though, this was when there arose the striking rule, supposedly observed in Victorian times, that no gentleman should try to get more from his land than he would have got from its value in government stock,74 i.e., not very much.50"11 For a long period (ending only in the late nineteenth century), the English agricultural system thus implicitly denied the

79 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

modern economists' assertion that the economy might as well be regarded as a homogeneous entity. It appears that two different standards of value, and indeed of "rationality," prevailed, one operating in the agrarian sphere only, and the other in both the agricultural and nonagricultural spheres. It is not only that there were two different notional average rates of return present in the economy, for arguably in the agrarian sphere there was no governing rate at all for landowners, in the sense of a standard minimum acceptable rate of return on investment in land. If we can judge by the above-mentioned reports of entry into and exit from farming, it seems that every tenant farmer tended to expect a rate of return roughly comparable to that enjoyed by owners of retail shops and manufacturing workshops. The quotation from Street in the previous section, however, does tend to suggest that very imprecise expectations spread through time in a relaxed manner may have been typical, at least of those who had no intention of leaving the farming life. But information on this point is rare because, as Holderness has made clear,75 very few farmers kept the relevant kind of books. It seems, though, that if expenses consumed three to four rent equivalents and receipts totalled four to five, then farmers made a respectable profit that allowed them to live in middle-class style. In the first half of the nineteenth century the following figures would not have struck a farmer as unusual: about one pound per acre for rent on a five-hundred-acre farm and a herd of livestock worth nearly two thousand pounds. The mid-nineteenth century generally saw quite meagre returns on land and yet lavish investment in it76 Some contemporary commentators regretted this "waste" of capital, as they saw it. It seems paradoxical, but it appears that the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution was characterized by an approach to farming that recognized that it is not just like industry. English capitalist agriculture seemed to see the benefits of working within natural ecological cycles and not being so exclusively bound by the economic "laws" applied in the nonagricultural sectors, where adherence to the short-term perspective was ensured then as now by the overzealous encouragement of capital mobility. But what were the broad societal implications of agriculture occupying such a central, secure, and, as it were, ultraeconomic position? These implications can be divided into two categories: the economic and the sociopolitical. Unfortunately, English historiography has largely focused on the latter. Certainly the possession of landed estates was the key to political power in England for several centuries. In his summary depiction of the eighteenth century English peerage, Aristocratic Century, John Cannon argues that economic considera-

80 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

tions definitely took second place to political ones in the minds of great landowners.77 In the next section I will try to draw some economic conclusions, albeit ones that impinge on social theory. Politics as a theme is deferred to the next chapter, which treats of the deliberate undermining of agriculture's privileged position, a process of sabotage embarked upon and subsequently lauded for overwhelmingly political reasons more or less regardless of other considerations. The economic and political effects of agriculture's uniquely secure position in English capitalism were only institutionally (and thus merely contingently) related. The consequences of not separating the two sets of considerations when trying to solve problems that are just political are still with us. These consequences have taken at least two forms: a chronically disarrayed and environmentally destructive world agricultural system, and (somewhat less directly) a chronically unimaginative and nonecological international socialist tradition. I shall say more about these matters in chapter 3, after I have sketched out the English denouement. SECTION 4 THE PLACE OF AGRICULTURE THE ECONOMY OF CAPITALIST ENGLAND

IN

When agriculture was the main source of wealth, it is hardly surprising that the agrarian interest should have enjoyed the pre-eminent position in the economy. In a sense this is the standard pattern in preindustrial economies. To reiterate, however, the striking thing about England is that very early on its preindustrial, hence predominantly agricultural, society also had a thoroughly modern pattern of economic organization (at least as compared to the situation found on the Continent). This long regime of preindustrial agrarian modernity provided England with a prolonged period of acclimatization to many of what we now recognize as the basic set of capitalist norms and institutions. This social habituation to commerce took place long before industrialization proper. It did not happen elsewhere to anything like the same extent (the Netherlands came closest). Among what eventually became the industrial giants, England had a uniquely modern domestic economy long before it was industrialized and this obviously must be borne in mind when trying to account for the special position enjoyed by its agriculture after industrialization had begun in earnest. In order to evaluate the economic significance of this rootedness of English industrialism in a long-maturing, modern, and productive agricultural system, the overall economic position of the landowners must be indicated, along with the wider economic roles they played. The question how population growth was sustained

8i English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime

must also be touched on. Finally, the broad trajectory of English industrialization and other relevant changes in England's economic structure will be described. Then it will be possible to discuss the position of agriculture in the full-blown English capitalist economy of the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Position of Landowners in the Economy Due to their ability to raise rents as the prices of agricultural produce went up, landlords were long able to keep pace with broad economic changes and thus easily maintain their relative position in the economy. In general, the pattern of percentage increases in rents was the same as that for wheat prices from 1500-1900, with one curiously anomalous period: It appears that rents doubled over the first threequarters of the eighteenth century whereas prices rose by about twenty-five percent overall.78 Of course factors other than changes in the prices of produce also affected the buoyancy of rents.™111 A summary account of the history of rent in modern England should begin by noting that in the late sixteenth century rents were judged to have been relatively low. Early in the seventeenth century, landlords exerted themselves to raise their share but fell back again later in the century. The next two recognized periods of especially buoyant rents prior to the twentieth century coincided with great agricultural booms, one lasting from around 1780 up to 1820 and the other comprising the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Rents were, of course, the basis of most great fortunes in England. The innovative work done by W.D. Rubinstein on the disposition of these fortunes is helpful in making some estimate of the relative position of landowners.79 Judging by the estates left behind at death by the very wealthy, it appears that the wealth accumulated in agriculture dwarfed that in the rest of the economy until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was only by around 1880 that the ratio declined to unity between large fortunes passed on in land and those passed on in the rest of the economy. These latter included, in order of eventual preponderance: commerce; manufacturing; the food, drink, and tobacco businesses; the professions, public administration, and defence. The remarkable predominance of landed fortunes is partly due to the extreme concentration of landowning at the very top of the social structure. For example, buried in the 1873 national statistics (Table 2) is the illustrative fact that eighty percent of the land in the United Kingdom was owned by less than seven thousand persons.80 More illuminating with respect to agricultural land in particular is the fact that around 1881, over half the enclosed land in England and

82 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

Wales was owned by a mere 2,250 families.81 (Ironically, the undertaking of the New Domesday survey had been approved by a lobby group for the agricultural interest, which was quite sure a priori that the extent of concentration in land ownership was much less than actually turned out to be the case.) In assessing the significance of this information about what the wealthy left behind, one should recall that not all the wealth generated through landholding came directly from cereal growing. Many wealthy landowners also made investments outside agriculture, strictly construed, in projects that, as it turned out, were to provide much of the infrastructure eventually used by the whole integrated and industrialized capitalist global economy. These projects included mining, roadbuilding, canal and dockyard construction, and urban development.82 On the other hand, the bases of many large fortunes were laid in lines of business directly ancillary to agriculture, such as brewing. In any case, it seems that the heyday of investment in extraagricultural activities by the genuinely landed elites was the last quarter of the eighteenth and first quarter of the nineteenth century. Strikingly, direct investment in manufacturing concerns per se was little indulged in by the English landed interest during any period.83 On the subject of the integration of the landed aristocracy with the rest of the economy, it is worth quoting Rubinstein at some length: Their separateness became more rather than less marked in the course of the nineteenth century and (they) did not fully "merge" with the business worlds until after the First World War. In the world of high politics and government, Britain became more dominated by genuine aristocrats in the half-century after 1832 compared with the half-century before; much of the nexus between the aristocracy and the older business and professional world which marked "Old Corruption" disappeared in the nineteenth century; the holdings of the largest landowners often became considerably greater in size.84

During the long period when the agricultural interest was unquestionably supreme,xxxiv series of elaborate protective laws were passed and recurrently modified. These "Corn Laws" even included sliding scales of duties on cereal imports correlated with domestic prices. They allowed for a small bounty on exports when conditions were right. In this enthusiasm for control over imports and pursuit of foreign markets the landed interest had been united with the monied interest since at least the middle of the eighteenth century.85 But, as I have suggested, neither group had much contact with, or appreciation of, the retailing and manufacturing elements in society, which were

83 English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime

with some reason much less enthusiastic about agricultural protection. Agriculture as Accelerator then Decelerator of Industrialization

Not surprisingly, England's highly productive agriculture had a considerable impact on population growth in England. From about 1400 to 1800 wheat prices and population generally rose together, with especially rapid rises from 1520 to 1630. But during part of the period I am concerned with this mutual stimulation took a strange form that underlines how unusual England was. From 1650 to 1750 a steady if unspectacular population growth was accompanied paradoxically by falling agricultural prices.8 This gave a tremendous stimulus to the demand for the products of rural manufactures particularly since the population was by then largely deprived of access to the land for the raw materials needed for household production of material necessities. Production and consumption were separating rapidly and conclusively even in early modern England and they were doing so as a result of the agricultural system in use, which permanently and legally restricted access to the land and could itself produce a sufficiently large marketable surplus to support a nonpeasant population. The enormous and incomparably free English home market was the formal manifestation of this separation of production from consumption. In the second half of the eighteenth century grain prices rose sharply, 7 and by the 17705 England became a net importer of grain as accelerating population growth finally overtook the capacity of the land conveniently to provide food.500" This was not, however, a catastrophic economic problem for the country as a whole. As late as the 18303 over ninety percent of the food consumed in Britain was still grown there.88 It is important to emphasize, then, that at least until the mid-nineteenth century, although production and consumption were socially separate, their circuits with respect to food if not textiles still largely closed within this rather small and relatively climatically unified and temperate country. Of course England entered the nineteenth century with such a lead in commerce and manufactures (especially in the overseas-oriented textile industries) that it was easily able to pay for the importing of the extra foodstuffs required. In any case, from 1820 to 1853 wheat prices were in a trough,89 despite continuing population growth. It is remarkable but even such facts as these failed to undermine the prestige of such gloomy thinkers as Malthus and Ricardo. Of course the problems of Ireland eventually

84 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

made food-supply questions an urgent political issue, but the inference backwards to some failure of English capitalist agriculture that later became so popular requires many substantial non sequiturs. The pattern of English industrialization was obviously greatly affected by the social structure and productivity of agriculture, but industrialization in turn affected the eventual position of agriculture in the so-called "mature" economy of Victorian England. There were at least two distinct bouts of early rapid industrialization in England.90 One was in the 17403 and appears" to have died early, for reasons not yet quite understood. The second commenced in the 17805. It has been suggested that it may have been due to a pressure to increase labour productivity because of high wages resulting from a series of bad harvests in the 17605 and i77os.xxxvi It is striking, however, that after 1830, although industrial production continued to increase at a great rate, a century would pass before manufacturing again expanded as a proportion of the British economy.91 It was other sectors, notably the famous "invisibles" (shipping, insurance, etc.) that expanded as agriculture declined. It seems that the showdown between agriculture and industry proper had to await the twentieth century. Some time around the middle of the nineteenth century Britain began to have a major balance-of-payments deficit - not overall, but in merchandise trade.92 The last year Britain ever recorded a trade surplus was 1822. But although this deficit became substantial, it caused no hardship. The late-Victorian economy was buoyed, if not ultimately carried, by the sectors of finance, commerce, and transport. It has long been a great puzzle why England, the initial world leader by a large margin in industrial production and possessed of the most appropriate social structure for continued industrial preeminence, should so soon have turned away from the path of industrial capitalism. Some late-nineteenth-century critics, notably the economist William Stanley Jevons, were uneasy about, for example, England's sharply expanding penchant for consumption (and large-scale exportation)93 of coal, perhaps the most crucial resource in its early manufacturing. The late-Victorian downturn in manufacturing has never been fully explained,94 but some recent historians have put a lot of blame on the cultural and ideological influence of the landed interest. Historians, such as Wiener, who take this line,95 have failed however, to notice that the same conservative factors should (a fortiori) have impeded the initial undoubted burst of activity in the first half of the nineteenth century, if they were capable of stopping it so effectively later. Nevertheless, the cultural-ideological argument must be examined and criticized more closely.

85 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

Some historians have argued impatiently that the English landed interest was effectively just like nobilities of the other ancien regimes: antimodern by definition.9*5 Such general interpretations must henceforth confront the more specific argument developed in this chapter, that the English landed order was peculiarly suited to capitalism of the purest kind. Although not strictly capitalists themselves, landlords were deeply imbued with the spirit of possessive individualism97 among European elites, probably uniquely so. The striking thing is that these great possessors were also imbued with other less-individualist values, such as the priority of family continuity, a sense of duty (whether observed or not) to behave paternally towards their social inferiors, a sensitivity to the social and aesthetic pleasures of rural life, etc. So long as the bulk of economic activity was agriculturally based, the English economy was still under the ultimate control of a group that, although willing to benefit from the market-oriented exploitation of their estates, refused to let what we now call "the economy" engulf the whole of their lives, or indeed the whole of the polity in which they lived. From the perspective of the landed interest it could be said that the economy had its place, and it would not bulk too large while they remained in power. The true capitalists of English agriculture, the tenant farmers, tended to share the politics and many of the values of their landlords and wished to see them continue in their role as protectors of the land.98 It has not been properly digested by historical sociologists and sociologically minded historians that many of those most strictly definable as capitalists (managing entrepreneurs) in England were not even remotely bourgeois, in the strict sense of "town-dweller," simply because they were not urban. The considerable size of this group is roughly indicated by the fact that around 1850, when there were just over half a million workers in the cotton industry,99 there were nearly a quarter of a million people classified as "farmers" by the General Register Office, with perhaps another hundred thousand farming part time.100 At this time there were nearly two million persons of one status or another engaged in agriculture out of a total population of twenty-one million.101 England was special, not because, as many vaguely believe,102 it was characterized by an historically bizarre and stifling balance of ancien regime and modern industry,300"11 but because it had an utterly unique agricultural basis that can and must be studied directly on its own terms, not merely as a variation on some imagined wider pattern. The irritated ranting from one set of historians of English capitalist development and the bemused apologetics of the other are signs either of sociological indecision resulting from failure to come

86 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

to grips with the theory of a purely capitalist society, or of dogmatic adherence to various vague theories of modernity that attempt direct, all-encompassing theoretical descriptions of social reality and thereby obscure as much as they clarify. If the English case is taken seriously as the nearest exemplar of a purely capitalist society, and if it is recognized that this emerged only after a long period of preindustrial agrarian modernity, then there is nothing at all paradoxical about it. It is time to end the veritable cacophony of conflicting opinions on, for example, the much-postponed English "bourgeois revolution."103 Historians should henceforth simply acknowledge that tenant farmers were the real backbone of the "bourgeoisie." It is worth noting that, contrary to the expectations of both Marxist and liberal orthodoxy, it does not follow from the theory of a purely capitalist society that industry must necessarily come to dominate, once established in a society possessed of a modern economy. Of course, almost all wealthy countries in modern times have, contingently, been overrun by industry, but this has nearly always been due to processes of state-led, deliberate militarization. There is not much concrete historical evidence of any purely economic motor for industrialization, particularly in the now-typical versions that involve extreme dependence on nonliving power sources. (As Chinese history makes clear, technical improvements need not come in heavy industrial garb.) In this connection Raphael Samuel has most usefully underlined the extent to which hand-powered production techniques remained important even in mid-Victorian England.104 In any case, a very large part of England's classic industrialization package was apparently not strictly economically motivated. Hobsbawm, perhaps unwittingly, has made this startlingly clear. He argues that it was the urge to invest in railway building during the 18405 that underlay the development of the British capital-goods sector, but also that this occurred even though economically, the scale of investment was irrationally large.105 The historiography of England's economic change has been similarly marred in another respect by illogical theoretical generalization. It has been emphasized ad nauseam that industrialization was followed by sharply rising standards of living,106 but it has never been shown either that these benefits ever were the actual rationale behind industrialization, or that industrialization is a suitable, let alone uniquely suitable, way to set about achieving improved living standards. Indeed, it is not clear that it was essentially industrial change that caused the bulk of the positive effect in the English case. As pointed out earlier in this section, England had the contingent historical opportunity, which it duly seized, to become the (highly developed)

87 English Capitalism in Its Light-Industrial Prime

service sector of the emerging world economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It abandoned, as quickly as it had taken up, its early-nineteenth-century obsession with manufacturing and concentrated instead on expanding further its former role of providing shipping and financial and other services,107 including the "hubcurrency" for world trade.108 Ingham has suggested that England was really not so much "the Workshop of the World" as "the Clearing House of the World."109 The rate of energy consumption in England, which can be taken as a crucial economic index of industrialism, had climbed sharply from 1850 to 1880, but had levelled off by 1900 and did not grow again until World War ii.110 The proportion allocated to manufacturing actually declined sharply from 1840 to World War i.in So although English living standards did improve in the nineteenth century, it is highly misleading to credit this to industrialization, unless of course one prefers to mean nothing in particular by the word. Of course, as English agriculture continued to improve its productivity even while involving a continually shrinking proportion of the population, it inevitably lost its centrality in the English economy. This trend can be indicated by noting that in 1800 agriculture accounted for one-third of the occupied population and one-third of national income, but by 1840 less than one-quarter of the population and even less of the national income.112 Agriculture's very success made it vulnerable to marginalization in that way. But the point to emphasize here is that it is quite misleading to say that English agriculture was eclipsed in particular, or to any special extent, by the industrial activity taking place in the country. Agriculture in England never lost power conclusively to the domestic manufacturing interest. Rather, the fate of English agriculture became uncertain when the English economy weighed anchor in its old mooring just off Europe and floated out into the rapidly industrializing world economy, convinced of the importance of its mission to spread the gospel of Free Trade, with which it had experimented so successfully at home. The World Economy Turns on Its Creator

I argue in the next chapter that Britain's success in this self-appointed mission was a major cause of what became an imbalance at the global level between industry and agriculture. The ability of English agriculture to expand in a measured way with English population growth and industrial expansion had been largely due to its being modern in very specific ways, and to its being the ballast of the economy for so long. With the revealing exception of the fascist nations, other countries under self-consciously modernizing regimes chose to "rationalize"

88 Agriculture Privileged and Benign

their agricultures in one way or another through integration with the world market. However, such externally led modernization typically occurred at the expense of ordered expansion. With production and consumption separated so widely in geographical as well as social terms, the odds against balanced growth became long, as shown in the next chapter. So, in a sense, English agriculture became the victim of the growth (indeed overgrowth) of world industry, and its fate was, as Adams puts it, a policy "choice" that "served a much wider immediate range of British interests than would [have] a policy of protection.""3 One might even argue that England's antics effectively caused, or at least abetted, the agricultural problem of the rest of the world when it thus chose not to be its own chief supplier. Returning briefly to the theoretical discussion that closed section 2, one could suggest that Uno may have been fundamentally correct but had the story exactly backward. There was no "agricultural problem" in the world at large until England helped create the conditions for one, through so aiding the expansion of the world market in general. If English economic thinkers and statesmen had attended more to certain crucial details of England's own internal substantive economic history and not illicitly extended the doctrine of free trade from its relatively valid domestic sphere to the altogether wider and more heterogeneous sphere of international trade, then perhaps the world would not have seen the generalizing of an economic doctrine of such studied sociological (not to mention ecological) naivety as Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage. That England was modern before it was industrial was not noticed by the doctrinaire enthusiasts for laissez-faire who supposed that free trade (especially in industrial goods) could be grafted onto absolutely any sort of social structure, and that it would then also in due course bear the much-vaunted English fruit of prosperity and a minimalist state. It is indeed difficult to account for this compound of wilful sociological blindness and groundless optimism. As it happens it was also what was behind the bitter political attack on the English landed interest that got underway in the mid-nineteenth century. That free trade could have global environmental consequences was not foreseen, apparently. The attack on the landed interest certainly, albeit incidentally, sabotaged English agronomy, but, ironically, it failed utterly in its real political objective of undermining the foundations for the existence of a rentier class. The wealthy elites simply shifted their interests to the growing financial and commercial sphere, maintaining the concentration of wealth and, thereby, much of their political power. In 1913, unearned income (i.e., rents, dividends, and interest from state and private loans) accounted for thirty-five percent of personal income in

89 English Capitalism in Its light-Industrial Prime

the British Isles, a proportion that did not change before i^2^.U4 Most of the liberal arguments against the English agrarian system in fact exhibit the flaw of irrelevance. I will therefore begin the next chapter with a discussion of the Radical attack and its effect in shaping the fate of English agriculture as the world economy came to dominate agriculture everywhere. The place of English agriculture became unclear, while production and consumption separated ever more in a world-geographical sense. The fabular story of what England could have become was definitively brought to a close. The British came to live off agricultural imports financed by overseas investments and international economic-service activities. Their domestic agriculture was consequently free to change its substantive economic function in specific ways and came in this century to resemble the narrowly specialized, and soon to be industrialized, agricultures of other countries. As a result it was just as vulnerable as any other national agriculture when the great interwar collapse of primary commodity prices occurred. That collapse was due to a global imbalance between production and consumption, itself due to supply and demand having expanded without any "organic" connection, without any balance between agriculture and industry."5 A further victim of this disordered expansion, I will argue, was the living environment. While there was nothing absolutely to guarantee that farming would henceforth become ecologically more destructive, there was no longer anywhere anything in the line of social institutions to prevent such a tendency. Humankind could be the logical end victim if we do not heed the institutional and agronomic lessons of the English story.

3 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed: The Industrializing (World) Economy as the Only Perceived Context for Human Activity in This Century

There has been [since 1914] a revolution in the introduction of machinery integrated with the internal combustion engine and of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and weed killers, but this has originated in the chemical and engineering industries, not in farming, and farmers have been less than passive in these developments, mostly having to be bribed into participation by vast and wholly unjustified outpourings of public money. Eric Kerridge1 SECTION

I

F R E E T R A D E AND THE ATTACK ON

THE LANDED INTEREST

IN ENGLAND

How did the modern world get from a state of fascination with the once-pre-eminent English model with its ecologically benign economic activity to the present predicament characterized by chronic environmental degradation? This is an involved question the formulation of which depends on the special interpretation of the environmental significance of the English trajectory advanced in the previous chapter. It is also a question that no single person could answer fully because there are so many component themes. Here no attempt will be made to outline the full story of industrialism, for example.1 This chapter is restricted to explaining the current environmental plight of modern society with special reference to the peculiar role and fate of its agriculture over the last century and a quarter. In the first section I will recount the dismantling of the privileged position occupied by agriculture in liberal England. The origins, course, and effects of the great interwar worldwide agricultural crisis will be traced in the second section. The adverse general economic results of

9i The Industrializing (World) Economy

that crisis were manifest at the time of the Depression but these ill effects evaporated with the advent of World War n and, until the last few decades, seemed to have been banished by government intervention. By contrast, the adverse environmental sequelae of the interwar crisis have unfortunately shown themselves to be much longer lasting. Of great importance among them is the acceleration of industrialization in general, and of the industrialization of agriculture in particular. The nature of the twentieth-century transformation in farming methods will be explored in section 3. Some of its notable characteristics are in no small measure due to the peculiar official approaches to solving the economic problems left by the Great Depression. The now ubiquitous governmental support for agriculture in wealthy countries (which varies in form only) helped spawn a huge range of industrial techniques that typically enter the economy on a cost-plus basis. By the early 19805 it was tacitly admitted by the United States Department of Agriculture that it used habitually to encourage the financially irrational use of technically excessive quantities of industrial inputs.2 Not only is overproduction pandemic but it is now enormously costly as well. In the centrally planned economies, albeit for quite different reasons, similar but even more wasteful production methods were legion, incredibly but continuously generating shortfalls in production. Currently no part of the "developed" world seems able to rid itself of the bane of expensive and dangerous overindustrialization. The conclusion seems inescapable that the substantive economic basis of modern society has been very poorly integrated with its natural environment in this century. To put it another way, there are good reasons to doubt that we have been living in a sustainable economic system over the last hundred years. Our agricultural practices in particular have been well integrated neither with the rest of our economic activities, nor with the environment. Strikingly, the socialist tradition has never come to grips properly with this problem. This is perhaps because the socialist analysis of capitalism was for so long unfinished and therefore inherently ambiguous. There are very few socialist thinkers who stand out in this regard. I will discuss some of them in section 4, but the chapter concludes with a sober account of the fundamentally ambiguous attitude towards industry on the part of even a distinctly non-Whiggish member of the socialist tradition. It is as well to issue a caveat before commencing the historical account in this chapter. It may seem unreasonable, even fatuous, to go in one progression from English domestic politics to world-scale environmental problems,11 and so the reader should bear in mind a few general points about the world-historical importance of England.

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First, until the turn of this past century, the English economy was clearly supreme and in many respects it served as a model to many other self-consciously modernizing states such as Prussia, Japan, and Russia. Second, as I argue later, it is the case that English policy debates were remarkable for their self-conscious and strikingly doctrinaire focus on questions of economic theory and ideology; it is also the case, unfortunately, that English economic arguments came to have enormous influence particularly in the international sphere (later to go so awry). Every historian of England must find it at least a bit surprising that Adam Smith's mid-eighteenth-century observations on preindustrial economic arrangements are today so revered as a policy guide in many countries, even in cases where levels of investment in fixed capital are so high as to make a mockery of attempts to implement his model of a rapidly self-equilibrating economy. The third of my preliminary points takes the focus away from England, however. The worldwide response to the twentieth century's general crisis in the interwar period, which is the source of contemporary problems, was not at all English in ideological origin; it was perhaps even antithetic to English ideology. One might well argue that the nonindustrial ethos of English high culture alluded to in the previous chapter3 made English politicoeconomic argument especially naive with regard to the environmental effects of modern industry. (An analogous cultural criticism has been forcefully made with respect to English interwar naivety in international relations.)4 In any case, as earlier argued, the English trajectory can serve as a peculiarly enlightening touchstone with which to compare developments in agriculture elsewhere. Classical Political Economy and English Politics

Going well back into the eighteenth century in England, there had been considerable political objection to the aristocracy's tight grasp on political power. Adam Smith, for example, although he was a spokesman more for what has been called "agrarian capitalism" than for the nascent bourgeois manufacturing interests, was no simple-minded admirer of the landed classes. He referred to landlords as those who "love to reap where they never sowed."5 Nonetheless, there was a sense in which for Smith the class of landowners was simply part of the politicoeconomic firmament, one of "the three great original constituent orders of every civilized society,"6 as he rather unambiguously put it. The real theoretical opposition to the landed interest only began to gather public steam with the advent of David Ricardo. Ricardo followed Smith in taking the existence of a landed class as a sociological given, but he differed from Smith in his analysis of

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who the ultimate beneficiaries of economic growth would be. Ricardo proved to his own satisfaction that as the economy expanded, the landowning class would not merely remain powerful but would actually become disproportionately wealthy at the expense of the rest of society. He grounded his extremely abstract proof of this contention in the continuing requirement that fresh farmland of ever poorer quality be cultivated. Having rents competitively set by the cost of grain production on the poorest land required to be under cultivation at any given time implied that, as the extent of cultivation increased, the rents on all grades of land would go up. He found this a most distasteful result of the economic system. As the originator of what has been called the "Ricardian vice" of mistaking abstract theory for reality,7 he judged England to be utterly trapped by this theoretical point. His ideas therefore were taken up with gusto by a variety of interests, all of which aimed at weakening the aristocracy (and not just in England either). Ricardo's time saw what was probably the highpoint of the active and direct influence of political economists on public affairs.111 There were some remarkable results in banking policy that ramified very rapidly, causing a major crisis in farming.8 Agricultural policy as such became a particularly contentious matter somewhat later at the time of the Irish famine, when the call for repeal of the Corn Laws (so favourable to the landed interest) became particularly loud. Sir Robert Peel as prime minister at the time was in the awkward position of being also the leader of the political party that above all represented landlords. Since there was as yet no inkling of the huge future effects of putting the world's remaining prairies to the plough, he tried to cut through the Gordian knot for agricultural policy posed by Ricardian economics by counselling government to encourage greater use of the improved farming methods already available. Thus he hoped to achieve greater agricultural production without further extension of the cultivated area. Peel duly pursued this policy of stimulating improvement artificially in conjunction with Corn Law repeal. That he felt it necessary to do so perhaps showed he had little faith in the ability of the capitalist dynamic to operate properly in agriculture (recall the discussion at the end of chapter 2, section 2). It seems, however, that most of his Tory followers regarded the whole episode as a "betrayal" and indeed a myth convenient to the Tories grew up that the policy was actually conceived and pushed through by the manufacturing classes. D.C. Moore has exploded this myth,9 but there is no doubt that any policy of cheaper food was very popular with capitalist factory owners.17 Rabble-rousing repealers were not above inciting popular agitation in favour of cheaper bread. They avoided as

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far as possible discussing the next logical question, insistently aired by Chartists, whether wages might not then simply go down in tandem with the price of bread. The whole debate took place during the long period in English history characterized by very low wages, a high proportion of which had to be spent on food. To give an example, in 1813, at the height of wartime demand, a bushel of wheat sold for a price equal to nearly double a workman's weekly wage. By contrast, in the us, the highest wheat price per bushel (attained in 1920) constituted only about a seventh of one weekly wage.10 The effects of Corn Law repeal were curious. The most remarkable thing is how very little happened for several decades/ This is puzzling, at least initially, given the clamour for repeal. It is less striking, however, when one realizes how varied were the motives of the various parties to the coalition for Corn Law repeal, and how shaky the underlying analysis. Some participants had merely domestic political interests at stake, others were concerned about England's world position. They often advanced mutually contradictory arguments for repeal.11 The impression of incoherence nowise evaporates when later verdicts are juxtaposed with the ideas of the time. It has been claimed, for example, that one ultimate effect of repeal was to make England dependent on America.12 This is quite remarkable, since one of the most doctrinaire, bourgeois Radical advocates of free trade, Cobden, supported Corn Law repeal precisely because he foresaw, as early as the i83os/3 the possibility of eventual us dominance over England. G.M. Young has a curious footnote on the subject: "It is not always remembered that Cobden regarded Free Trade, not as a law of nature, but as a device for postponing the inevitable consequences of American competition. In his heart Cobden preferred the pre-industrial civilization in which he was born, and there is as much bitterness as belief in his economic creed."14 The obvious retort to Cobden's rationale, made with over a century's hindsight by Max Nicholson, was that this "buying of time" through repeal was in vain.15 The extra, temporary advantage was squandered, and dependence on America duly ensued. English industrialization was eventually spurred by repeal but there was a considerable delay before lower grain prices materialized. At the time of repeal there was competition from Baltic grain grown by virtual serfs,vl but not from the North American prairies. American wheat did not appear in large quantities on English wharves until after the transcontinental railways were constructed, enabling the grain to be moved cheaply to the North American coast for shipment overseas. Although some people worried about the long-term social effects of undermining agriculture, at no point in the public discussion of Corn

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Law repeal does there seem to have been any concern for environmental issues, especially not at the global level. But Corn Law repeal did have environmental repercussions on several levels. The Effect of Corn Law Repeal on English Agriculture

In purely domestic terms, as I have hinted, very little happened after repeal for a few decades. Peel's pro-improvement legislation was implemented. Funds were made available to landlords to carry out extremely expensive drainage operations, especially in the heavy-soil regions. In general, efforts were made to generalize the practice of high farming and these met with success on the whole, as farming was very profitable and rents were consequently buoyant. F.M.L. Thompson has argued, however, that the basis for a fundamental shift in the English farming approach was unknowingly laid at this time, during what he calls the "Second Agricultural Revolution."16 As described in the previous chapter, classical English farming involved the integration of animal raising with crop production, albeit largely for the latter purpose. Thus, it had been in a sense a mixed farming system all along. Thompson suggests that the mid-century push to increase yields led to the addition of external inputs, which had the effect of raising the virtuous circle of recycling nutrients on the farm to a yet higher level. Feedcakes made of crushed seeds were added to the diets of the animals. This was done to increase their manuregenerating capacities.17 The cakes were made from the pulpy byproduct of seed crushing for industrial purposes. To a considerable extent these seedcakes were imported from the Continent. In a literal sense, then, as Justus von Liebig was loudly to complain, English fields were being fertilized with nutrients originally taken from Continental soils. According to Thompson, this heralded a crucial shift in attitude. Using the special sense of "industrial" clarified in section 3 of chapter i, it might be termed a cryptoindustrialization of agronomic practice. English farming, at least at the top level, was no longer only a matter of overseeing a perfect closed cycle on some particular patch of land. E.L. Jones, who also puzzled over the failure of Corn Law repeal to induce immediate economic catastrophe, drew attention to the mixedfarming aspect of English agrnomy as well. Eventually, when cheap overseas grain did make its impact, English farmers were able to respond by simply altering the mix, as it were, within their farming operation. Livestock production was stepped up and cereal production cut down. Indeed, cheap cereals are a direct incentive to increase livestock production since for that purpose they count as an input.

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The effect was a certain homogenization of the hitherto more regionally distinct English farming systems. So long as steamships were not in common transatlantic use and refrigeration was not available, English farmers were able to keep the domestic market for meat largely as their own. As urban living standards rose later in the century, meat eating became more common.19 Once cheap refrigerated meat (from, e.g., Argentina) became widely available, the English livestock producers adapted again, this time by increasing the proportion of higher-quality meat in their production, leaving it to others to supply, for example, cheap tins of corned beef. Dairying was also on the increase in Britain. Agricultural workers' wages were finally beginning to rise later in the century, further stimulating the reduction of arable farming and the increase in animal raising because of the higher (and more seasonally skewed) labour requirements in cereal production. Within the general so-called "Great Depression" of agriculture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the English experience was triggered by the combined effects of a run of bad harvests and the appearance of American prairie grain on English docks. This was strictly speaking only a depression for the arable farmers.20 It was probably something of a boon to those who had already started to increase the proportion of livestock production in their mixed operations, though animal plagues hit many very hard. These changes in agronomic practice, accelerated by Corn Law repeal and poorly understood at the time, coincided in an apparently accidental way with more general political criticism of the landed interest. This opposition was deliberately fanned by Cobden and others after their conspicuous success with repeal. Even John Stuart Mill, for example, toyed with the idea of state control of land. Land nationalization was a popular cause with the more radical of the agricultural workers under the influence of Henry George. Part of the same current hostile to landowners (but far more moderate in social implications) were the struggles over cropping restrictions and "tenant right" in general. The debates at the time on these matters, however, show no explicit sensitivity to what one might call "environmental impact." But because the practices in question did have significant direct ecological effects at least locally, they merit more extended discussion here.21 It had been customary, as explained in section 3 of chapter 2, for leases to contain restrictions with respect to agronomic practice. As English farmers altered the arable-to-livestock balance in their mixed farming, they often ran counter to time-honoured land-use restrictions enforced by the landlords at least originally in the interest of endlessly sustainable arable production.22 The other contentious

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matter was an outgoing tenant's right to claim compensation for the value of the unexhausted portion of improvements financed or otherwise carried out over the course of the lease. This mattered more and more as long leases came to be less popular among owners in the nineteenth century.23 Diminished legal security in any case inclined many tenants to rely increasingly on off-farm inputs,24 thereby exacerbating the cryptoindustrial trend alluded to above. The result was the gradual dissolution of classical English farming. English food production became increasingly dependent on the "mining" of soils elsewhere on the planet. This was perhaps to England's advantage, but on a global scale this robbing of Peter to pay Paul was not an edifying spectacle. Liberal opinion nonetheless tended to side with the capitalist tenants' point of view. Liberal economic ideology increasingly held that capital seeking profit must be allowed to pursue its immediate best interests without hindrance. Along with this had gone a campaign to assimilate the law relating to the purchase and sale of land to that regulating transactions involving true commodities (i.e., ones actually produced for sale). This implied an attack on strict settlement and on primogeniture, although it seems that the two were not carefully distinguished by the public at all times - hardly surprising, given the mixture of motives and tactics amongst those calling for the end of the old order. It is striking that in the first few decades after Corn Law repeal, farmers were reluctant to support bodies agitating for land-law reform such as the National Freehold Land Society founded in i849.25 Manchester-style liberals attacked the estate system and the wealth of landlords in many cases as a way of undermining the political power of the aristocracy without conjuring the feared tool of a call for universal suffrage.26 The thoroughly undemocratic result was, ironically, a decline in middle-class unity and an increase in that of the landed interest. There is more than just that one twist of political irony in the story. Limited-liability company law, developed expressly to facilitate industrialization, was in fact modelled on the legal device of strict settlement.27 The Economist claimed in 1844 that strict settlement was keeping capital from the land. As it happened, however, once strict settlement was seriously under attack, "capital" began to flee the land. For the upshot of the difficulties of agriculture in the last quarter of the century was a considerable stimulus to what was rather disingenuously termed "reform" of the land laws, and of course once Corn Law repeal really started to hurt landlords who owned considerable acreage in the more purely arable regions, they began to move their wealth out of agriculture. Some diversified their investments and put more

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money into, for example, developing coalbeds that lay under their lands (although it appears that in the better arable regions this tended not to be an option, for geological reasons). Most ironically of all, it seems that some landlords, particularly those closely associated with the City, invested in some of the very overseas transcontinentalrailway schemes that spelled the end of the classical English arable farming they had been fighting to maintain. Parts of many estates were simply sold off as well. Tenants keen to farm differently, free from the old cropping restrictions, bought their farms outright in increasingly large numbers. From 1880 to 1925 there was a massive and probably unprecedented turnover in English land ownership. Nearly one-quarter of the land changed hands so that by 1927 more than thirty-six percent of the land was owner occupied.2 The idea of an obligation to maintain land in any kind of permanent trust for future generations seems to have disappeared in the general melee. Corn Law repeal also served to stimulate English industrialization in a more general, indirect way. This in itself had environmental implications, although England lagged far behind Germany and the United States in the adoption of some of the newer heavy-industrial production techniques, many of which were remarkable for their high fuel consumption and generation of chemical wastes. Since Corn Law repeal also seemed differentially to benefit urban populations through appearing to be the only possible cause of lower food prices, it did a great deal to vindicate (in the public's mind) the Ricardian argument in favour of freer world trade. Indeed, the Disraeli government of the late iSyos positively re-ratified Peel's epochal decision.29 The increased enthusiasm for free trade showed in the remarkable later failure of Joseph Chamberlain to achieve his goals of imperial preference and tariff reform in the late-Victorian early-Edwardian conjuncture. It may be useful to underline how specious many of the orthodox economic arguments in favour of free trade became once the arms race of the decades prior to World War i was truly underway. As Avner Offer has suggested in his slyly titled The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation, it is very likely that the Royal Navy was an incomparably more expensive way of securing a food supply than protected domestic commodity prices would have been. In this century only the Americans have been able to match the astonishing British capacity to abstract from the huge fact of military expenditure while claiming to be considering problems of economic policy as they bear on the national interest. When they have clashed the supposed laws of economic reason have always given way to supposed military necessities. That is one of the luxuries we moderns owe to industrial methods of production.

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Free trade as a general abstract principle was bound to have complex global environmental consequences in the long run. Ricardo's famous doctrine of comparative advantage leaves no room for any consideration of the possible harmful ecological effects of increasing international specialization (for example, through monoculture, or other gross simplifications in farming systems). I will go further into the question of world trade in agricultural produce in the next section, which treats more explicitly of the world economy's effect on agriculture in England and elsewhere. SECTION 2 THE R I S E AND FALL OF AN ORDERED WORLD MARKET IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCE AND THEIR MANIFOLD EFFECTS

What might be called the classic "agricultural explanation" of the ubiquity and longevity of the Great Depression of this century also explains many of our current economic and environmental problems. The line of reasoning behind this view was enunciated with special clarity by Keynes's civil-servant colleague Sir Hubert Henderson in the Stamp Memorial Lecture for 1946, "The International Economic Problem."30 In this piece, Henderson drew particular attention to world trade in agricultural commodities, and to the monetary effects of the Great War (which he regarded as even more important among long-term causes of the Great Depression). A precis of the story as told by Henderson, carried forward to the present and otherwise embellished, follows here.V11 The Agricultural Explanation of the Great Depression The chief empirical symptom of a sea change in economic conditions as the twentieth century unfolded was an extreme and chronic imbalance between agriculture and industry. This imbalance, since exacerbated, has to be traced back before World War i into the very structure of the emergent world economy. As industrial Europe underwent rapid population growth, international trade and investment expanded constantly in order to ensure adequate supplies of food and raw materials. So long as agricultural techniques were changing relatively slowly, growth necessarily took the form of an expansion of the area under production. The balance of international payments was easily kept in equilibrium because, for the system as a whole, Britain was simultaneously chief lender, a major supplier of the industrial capital goods on which the loans were spent, and a major market for the primary products made so much more easily available by those same

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capital goods. Around the turn of the century, however, labour-saving agricultural mechanization (as opposed to yield-increasing, "landsaving" technical change) began to take place. Great increases in the speed of land transportation also occurred. These developments were realized in many of the newly opened areas at precisely the same time that the rate of European population growth started to decline. The persistent excess of supply over demand that resulted for many staple agricultural commodities caused ruinously low prices. The new means of swift transportation ensured, moreover, that these low prices were worldwide. That this was the background situation behind the price phenomena only became unmistakably clear after the temporary shortages caused by World War i had been remedied. Until World War n "sopped up" the surpluses of grain and the large numbers of unemployed that appeared in the 19305, there seemed to be a permanent disjuncture between the size of the economy and the size of the population in every one of the heavily industrialized countries (seemingly permanent with respect to unemployment because working people, then as now, tended to disregard the classical remedy of a reduced general real-wage level)/111 At the start of the interwar era, governments responded to the general disequilibrium with schemes to keep supplies off the market. Later, more frankly protectionist moves became common in the metropoles (which were rich enough to afford them). These of course aggravated the global trouble. The balance of payments of those countries dependent on agricultural exports became so deranged that the self-adjusting mechanism of the international economic system suffered a strain that was critical in bringing about the eventual collapse of the gold standard. As Henderson explicitly put it, it was no longer true that "a constantly expanding volume of international trade [was] to the manifest advantage of all parties to it."31 In the late twenties there had been some progress towards regaining global economic equilibrium, but the financial crises of 1930 and 1931 caught many countries still dangerously off balance. The subsequent slump caused an increased resort to protectionist policies. Agricultural groups were "saved" on an ad hoc basis by governments that had no overall policy about the role agriculture ought to play in the national economy. Even groups that competed with each other were often protected simultaneously.32 In sum, laissez-faire was thrown overboard without careful thought as to what should replace it. Free trade appeared to have committed suicide. Many had good reason to be grateful once European fighting resumed in the late thirties. For during World War n, the relatively new willingness and capacity of governments to oversee agriculture - a capacity that had grown gradually throughout the 19305 - providentially turned out to be precisely what

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was needed to bring about the controlled and rapid rise in domestic production that in so many countries had become crucial for survival during war. To take the most striking example, the British changed within those five years from having one of the least to having one of the most mechanized of farming systems.33 This war-caused exaggeration of the abilities of an agricultural system that had previously been an accessory in gross overproduction during peacetime only fed the agricultural problem all the more. In 1960 British agriculture had the highest output per head in Western Europe, if one leaves out the Netherlands. It is still the case today that very expensive (because now also substantially chemically assisted) agricultural overproduction characterizes the northern developed nations, and it does so at the same time that agricultural pollution is increasingly seen as presenting the greatest danger of all to the ecosystem upon which we depend.34 Many of the former exporters of agricultural products, comprising large parts of what came to be called the "Third World," never regained whatever economic balance they had had prior to the interwar crisis. The agricultural problem was for a time somewhat masked by the "food-aid" programs of the us (aimed at getting rid of surpluses and altering the emerging new global political balance between "East" and "West"). In many hapless countries the food-aid programs aided and abetted urbanization, which for a whole complex of reasons took priority over the recasting of the agricultural bases of their economies.35 The situation was further complicated by the then Soviet Union when it finally admitted officially in the early 19705 that its agricultural system was absurdly inadequate and needed propping by massive grain imports. While there have been interludes of relative stability in what some call the "international food order,"36 the overall verdict must be that the whole "food system" has been chronically off balance for the past hundred years. Discussion of the period after World War n will resume later, but first I shall examine some of the elements in the earlier part of this narrative more closely. In the Henderson story, the fateful developments around the turn of the century occurred in western Europe, not in the "peripheries." There had been a considerable acceleration in population growth in Europe (in many cases explicitly encouraged by the state on military grounds).37 The resulting increased demand for foodstuffs stimulated producers of agricultural staples overseas, and elsewhere in Europe. The production units involved, however, were not at all like the English farms, whose operations were described in the last chapter. In the "New World," agriculture was typically undertaken on farms owned and worked by families, often assisted by some temporary paid labour. As a rule the families had acquired title to the land directly

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from the state (free of charge, or almost so). In eastern and central Europe, by contrast, many land-owning elites from the local anciens regimes received a new lease on life from the burgeoning western European demand. In these regions the actual farming was typically carried out by peasants. In terms of economic theory it is hard consistently to compare the costs of production of commodities produced under such disparate social conditions.1* This is something that even most Marxists (with the notable exception of Arghiri Emmanuel)38 and many other ultimate followers of Ricardo forget. At any rate, in flagrant disregard of sophisticated considerations in the theory of value, the world's corn exchanges quickly enough came up with a world price for, most notably, wheat. The price was such as to keep this entire, disparate array of producers in business for some decades. Not only was the real social basis of the costing obscure but no account was taken of the sustainability of the production methods (and hence, in the long term, of the prices). The world agricultural market operated with its social and environmental eyes tightly shut. This had, and still has, significant consequences for the environment because, staggeringly, what occurred in many of the key producing areas in the New World was, in effect, a revival of the technically "primitive" farming method of shifting cultivation. The Revival of Unsophisticated Farming in the "New World" North America's western farmers ripped open enormous areas of the prairie grasslands, which had never previously been farmed,x and seeded them to wheat typically for several consecutive years. The yields were very high since the crops were making use of a vast storehouse of accumulated organic fertility just below the surface. Once this fertility was used up, the yields fell off. In response, the acreage of farms was simply extended and more land was ploughed up. From the global perspective this was profligacy on an unprecedented scale. Very little effort, if any, was made to produce on a sustainable basis. Elementary soil-conservation practices were foresworn.39 The eventual price "paid" for this in the Dustbowl was incalculable. Ricardo's doctrine of comparative advantage does not allow for such considerations, however, so English grain produced according to the highest standards of sustainability had to compete on an equal footing with this prairie grain produced by methods more akin to mining than to proper farming. This prodigious grain production of course occurred nowhere near any considerable markets. The railway is the machine that has had the greatest impact on agriculture, followed closely by the grain

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elevator.40 Here it should be noted that, for a while at the start, us railways actually carried grain at below-cost rates in order to increase their catchment area.41 It is often by such subtle means that industry has vanquished agriculture. Railway investors had an incentive to facilitate the expansion of agricultural production on a scale that had no organic link to the size of the world market in agricultural produce, let alone more local markets.X1 Of course since American farming was done in a high-wage, scarcelabour context compared to the rest of the world, there was an enormous incentive to design effective harvesting machines (initially for use with teams of horses, only later with tractors). Success was soon forthcoming and the reaping machines attained fame worldwide. In fact, there developed a monstrous confusion that persists today in the general public's mind about the nature of the "achievement" taking place on the prairies. It was altogether remarkable that so much grain was harvested. What was not at all to the credit of the producers was the amount of grain grown, i.e., the amount available for harvesting. Quite the contrary, since the crops grew more or less automatically, in spite of the careless methods employed. Nowhere did this confusion eventually cause more trouble than in the USSR, (as the next section explains). But not all the expansion of agricultural production carried out during the decades bracketing the turn of the century was done on virgin soil, and not all of it was done by owner-occupiers of large farms as it was on the prairies. The Agrarian Situation in Europe

As noted earlier, agricultural arrangements on the Continent presented a bewildering array of institutions. However, nowhere did the agrarian regime resemble England's capitalist farming, nor were there trends anywhere tending to the establishment of such a system. By the mid-nineteenth century most of western Europe was farmed by free "peasants" who owned their own, generally quite small farms outright. In general, this pattern of smallholdings was the result of revolution or of threatened revolution. The process of dismantling serfdom was highly uneven and customs had never been uniform throughout Europe anyway. In the eastern and southern parts of Europe land tended still to be in the hands of great landowners who worked the farms with small armies of labourers. Land was intensively farmed throughout Europe but only rarely with as much sophistication as in English classical high farming. Peasants with very small holdings did tend to exercise some care to preserve what little land they had, since they were generally in a very precarious position. The

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large estates in eastern Europe (especially in the Danubian prairie) specialized in grain production for export through the Dardanelles, chiefly to western Europe and particularly England. It was thought to be self-evident that England's population had finally outgrown the capacity of its own farming system, and the English demand provided a ready market for the rest of Europe. Those old feudal elites that had not yet been overthrown because of political conditions experienced a renascence due to the English predicament. Czarist Russia embarked in the second half of the nineteenth century on an industrialization campaign that was state initiated and financed substantially by taxes on the peasants. The peasants exported grain to England and other parts of the world in order to pay these taxes. The regions that most resembled England in terms of the intensity of their farming efforts were parts of Germany and France as well as the Low Countries. In the latter, there existed a large class of prosperous independent landowning farmers who came increasingly to specialize in dairying for export. They pioneered in cooperative banking and also in the cooperative marketing of farm produce. They were thereby able in the Great Depression to forestall to a considerable extent the development of the notorious gap between the prices paid by the consumer and those received by the farmer (of which more later). Perhaps the most striking thing, however, is how unbalanced the farming pattern over Europe was. Regional specialization was marked and in itself helped feed a trend towards the increasing use of artificial inputs in farming. Nothing quite like the "golden cycle" of English high farming appeared over any considerable area. The artificial inputs in use were of two principal sorts. There were the frankly synthetic fertilizers being produced by chemical factories and there were the special processed feedstuff's for livestock. As earlier explained, large parts of Europe came to engage in the production of various crops whose seeds were crushed for oil and then made into cakes to be fed to animals. Also, a large proportion of the grain needed for animals and humans in western Europe was imported from other continents (for example, Denmark imported fodder from North and South America and China). The typical Continental specialization in products for export made many areas that expanded production in the half century prior to World War i peculiarly susceptible to the interwar problem of inadequate international markets. The small owners of western Europe were generally too numerous and disunited to respond effectively when depression struck and were unable to cut back production successfully. The countries of eastern Europe, which had known something of free trade within the Austro-

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Hungarian empire, and which lost almost all of their grain markets in western Europe to the New World during the First World War, were so severely debilitated by agricultural depression that they swiftly became economically subservient to Nazi Germany - and were scarcely able to resist Stalin after the end of World War n. International Economic Events and Agriculture between the Wars

As Henderson emphasized, the immediate effects of World War i were gigantic. The self-equilibrating market system had never before had to digest an event of such economic magnitude. In that sense, as Andrew Macfadyean urged,42 there is some confusion of logic in blaming laissez-faire for the problems of the interwar years as many did and do. However Macfadyean himself compounded the general explanatory confusion in another way, inasmuch as he argued that laissez-faire was not crippled by the experience, a rather perverse position to take given the history of monetary institutions since then.43 Certainly we have never again seen beneficial self-regulation. One key effect of the war was an enormous increase in purchasing power in the economy, brought on by the fact that the wholly unprecedented (and essential) wartime government spending had not been paid for to any considerable extent by taxation. Nor was there any corresponding increase in the production of gold to match this increase in the money supply. The immediate postwar problem was, therefore, very serious inflation. Trying to solve this, several European countries drastically reduced the value of their currencies and thus became quite unable to pay for imports. Other countries, like Britain, that sought to return to the gold standard underwent a drastic deflation. Overall a considerable shrinkage of world trade resulted. In the late twenties the monetary situation was eased by massive us loans to those parts of the world unable to pay their debts immediately. The expansion that followed seemed to be promising, but the Great Crash showed that it had probably been overheated and included too much speculative activity. There resulted runs on a number of currencies, especially, and significantly, the pound. Britain was forced to abandon gold and the era of tariffs really began to get underway. These trade restrictions were as often intended to prevent the importation as to cause the export of unemployment. It seems that some partial recovery had begun by the onset of World War n. The role of agriculture in all this was profound, but it varied somewhat depending on the country and region. During World War i the submarine blockades of Britain and shortage of money to pay for

106 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

imports had caused the British government greatly to stimulate the expansion of cereal growing. Grasslands were ploughed up again.44 On the Continent the war brought agricultural chaos to many areas, especially in eastern Europe, which lost the bulk of its markets. This pattern of agricultural strengthening in the country that so recently had been importing lots of food and weakening of agriculture in the countries that relied on exporting it was alarming in itself. Further, to aid in the war effort, the us and the dominions, especially Canada, had increased their food production enormously. Farming was a very prosperous activity during World War i, wherever it was not in chaos. This prosperity for farmers contributed greatly to the expansion of acreage. At the end of the war it was immediately apparent that the situation was unbalanced. With the onset of deflation this imbalance became very serious and agricultural prices plummeted. Relative to effective demand there was clearly a worldwide overproduction of cereals. It is impossible to blame any one region. The groundwork for the unstable system was laid in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by the great expansion of acreage in such places as the Argentine and the us.X11 The Bolshevik revolution swiftly and, it seemed, permanently removed Russia from the big league of grain exporters.3011 If this had not happened the crisis of the interwar years would have been immeasurably worse. Compounding these problems were certain peculiarities of farming (as opposed to other lines of commercial production) that make it especially sensitive to such general economic disruptions as large fluctuations in the values of currencies.45 For one thing, there is a timelag before any correction can occur. The pressures to reduce production are severely weakened by any financial pressures that farmers may happen to be experiencing. Almost all over the world in the period after World War i, farmers had engaged in borrowing to buy more land (and often also to pay for the more expensive inputs called for by the new, less labour-intensive farming techniques). In Britain, for example, farmers were for the first time on a large scale buying the lands they had formerly rented.46 To farmers suffering from previously contracted high financial charges, the remedy for lower prices seemed, however perversely, to lie in increased production. In this exacerbated overproduction crisis of the interwar years there came into play some new, very serious adverse factors for the farmers. In all previous depressions agricultural prices had always fallen further than those of nonagricultural goods. But the "scissors" in this case opened to an unprecedented extent. It seemed likely to the League of Nations Economic Committee (which published two valuable volumes of deliberations on "the Agricultural Crisis" in 1931)

icy The Industrializing (World) Economy

that the alarming behaviour of the scissors was partly due to the conjunction of, on the one hand, the considerable concentration and consequent control over prices that increasingly characterized industry, and, on the other hand, the contrasting, highly competitive, smallentrepreneur nature of farming. To make things worse, there was a widening of the spread between the prices received by farmers and those paid by the consumer. The latter did not gain from the fall in agricultural prices as much as the various middlemen and transport firms. This helped keep the general wage level relatively high. To the (often debt-ridden) farmer who faced cereal prices that had fallen enormously and agricultural wages that could not in all good conscience be brought down any more, salvation seemed to lie in mechanization. For obvious reasons this "solution" could hardly deliver a decrease in production, which is what was needed. Indeed, in this period there were other technical factors that facilitated the expansion of production. New, hardier varieties of crops had permitted the extension of farming to many regions possessed of poor soils. The resulting decline in global average yields per acre, however, was more than offset by the absolute extension of acreage. To complicate matters further, the concurrent general move away from oxen and horse power in almost all economies allowed vast acres to be shifted from the production of forage to that of crops for human consumption. The enormous loss in manure supplies that ensued was somewhat made up by the increasing use of chemical fertilizers, which required less labour to apply than manure. The upshot of increased chemicalization and mechanization was often a reduced cost of production that hardly worked to encourage reductions particularly in acreage. It is especially worth noting that the price of ammonia-based fertilizers was, among industrial prices, distinctively low after the Great War. The cause was war-determined overcapacity in the explosives industries worldwide. Thus, a key input that helped bring about overproduction in the first place was cheapened as a result of the war. It is disturbing to reflect that a crisis of overproduction of all things led increasingly to the substitution of more "efficient" methods of production that used more capital and less labour. On ecological grounds, and from the point of view both of future generations and debt-burdened farmers, it would have been preferable if the prices to farmers could have been raised in such a way as to induce a return to more old-fashioned and environmentally benign farming systems. Reduced production (without invidious reduction in acreage), which would have been almost certainly the result, was just what was needed. Instead, especially in large parts of cereal-producing America,

io8 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

farmers simply abandoned ploughed fields and allowed a catastrophic loss of topsoil to occur.47 It was natural under such conditions for countries to try to take steps to protect their (usually still overwhelmingly) rural populations in the crisis of low prices that had appeared, and that looked to be permanent. In general, however, these measures exacerbated the problems in that they also tended to weaken incentives to reduce production, despite government efforts all over the world to reduce acreage. The generalized subsidization of agriculture so familiar to us now dates from this period, and it is important to underscore that originally this development had absolutely nothing to do with socialist ideology. It is striking that an historically conservative political force, as the agricultural interest mostly was, was the first to receive largescale state aid. Only fascist parties, ironically, were able to make honest political hay from this. It is interesting to note that it was the most competitive relic from laissez-faire capitalism that most needed rescue. There can be no doubt that the laissez-faire system had shown that it could not extricate itself from major imbalances such as world wars. It became widely apparent that the system was only capable of adjustment to smaller-scale changes. It was in this altered intellectual context of a profound challenge to liberal orthodoxy that Keynes wrote his magnum opus. It was likewise then that socialist economists came to focus on the plan-market antinomy (under the assumption that socialism inherently had to choose only between those two institutions). World War i had shown unambiguously that planning worked. Pragmatic war converts to planning ranged in type all the way from Lenin to Churchill. In the thirties, in the us (where the agricultural depression was most severe, at least relatively), the government instituted the famous "parity" program whereby the state supported prices of agricultural goods to an extent that allowed a return to the balance of purchasing power between agricultural and nonagricultural incomes that had obtained in the period 1909-14. The government also in many cases paid farmers to keep acreage out of production. It also eventually embarked on a policy of deliberate rural depopulation in the hope that this would raise income to the remaining farmers (and dilute their political clout). But during World War n a fresh bout of technical improvements erased the national economic "gains" made by rural depopulation, so that, at war's end, the problem of overproduction and consequent rural income shortfalls was still present and essentially just as severe. However, the likelihood of populist revolt had become much smaller since the rural population had shrunk, in both absolute and relative terms. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that the

109 The Industrializing (World) Economy

ideological change in America towards the wholesale embrace of corporatist philosophy in economics and business that characterized the postwar era could not have taken place if America had still had a high rural percentage in its population.X1V Thus, it was clear by the mid-thirties that agriculture was the weakpoint in what was still popularly considered to be a recognizably capitalist arrangement of the world economy. It is interesting to reflect on this century's overall economic "system" (or more properly lack thereof) in the light of Uno's contention that English midnineteenth-century farming came closest to exhibiting how capitalist agriculture has to be organized if agriculture is to integrate smoothly with the rest of the economy and thus allow capitalism to be a viable, indefinitely sustainable system. For Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society can be used to spotlight one of the most crucial differences, underlined by the Great Depression, between agriculture under a selfconsistent capitalism and agriculture in the context of a chaotic, warinfluenced, industrializing world economy. Owner-farmers were nowhere buffered from the Depression's effects by the existence of a land-owning class. On the contrary, they became directly subject to banking and other financial interests (e.g., insurance firms) that, unlike land-owning aristocracies, are not made up of noninvesting consumers. Banks put pressures on American farmers that would have found few, if any, parallels in the attitudes of English lords to their English tenants, even in the English Great Depression of the late nineteenth century.^ Strikingly, bad relations between landlords and tenants in England had been most prevalent in those cases where the lord was absent, or too busy, and hired some commercially overzealous land agent to oversee the estate. In general, the pressured owner-farmers of the interwar years simply took out on the soil the abuse received from creditors. The result was catastrophic soil erosion in areas that should never have been ploughed. Soil reserves that should have been retained for the distant future were allowed to disperse to the sea (notably the Gulf of Mexico). In the us case the state did attempt to intercede on behalf of the farmers, and eventually on behalf of the land. For a long time, however, the programs were ineffective because of their design. As Rasmussen and Porter put it: "Initially, the idea was to establish demonstration projects with the idea that farmers, having observed the benefits of good land use, would establish it on their own lands. It soon became apparent that one man's good land use could be undone by his neighbour's prodigality."48 Such institutional (and agronomic) naivety was complemented by ill-placed trust in the state, as evinced in the extremely technocratic conception that lay behind

no Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

the Tennessee Valley Authority, which industrialized an entire watershed as a way to cure poverty. The State of World Agriculture since World War II The period after World War n has been likened by many economists and economic historians to the half century prior to World War i in that both were marked by a freeing up of international trade. It has been pointed out that World War n was far more destructive in material terms than its great precursor, necessitating the substantial rearrangement of European affairs that occurred in its aftermath. Pollard has emphasized how a great deal of Europe's political superstructure was either destroyed or thoroughly discredited by the war's virulence and its perceived origins in fascism and related ideological currents.49 What followed the making of peace was a strong movement to the left on the part of much of the European population, but this was deliberately contained by a series of American policies that were increasingly bent on ensuring that the cold war, into which so much American effort was going, was not undermined from within Europe.50 What had also emerged from the war, actively fostered by the Americans, was an extreme economic "pragmatism" on the part of the European middle classes, taking the place of the interwar nationalistic fervour. In due course this made possible the formation of the European Economic Community (EEC) and the European Free Trade Association and indeed this dynamic is still being played out. These developments towards freer trade contain the main grounds for an analogy between the periods before and after the warring interlude of 1914-45. Further support for this analogy comes from the fact that, just as there was an undoubted hegemonic power before 1914, namely England, so after 1945 the us emerged in a position of immense strength, having suffered no physical damage and having been given an enormous and much-needed demand stimulus by the war. However, the numerous difficulties with this whole long-reach analogy make it of little use for predicting the evolution of the world economy, especially the future place of agriculture within it. There is a widespread hope that a permanent and stable international world order characterized by ever-freer trade will re-establish itself and become increasingly self-regulating once again. But such optimism is apt to overlook certain crucial details of the period in which England was pre-eminent, notably the existence of a relatively self-equilibrating world currency. This latter had disappeared long before the Americans came to exert decisive power in the international sphere. The pre-World War i system of international trade, the

in The Industrializing (World) Economy

passing of which Sir Hubert Henderson lamented, has not been replicated since World War n. Indeed it could not be. The economic fundamentals have changed. Whereas England ruled in a system in which primary products were sent from the poorer countries to the rich (principally England itself) in exchange for manufactured items, the trend today, if there is one, is towards something like the converse of that. The us came to suffer from an extreme balance-ofpayments problem by the early 19705, whereas before the first war and, to a lesser extent, after it, England maintained an enormous balance-of-payments surplus.51 At the same time the Americans increasingly came to play the role of agricultural supplier to the rest of the world. This development was rooted in the chronic tendency of us agriculture since the twenties to overproduce. American governments have "managed" the resultant surplus ever since the New Deal, instead of eradicating it. The panoply of price- and income-support devices in American farming make it, in effect, a state-run enterprise. Public Law 480 notably created "markets" ex nihilo by providing food to poor countries at us government expense. Since the war the us has tried to mould consumer taste and diet in Europe and Asia to suit its overcapacity in agriculture. The overall failure of the much-touted "Green Revolution" to solve the world food problem despite some notable local successes gave the American government a strong political motive for exporting enough food to keep political tension at "tolerable" levels in various parts of the "Third World." Although there is some reason for uncertainty today due to the Republicans' oft-stated but rather far-fetched intentions to revamp American agriculture, one can say that overall, in recent decades, the American government has been earmarking agriculture specifically to be a major part (if not the centrepiece) of the effort to whittle down the balance-of-payments deficit.52 Over the same period there has been a remarkable trend under the direction of transnational corporations towards locating fresh investment in manufacturing capacity in some of the "developing" countries. Whereas in the late nineteenth century the relatively "backward" countries were self-feeding, today many are obliged to import food from the "developed" countries. A great deal of the new manufacturing capacity located in the peripheries is owned by the metropolitan elites and in such cases does not significantly enhance local ability to pay for those food imports. The manufactures of the "South" have been prevented from entering the markets of the "North" by trade barriers originally set up to prevent unemployment in the latter.53 The nineteenth-century "Pax Brittanica" had collapsed when the fall in world commodity prices destroyed the hitherto more or less adequate ability of the poorer countries to pay for their im-

H2 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

ports. The internationalization of the system under American hegemony, by contrast, took place despite a strong lack of feasibility even at the start. One manifest corollary of this implausibility is the massive load of international debt, which it is candidly and frequently admitted can never be repaid. In destroying the competitiveness of non-capital-intensive agriculture, the Americans and their technical emulators in Europe removed the one reasonable foundation for the generalized Third World ability of poorer nations to pay debts, for it is certainly even less open to the nonwealthy of the world to set up their own capital-intensive industries. We seem to be locked into an international arrangement that is incapable of closure. Thus, while in the period of English hegemony poor countries could both feed themselves and export commodities, today many can do neither.™ Furthermore, whereas England's currency was essentially impregnable at the time the country wielded power, the American currency is not. For the dollar to try to strengthen itself through massive exports of basically low-value goods like wheat, corn, and soya beans, often to extremely poor customers at that, does not even begin to make sense. The countries to which America used to sell agricultural goods in the days before World War i, and from which it could routinely expect solid payment in return, were those of the now agriculturally self-sufficient European community. Without in any way tending to a sensible or permanent solution to the substantive economic implausibility of the world economy, the recycling of "petro-currencies" accumulated in private and state hands after the oil crisis of the early 19705 went some way to prevent stagnation by allowing an expanding global money supply. Since the 19805, however, the situation has become more open ended as two extra dynamics have been superimposed. Drastic interest-rate hikes accompanied by widespread monetarist-inspired domestic-spending restrictions (especially in the English-speaking world) have led to disinvestment and greatly increased income inequality particularly within the rich countries. Simultaneously, massive programs of deregulation of the international activities of financial institutions were carried out apparently on purely dogmatic grounds, with little or no attention to the likely consequences, which included less-controlled money-supply fluctuations and a rapidly escalating preference for liquid assets. It is possible that the deregulation process has to some extent mitigated the imbalances between rich and poor countries inasmuch as it has positively facilitated both absolute and relative disinvestment in the metropoles. In any case the deregulated "system" has three other major defects. First, it has made national-level economic-policy implementation effectively impossible. Second, it is an

H3 The Industrializing (World) Economy

arrangement that, compared to the former Bretton Woods system, has a considerably enhanced potential for outright chaos at the global level. Third, as a direct result (perhaps intended), speculating against currency fluctuations now occupies a wholly unprecedented and enormous proportion of the world's investible funds. Given such a background, recent moves to further liberalize world-trade flows raise the spectre of very long term mass unemployment in the metropoles. If the new arrangements under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) seriously reduce trade barriers, we can expect the gradual emergence of a more global bourgeoisie able to hire from a labour pool so immense as to guarantee low wages worldwide. The pressure to produce food as cheaply as possible without regard to sustainability will thus probably be strong everywhere. In the case of the high-valueadded products of the metropolitan areas, demand will probably become chronically sluggish (except perhaps for weapons) and so balance-of-trade problems will become even more acute in America and England and may well spread. The Anglo-American 19805 "solution" of bringing the cold war back to full strength can hardly be repeated. The contrast between our likely future and the patterns that existed when Britain was undisputed master of the world are enormous. We must again consider Henderson's question for the 19305: are the conditions under which an expansion of world trade is beneficial present or absent? The issue is particularly acute in the case of agriculture, for some very bad conceivable outcomes are by no means unlikely. The pressures on the natural environment that might result from an American bid to rebuild financial supremacy largely on the basis of agricultural pre-eminence could be devastating. Indeed, they would invite an eventual global demographic catastrophe. There is a serious possibility that American agriculture will collapse someday due to its extreme reliance on energy-intensive external inputs and ongoing attack on the biological, chemical, and physical nature of soil by means of heavy applications of herbicides, pesticides, and chemical fertilizers to the exclusion of techniques that maintain the organicmatter content of the soil. It is estimated that for every bushel of corn harvested, the us loses two bushels of topsoil.54 The new crop varieties that are expected from contemporary genetic manipulation will be probably more not less reliant on artificial inputs (due to, if nothing else, the manifest self-interest of the chemical corporations that are so prominent in contemporary research in plant genetics). These new plants are not being designed according to sound ecological principles. If generalized American agricultural failure were to occur in a context (one that the Americans have at times diligently tried to

H4 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

develop) of maximum reliance by the rest of the world on us food (and consequent inattention to agriculture outside the us) then a very serious world food problem could emerge. While this projection is grounded somewhat speculatively in American economic policy trends, its agronomic basis is already reality. I turn now to a technical consideration of industrialized agriculture, a phrase that ought to be oxymoronic.

SECTION 3 "SOLVING" A G R I C U L T U R E ' S P R O B L E M S BY D E L I B E R A T E L Y S U B S U M I N G IT UNDER INDUSTRY As explained in the last section, choices of agricultural techniques played a major role in causing the Great Depression and were also in turn affected by some of the economic pressures engendered by the slump. Even though labour was by no means in short supply at the time, the Great Depression stimulated an increasing use of off-farm, nonliving (industrial) inputs. The resultant creeping industrialization of agriculture became a veritable torrent during World War n when labour was genuinely scarce. As already mentioned, the "West" now relies on a chronically overproductive industrialized agriculture that is quite bereft of economic rationale, however politically convenient it may be (for, e.g., us foreign-policy objectives and intra-EEc policy compromises). For once industrialized agriculture became the technical norm, price-support systems originally intended to keep farmers from poverty actually encouraged the excessive use of inputs produced by industry (where previously they had been a contributory cause of the use of excessive areas for crops).xvn Explaining this absurd situation in more detail involves trying to elucidate the essential nature of industrialized farming. This will not, however, be a mere exercise in corporate demonology. There is much confusion surrounding this topic, as evinced in the widespread, and often careless, use of the clumsy term "agribusiness." That usage makes some sense if one is seeking to denote commercial as opposed to technical developments, but even so it is very imprecise and it does not point us towards ecological implications. In some contexts, the word connotes large-scale farming enterprises regardless of corporate form, in other contexts it refers to the direct involvement of large corporations in the "food industry," whether actually in the fields or merely in processing.™11 No simple conclusions can be drawn from an attempt to map such variety in socioinstitutional arrangements onto some list of types of farming practices differentiated by environment impact. To illustrate this point it may be noted that, on the one

115 The Industrializing (World) Economy

hand, corporations sometimes directly control what happens to output from very small scale farms responsibly managed, but on the other hand, some of the most industrially operated and largest farms (in terms of acreage) are in fact still family concerns. In the obviously important case of the us there has been no clear secular trend over this century in the extension of corporate power in agriculture that can be easily related to changes in agronomic technique. Rather, there has been a sort of reflux, with American corporations making forays into, and then retreats from, direct involvement in farming. This has taken place against a background of steady overall change in the way the land is handled. This reflux is due partly to unintended consequences of changes in tax laws and other government policies not necessarily aimed at inducing agronomic changes one way or the other. It seems clear, then, that the technical aspects of the changes in agriculture must be sorted out from the social ones and confronted in analytic separation, or else the environmentally distinctive nature of industrial agriculture will remain obscure. Unfortunately, most critics of late-twentieth-century agronomy have needlessly compounded their tendency to analytic confusion by ignoring the wider historical dimension. It was the message of the previous section that the Great Depression played a leading role in the industrialization of agriculture by stimulating increased industrialization in general55 and the industrialization of agriculture in particular, and that it did so largely because of the operation of "price scissors." A gap opened between prices of agricultural and industrial goods and also between the generally low prices received by farmers for produce and the final prices paid by consumers, which were not quite so low. The crucial point is that the upshot of the price dynamics was a concentration of the pressures to economize on those directly engaged with the land, regardless of the scale of their operation. These facts, however, are very rarely adverted to by modern environmental critics. When these critics do bother to look outside the world of "wilderness" concerns to consider agriculture, they do not like what they see but they typically (and with great historical naivety) put the blame directly on the general profit-seeking dynamic of capitalism. (They should know better if only because of the notoriously bad ecological record of Soviet industrial farming, which completely lacked an autonomous price dynamic.) Unfortunately, the only serious critics of industrial farming per se., those who comprise what can be loosely called "the organic-farming movement," typically operated on a completely different wavelength from the socialist critics of capitalism, who said even less about Soviet agriculture than they did about the Great Depression. So the critique of industrial agriculture constructed here

ii6 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

has drawn largely on the writings of organic agriculturalists while attempting greater historical sensitivity than they usually display. Mechanization and Chemicalization Distinguished

It is very common for Whiggish, liberal defenders of the entire modern package to assert that, since industrialization has brought so many new, useful commodities to the general public, it must be similarly beneficial in agriculture. This is an outstanding fallacy, the currency of which depends on ignorance of the essential differences between agriculture and industry. As explained in section 3 of chapter i, agriculture necessarily rides on living ecological cycles, whereas industry transforms dead matter, changing only its form, as the Physiocrats acutely pointed out. The effect of mechanization on these two different types of activity are very different. In industry it has often happened that the process of mechanizing the production of one kind of thing has led someone to conceive and design some unprecedented devices. In agriculture mechanization can only speed up some key processes, by no means all, and it never facilitates the emergence of new products. Indeed, as Wendell Berry has very carefully argued, mechanization in agriculture, although (or perhaps because) it increases the speed at which a task is performed, generally reduces the quality of the work. As indicated in the previous section, mechanization rarely has a direct positive impact on productivity per unit of land area either, except to the extent that the greater speed with which some operations can be carried out may allow more precise timing of key activities so as to make the best use of good, and avoid bad, weather. In many areas this is important, in some scarcely at all. It depends on climate patterns during the relevant parts of the year. But highlighting the favourable point about speed and precision may lead to too generous an assessment of the broader effects of mechanization in agriculture. It is often claimed, for instance, that each farmer feeds many more people today than used to be the case. But such calculations refer only to the number of farmers actually on the land. They do not include all the producers of industrial inputs who make possible the apparent reduction in the ratio. It has been suggested that in the case of American society in the period 1958-70, if the increase in urban labour requirements due to the rural exodus over the period is factored in,xlx it is impossible to demonstrate any unambiguous decline in the proportion of overall labour time spent on average in producing (even the expanded output of) food over that same time period. Absurd as that situation is, its hidden implications

iiy The Industrializing (World) Economy

are even worse. For the rural exodus entailed an enormous loss of invaluable local knowledge of the land and of techniques. There are some other very different reasons why we must be careful with that omnibus term "mechanization." As commonly used, it is hardly less ambiguous than "agribusiness." Most of what is ordinarily intended by the term "mechanized farming" today would actually be more accurately termed "chemicalized farming." The use of chemicals typically has the effect of saving labour time and thus, superficially at least, resembles mechanization. However, apart from the replacement of animal traction by fossil-fuel-consuming motorized vehicles, the adoption of farm machinery in the strict sense only saves labour-time and does not much affect other "inputs" in farming, whereas this is not at all the case with chemicals. They are of much greater ecological significance than farm machinery in determining the character of contemporary industrial agriculture. There are essentially three different sorts of farm chemicals: fertilizers, pesticides, and animal "growth factors." The first two of these will be discussed at some length here. Then a general conclusion about the deep implications of chemicalized agriculture will be drawn. Chemical Fertilizers

The family of farm chemicals with the greatest significance is that of artificial fertilizers ("synthetics," or "artificial manures" as they used to be called in England). It was first suggested that synthetic fertilizers be used when it was discovered that plants typically take up the crucial elements nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) i inorganic forms. These elements, generally in that order, are the typical rate-limiting factors in plant growth. Of course many other elements are also absolutely necessary for plant life, but in much smaller quantities. The ill effects of continuous cropping without the return of wastes to the soil show up first in yield reductions due to depletion of the soil's supplies of N, p, and K. Nitrogen is available in the air at all times and plants can get it from the air, as many chemical factories do, but it is generally easier for plants to get nitrogen from the soil. The other two crucial elements, phosphorus and potassium, typically have to be, mined, as it were, and then processed into forms capable of being applied to the land. The industrial production of fertilizer compounds containing these three elements involves considerable energy costs, particularly in the case of nitrogen. Some idea of the preponderance of nitrogenous compounds in the energy aspects of the fertilizer problem can be gathered from recent us Department of Agriculture statistics. The production and consumption of

u8 Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

food in the us accounts for about seventeen percent of the us energy "budget." One-fifth of this seventeen percent is used for farming inputs for production. Chemicals account for one-third of that in turn. Ninety-eight percent of that quantity is used in the production of fertilizers. Eighty-five percent of that ninety-eight percent is used for producing the nitrogenous fertilizers.56 Agriculture dependent on artificial supplies of nitrogenous compounds thus implies the consumption of fuels that will not be so readily available in the future. The other elements, not being available in the air, are susceptible to a more insidious form of long-term cost increase. Careless overapplication of P and K fertilizers often results in the irreversible dispersal of some of our supply of these elements. There is already some reason for disquiet on the phosphorus front.57 The associated problem of phosphate and nitrate contamination of water supplies is another matter altogether. The issue here is the ultimate source for the elements taking part in plant growth when growth does not, as in nature, rely simply on local recycling. It appears that artificial fertilizers are also the oldest family of industrially produced farm chemicals to be in widespread, constant use. The full global history of their use has not been written but it is already clear that it displays an interesting pattern. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century natural fertilizers such as Peruvian guano were widely imported into Europe and the us until the supply ran out. Thereafter, farmers, spurred by active advertising efforts, turned to the burgeoning chemical industries for supplies of artificially produced phosphates, potash, and nitrogenous fertilizers. Expenditures on commercial fertilizers in the us went up 513 percent over the period i899~i9i9.58 The eventual, even more dramatic increase in percentage terms in the western states was the inevitable fruit of the profligate approach to soil fertility during the great cereals expansion of the i88os and 18905, which simply rode on the soil's existing capacity without regard to its renewal. However, for a long time the vast bulk, in absolute terms, of us fertilizer application was taking place in the long-exhausted soils of the Northeast, and in the initially poorer and also heavily used soils of the cotton-growing states. Only in the 19405 did the north-central regions outstrip the South and Northeast in fertilizer use.59 It is interesting to compare American fertilizer use with European, and also to look at the reasons for the tremendous applications of fertilizer that were occurring. Paul de Hevesi pointed out that, on the whole, the cerealsoverproduction crisis of the interwar years did not originate in increased yields per acre. Excluding the areas encompassed by the USSR, China, Iran, and Iraq, the world average for land productivity in

H9 Tne Industrializing (World) Economy

wheat for the years 1909-13 was 15.2 bushels per acre. For 1923-38 it was 14.9 bushels per acre.60 Certainly some of the poor yield is attributable to the extension of cultivation to poorer soils, a move that fertilizers helped made possible. However, one must not suppose that fertilizer use must have been light just because the yields are so steady. The world leaders in fertilizer use in 1928 were, in order, Germany, the us, and France. Then came Japan, Italy, and the Netherlands, followed at some further distance by Britain, Spain, and Poland.61 The us is of course very large, and the yields per acre tended to be very high in Europe due to the typically more intensive cultivation. Even so, it seems that most of the countries making heavy use of fertilizers were not the ones extending their acreage greatly at this time. It seems that the use of fertilizers was by then crucial in many countries merely to allow the production systems in use to be maintained. In order to have some idea of the magnitude of the problem being compensated for by fertilizer applications, consider the following figures from a nitrogen balance sheet for the us calculated by J.G. Lipman for the year I93O.62 The figures apply to the 366.5 million acres of crops harvested that year. There were 5.5 million tons of nitrogen removed in harvested crops, 1.5 removed in pasturage, 0.9 removed by drainage, and 0.5 removed by erosion. In only partial compensation there were 3.0 million tons gained through fixation from the air, 1.3 gained through rainfall, and only 0.4 gained from the application of fertilizer. Since World War n the use of artificial fertilizers worldwide has expanded enormously. A debate about the wisdom of this trend has been raging between the members of the organic-farming movement and the proponents of synthetic fertilizers. It is claimed by the former that the soil is "burned" by fertilizers, while the latter argue that there is no evidence that in themselves, fertilizers are capable of damaging the soil. (Both sides agree that overapplication can lead to waterpollution problems since what is not taken up by the plants may leach out to the surrounding water courses or down to the water table.) The debate as cast, though, is a bit beside the point. It is probably the case that careful use of artificial fertilizers will have only minor deleterious effects ,** but careful use is emphatically not the norm. In fact the key element in what should be called industrial farming is the substitution of fertilizers for labour in soil maintenance. This may seem strange since we tend to think of tools and machinery rather than raw materials as the general type of laboursaving factor.^ If one examines the techniques that have been abandoned as artificial fertilizers were adopted, however, one can see that the effect has been labour saving and environmentally deleterious.

I2O Agriculture Displaced and Disarrayed

In addition to being geologically complex, a perfect farming soil contains a great deal of organic matter that is useful on several counts. It serves to "store" water (because of the great water-absorptive capacity of humus); it allows soil warming and aeration (due to the crumbly structure); and it allows a complex biological community of beneficial insects, invertebrates, and microbes to flourish. These latter assist plant growth in myriad ways. If the agronomic practice does not include the regular return to the soil of sufficient decaying plant matter, then the soil structure and chemistry changes and a decline will be registered in the biological variety of living inhabitants and hence in the ultimate biochemical capabilities of the soil in question. It becomes, in extremis, merely a physical support system for the roots. This is the tendency in industrial agriculture, with hydroponics as the logical terminus. In addition to injudiciously spurning the enormous variety of biological (living) activities taking place in a healthy soil, industrial farming makes the soil far more liable to erosion by wind and water as its physical structure simplifies and dries out. Chemical fertilizers (and irrigation) thus become necessities once a crucial threshold of soil damage has occurred. There emerges a fertilizer treadmill, in effect. This is the condition of a great deal of soil in intensively farmed regions. The effects have been chronicled with particular clarity for a village in Portugal by Robin Jenkins.63 The argument here does not indict artificial fertilizers per se. If added in moderate quantities at the right times of year to a biologically healthy (complex) soil, they have mostly beneficial effects. What the above account does condemn is the practice of using artificial fertilizers as a substitute for proper soil management. When most fertilizer applications consisted of manure dressings, the problem could not arise. Being but poorly digested remains of vegetation, manure could constitute an addition to the organic-matter supply in a soil, as well as a source of nutrients. Chemical Pesticides

A treadmill effect analogous to that obtaining with fertilizers has appeared with respect to many pesticides. Generically, pesticides include a great variety of antibiological agents used deliberately to kill microbes, particularly fungi, as well as insects, weeds, and even birds and animals. Chemical pesticides have been used for some crops for a very long time. French wine growers were making extensive use of them in the late nineteenth century, but they do not appear to have become a regular ingredient in general farming practice until after World War n. Insecticides have been adopted on a large scale in fruit-

I2i The Industrializing (World) Economy

growing regions especially, but also in areas producing fibre crops and vegetables. The use of herbicides has increased considerably in recent decades as a response to the erosion problem described above. The concept of "zero tillage" appears to depend on it. The theory is that ploughing dusty soils exacerbates erosion problems. Since in systems using a lot of artificial fertilizers the soils are dusty, and given that ploughing is largely undertaken for weed control, it seems that herbicides can obviate the need to plough entirely. Among "pesticides," defined broadly, whose use is currently increasing must also be counted the antibiotics employed against the infections to which farm animals are prone. (Other chemicals employed in livestock production but not classifiable among pesticides include steroid growth promoters.) The treadmill effect with pesticides is most marked with respect to insecticides (and antibiotics). The reason is related in the case of insecticides to their origins. During World War n, research in chemical warfare made extensive use of insects as model organisms for study, since they breed rapidly, thereby allowing more experiments to take place per unit of time. The upshot was the development of a very wide range of powerful insecticides. These were not designed with agricultural use in view, but when the war ended it was decided to make commercial use of the research that by then lay ready to hand by encouraging municipal authorities and farmers to use these chemicals. Some of the disastrous results of this ill-conceived plan were chronicled by Rachel Carson, to some effect.64 Since many of the insecticides were quite unspecific, their gross application resulted in the deaths of insects of many other species besides the pest in question. Many of these were highly beneficial in that they preyed on other insects that had the potential to become pests if their population significantly increased. The insect world is a complex web of predator-prey relations whose balance is very easily upset. When a given pesticide also affects a natural predator of the original pest in question, a direct treadmill is likely to result. If a pesticide also affects the natural predator of another insect species that only then becomes a pest, it may be necessary to introduce another pesticide as well. Thus the treadmill effect can also arise stepwise, as it were and ramify perhaps endlessly. I deliberately leave out of this account the future complications caused by effects on birds. In the case of antibiotics, the faster generation times of most bacteria (compared to insects) mean that the inevitable genetic selection of resistant varieties can become a running problem where outbreaks are common (for example, among livestock raised in highdensity conditions, battery chickens). The problem of antibiotic

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resistance has led to some well-known, extremely awkward consequences in human medicine, and the same goes for veterinary medicine.65 Antiecology the Implicit Philosophy of Contemporary Agriculture

The rationales behind the current extensive and regular use of the various agricultural chemicals share a common intellectual approach, the essence of which can be captured by the term "antiecological." The attempt, in effect, is to reduce the contribution of living processes to agricultural production. The antiecological approach also tries - and this is a related tendency - to make agricultural production radically indifferent to place. Rather than embedding the farm operations into the local living cycles present on a site (or easily induced on that site), the inputs are brought to the site, generally to whatever extent is immediately profitable (i.e., over a period of a few years at most). We here confront another aspect of the self-propelling character of the industrialization of agriculture. As artificial, off-farm inputs come to matter more and more, so the former intrinsic qualities of the land matter less. As the quality of the land declines, the need for externally sourced inputs goes up. The farmer ends up competing and accumulating in the exact same fashion as any industrial capitalist. The contrast with the situation in mid-nineteenth-century England could not be sharper. There the quality of the land was crucial and it was in the landlords' interest to maintain it and indeed to improve it. With the advent of chemicalized agriculture and its "achievement" of making farming radically indifferent to place, there ceases to be any useful role for landlords to play. They become the pure parasites the bourgeois Radicals of the nineteenth century claimed they were. So far I have outlined the consequences of abandoning the natural cycles of living entities at one end of the process only, the production end. The consequences are also severe at the consumption end. Not only is recycling on the farm eschewed in contemporary industrial farming but also the waste products from the overwhelmingly q$-farm consumption of farm produce are not returned to any production cycle whatever. Kitchen waste and sewage are not merely sequestered away from farms, but in the wealthy countries, wastedisposal systems have typically been set up in such a way that all wastes, biodegradable and otherwise, are first most injudiciously mixed and then either buried, or dispersed in bodies of water. In the former case the result is a dismal underground "cache" consisting of

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a totally senseless compound of wastes unusable even in principle in any recycling process. If "disposed of in a body of water, then not only can severe water pollution occur but valuable elements existing in short supply (at least rarely in adequately concentrated stocks) are dispersed permanently. The whole process of waste disposal in industrialized societies is not like that of life, where recycling of wastes is locally rooted and continuous.™1 Unfortunately, most agricultural research, which has taken its cues much more from analytical chemistry than from biology, has fostered the industrial approach. Farming is conceived explicitly as an inputoutput process that has a beginning and an end. Realistically, of course, no such thing is possible. All things come from somewhere and the consequences of an event never cease to ramify. But agricultural research has pretended otherwise. Contemporary farming as a form of productive activity has to be classified as "industrial." The source and full nature of the inputs are not considered, and neither are the full nature and destination of the outputs. Examples are legion. The folly of not considering the input is clear from the case, eloquently reported by Wendell Berry, of the Arizona farmers who irrigated land with water from underground aquifers without carefully considering the nature of such supplies.66 As it turns out the water in question had very high concentrations of various salts, which, since they were not used by the growing crops, simply accumulated in the soil after years of irrigation until levels toxic to the plant roots were reached. The soil there is now permanently ruined for farming. A good example of inattention to the output is the Californian so-called "tomato" (produced in the winter), which bears almost no relation to the original. It is hard to imagine that hunter-gatherers would have bothered with this "fruit" had they come across it in the wild. Many persons are inclined to attack science frontally at this stage in the argument. Charges of "reductionism" rain down upon the scientific agricultural-research establishment. While the clamour is justified, the terms of philosophical abuse are ill chosen. Any genuine attempt reductively to explain what happens in farming would require the most extensive knowledge of all the relevant factors. The outstanding feature of industrial thinking is its urge arbitrarily to simplify so that only a few variables need to be considered and then manipulated. It would be much more accurate to say that scientific ignorance of what it disturbs is what distinguishes contemporary agronomy. Ecological science has been conspicuous by its absence from the research agenda in agricultural-research establishments.™11 This omission of ecology has been, among other things, extremely expensive according to even the most myopic standards of conventional cost-benefit

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analysis. Here are some of the conclusions on the usefulness of biological control of pests by their own natural enemies, drawn by a leading authority, Paul Debach: The chances of obtaining some significant extent of success against any given insect pest species from importation of natural enemies are about 54 in 100. In view of such truly outstanding results, it seems a remarkable indictment against our profession that only about 223 pest species have been subjected to the natural enemy importation method whereas there are approximately 5000 species of insect pests recorded worldwide ... The analysis of all importation projects reveals that the chances of obtaining a degree of control (i.e., either complete or substantial) that would nearly or completely eliminate the need for further insecticidal treatment included four pest species out of ten, or 40 percent... savings resulting from reduced chemical treatment costs and lessened crop damage for each dollar invested have been carefully estimated as being about 30 to i ... With insecticides it is estimated to be only about 5 to i.67

These calculations did not even factor in the costs that may lurk in the possibly very long-term, deleterious side-effects of some insecticides. The research effort into chemical insecticides is enormous and the basic entomological research into biological control is miniscule. Industrial "reason" does not even bother with economic rationality, let alone ecological sense. The narrowness of the technical horizon, not the scientific philosophy, is thus the chief problem with contemporary research. The problem is in fact precisely analogous to that posed by those effects of economic activity quaintly but accurately known as "externalities." As Kapp explained, it is the narrow purview that keeps these undoubted effects from being considered on a serious footing.68 The point can also be illustrated by considering the mycorhizzal relationship and the problem of genetic uniformity in crop and animal production. In both cases a severe lack of scientific knowledge is demonstrated. I will consider them in turn. Many species of plants are capable of being in a symbiotic relationship with certain fungi that attach to the root hairs. Sir Albert Howard made much of this in his interwar agricultural research into organic methods, because the presence of the symbiont fungus allows the plant better access to nutrients that are thus "predigested" for it. Excessive use of chemical fertilizers changes the soil into an unsuitable environment for the relationship to appear and be sustained.69 Now, what this shows is not that it is wrong to describe plant nutrition "reductively" as a mere exchange of chemicals between soil and

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plant, as some strict proponents of organic methods argue. Rather, the useful conclusion is that the details of the process of plantnutrient absorption may be much more complicated under certain conditions than was previously thought. It is, of course, always "chemicals" that enter the plant. Genetically uniform crops are the result of adopting only one cultivar (or individual plant) of a particular strain (perhaps a highyielding or hitherto disease-resistant one) as the source for seeds. Being uniform, the plants in such monoculture crops are particularly susceptible to unfamiliar diseases, pests, and environmental changes such as climatic variation. Plants in the wild, of course, exist in far more varied populations genetically and are usually also far more interspersed with other species than plants in farm fields. The advocates of monoculture simply did not take into account the complexities of population biology (which were perfectly well known to others). The same considerations apply to the genetic uniformity of farm animals. A few Canadian examples indicate how far this has been carried. In Canada four-fifths of the Holstein cattle are bred artificially with semen from a mere twelve bulls, and the number of distinct poultry breeds was reduced from eight hundred to eleven by 1979 and six by 19887° There is a great deal of investment today by firms in the chemical industry in the genetic engineering of plants and animals to "consume" better as inputs many of the farm chemicals and chemicalized feeds already in use. Industrial control of the agricultural-production process will thus be extended by the ongoing simplification of biotic reality. There is a general lesson to be drawn from such examples. Nature is far more complex than the picture we get from what little scientific knowledge we have. When in doubt, we should imitate nature rather than simplify our activity to spite it, as it were. Peoples possessed of primitive animistic religions generally operated in a way that was functionally equivalent to following the principle that nature should be imitated, not defied. Many critics of contemporary agricultural science who are aware of this counsel methodological holism as the remedy for our failures. While it may be doubted whether holism can be a means to increased knowledge, there can be little doubt of its wisdom as an axiom for agronomic praxis. Ideally, we should neither defy nor deify nature. It is a striking feature of this century that the societies running under the two conflicting ideologies of capitalism and socialism should have been at one in their scientific and industrial activities, despite being under such different forms of economic pressure. When it comes to their inattention to ecology, to the real, full study of

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living systems, the two ideologies have in fact been indistinguishable. One reason why I adopted a distinctly asociological definition of industry in section 3 of chapter i was to be able to highlight this deep similarity. What follows is a brief resume of the socialist record with respect to agriculture. The socialist tradition - which, being hyperindustrial in outlook, has said little enough in general on the subject of agriculture - early became fixated on the process of farm mechanization (in the narrow, etymologically "reasonable" sense connoting machines as such) and did not engage in a serious analysis of the quite different and furtherreaching consequences of substituting chemicals for labour. The myopic socialist treatment of agriculture will thus be a main theme in this final section of the present chapter. It will conclude, however, with an examination of two socialist theoreticians who, atypically, both took agriculture seriously on its own terms and queried its subjugation by industry. The earlier one, a prominent German politician called Eduard David, wrote a great deal specifically about agriculture. The other, Kozo Uno, the Japanese academic I have already discussed, published a number of analyses by no means compatible with regular "industriosocialist" views. Both had much to say about the very concept of technological change. David looked at its role within the modern notion of agriculture, and Uno considered its effect on the very idea of economic theorizing in general. SECTION 4

AGRICULTURE AND THE SOCIALIST

TRADITION

The origins of the socialist movement are predominantly urban, but early visions of socialism were apt, rather nostalgically as most later commentators saw it, to be cast in terms of a rural arcadia. The charge of nostalgia, however, is a shallow one, thoughtlessly hurled with the benefit of hindsight at thinkers who lived in an era of transition whose terminus in industrial capitalism was anything but a foregone conclusion.71 I will here mention just a few of the early English strands in the socialist tradition that envisioned a rural component in their "New Jerusalem." William Thompson, a follower of Robert Owen, drew up plans to settle cooperative communities on the land,72 at a time when it seemed an open question whether urbanization would proceed further, let alone at the rate it actually did. According to Dorothy Thompson, the Land Plan of the Chartist movement, which also aimed at resettling people on the land, was largely responsible for maintaining the enthusiasm of many members of that movement.73

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The driving interest in these projects, however, was more social and political than agronomic. William Thompson wanted his communities to attain economic self-sufficiency, chiefly it seems, in order to facilitate social experimentation along the lines of his extremely radical feminist views. Feargus O'Connor, the Chartist leader, enthused about small farming projects on the grounds that even some ability to sustain themselves would enable workers to affect the general wage rate favourably. The same motivation underlay the allotments movement nearer the turn of the century. A more specifically environmental element in nineteenth-century English social criticism is perhaps to be found in the widespread fears of the consequences of overurbanization (well-founded fears, particularly in the English case), but the effect on people, not that on the land, was the concern. In this century, across western Europe, as the urban roots of socialism deepened and strengthened, the urbanized, industrialized version of society became a given for socialist analysis. The emerging Marxist tradition did a great deal to reinforce this prejudicial cast of mind. Agriculture now occupied a residual category, not one to be construed as part of an independently valid way of life. Of course, within societies such as late-nineteenth-century Russia that were not yet very far along the "inevitable" road to industrialization, intense debates arose as to the propriety of this sociological railroading.74 Certain elements in the anarchist movement also provided an interesting counterpoint; Kropotkin was inclined to view the industrial order with disdain and advocated the universal adoption of intensive, small-scale cultivation. Nevertheless, it is unquestionable that, overall, the socialist tradition had settled into an overwhelmingly urban, industrial mode by the turn of the century .XX1V The eventual political fallout for peasantries from this bias was enormous75 and, of course, continues as recent debates about African socialism show.76 It is worth considering further the role in this story of what emerged as the predominant elements in the Marxist tradition. I have already referred to Marx's unclear, even ambiguous remarks on the role of technological change in agriculture in modern times. Farming seemed destined to remain the backward sector and yet its development had some of the largest social effects. Where Marx hesitated to pronounce definitively,77 Lenin did not.78 Idolizing latenineteenth-century American harvesting machines, he argued both that the development of "capitalism" in agriculture was an inevitable process once started, and that mechanization of agriculture was a sine qua non for socialism. Indeed, to Lenin it could hardly have made much sense to view these as distinguishable propositions, since for him industrialization was both inevitable and desirable in all facets of

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life. However, the two points have to be distinguished and challenged. The former argument proved very difficult to sustain, as the complex demographics of peasant households confounded tendencies to proletarianization in the countryside of many countries where it was thought to be inexorable. Russia itself proved to be among the "awkward" cases.79 The second argument has proved to be a political (and financial) embarrassment to revolutionary socialist regimes that have, without exception, come to power in countries that had not "completed" their Leninist courses of capitalist development in agriculture. The most absurd and tragic results of this fetishizing of what were taken to be advanced farming methods occurred in the Soviet Union, where giant model farms were newly laid out for mechanized production before a trained workforce had been developed and before a proper storage-and-transport infrastructure had been installed to support the use of the expensive machinery.80 In the maturing MarxistLeninist version of socialist construction, nature was regarded as an utterly passive and infinitely malleable substrate for industrialized agriculture. Because the proper treatment and improvement of the land was not regarded as an important step, let alone a priority, Soviet agriculture attained notoriously low productivity levels per unit of land area (even on some of the world's most excellent soils), coupled with an astonishingly bad record in soil erosion.81 The response in the mid-iQyos was to import grain on a large scale while investing even more heavily in the further industrialization of agricultural-production processes. The result was increased output purchased at a much more than proportional increase in capital costs.82 The inefficient use of resources in Soviet farming was substantially due, of course, to its overly centralized, command-from-above style of social organization. Experimental systems employing mobile brigades of workers were tried out in the early seventies but were soon politically quashed.83 They were revived more recently and might eventually have altered the poor labour productivity in Soviet agriculture if they had been given a proper chance. Their environmental impact was quite uncertain, however, although it seems unlikely that it could have been worse. It is impossible at the moment to tell which (even whether) elements of Soviet-style agriculture will survive the current upheavals. Communist China appears to be an exception to the rule of MarxistLeninist inattention to the role of the land itself, but this is a misleading impression. The often high levels of productivity per unit of land area in China are mostly due to the pragmatic continuation of ancient recycling practices that have no rationale within modernization orthodoxy.^ In other respects, recent Chinese mishandling of the land

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has occurred on so enormous a scale that it can by no means all be attributed to special problems due to high population density.85 The calls that recently influenced events in eastern Europe for greater popular control over the centralized economies of what many called "actually existing socialism," while not unreasonable in their own terms, were overwhelmingly political in thrust. They thus allowed under different colours the perpetuation of one of the great blindspots of Soviet-style socialism: institutional naivety with regard to the social basis of an adequate system of land stewardship. This environmental innocence was not, of course, peculiar to the Marxinspired tradition in socialist theory and practice. Socialists in general have either ignored the land, or simply assumed that "the state" would see to its maintenance. Again, this institutionalized irresponsibility (or, perhaps more precisely, noninstitutionalized nonresponsibility), is not unique to the socialist tradition, but it has felt especially natural to it. Inasmuch as it deliberately eschewed the evolutionary perspective in social analysis, the socialist tradition was led to a kind of hypermodernism. The basis of the system of land ownership in English capitalist agriculture, which was in functional terms a highly effective form for land stewardship, was regarded as a "feudal" relic by doctrinaire liberals and socialists alike. So long as socialists held to the not-yet complete Marxist theory of capitalism, which was consistently unable to comprehend agriculture, then the theory of agriculture in any other kind of modern society was likely also to remain obscure. The last century of agricultural history amply demonstrates the practical difficulties of incorporating farming into modernizing societies. Since these societies were also, without exception, deliberately pursuing industrialization, there ceased to be any kind of ideological barrier to the adoption by socialists of an industrial interpretation of agricultural production. Having thoroughly misconstrued the English case (which most of them, incoherently, nevertheless held to be central), it was all the harder for socialists to devise an adequate interpretation of what went awry in the twentieth century. In retrospect, though, the omission is still staggering. During the Great Depression commercial agriculture was widely conceded by antisocialists to be the weakest link in the capitalist world order. Agrarian unrest and environmental degradation were at historically high levels. Yet the socialist movement kept the analysis of agriculture in the background. That the socialist movement failed to make substantial political hay out of the aftermath of agricultural crisis in the interwar years is an index of how subservient it had become to the priorities of the industrial perspective. The weakness of socialist theory was just another expression of this same tendency.

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Eduard David and Kozo Uno swam against this current with its attempt to annihilate distinctions, to homogenize all modern societies into one sociological puree in which agriculture was a mere subcategory of the industrial economy. David did not accept the assumption that there was no essential difference between industry and agriculture, and Uno argued that the twentieth-century economic imbalance between agriculture and industry implied, among other things, that we had entered an era of transition away from the selfpurifying version of modern society known as capitalism. In my estimation, David and Uno cannot be said to have misconstrued modernity in the ecologically and institutionally naive way that became so basic to the socialist perspective. Eduard David on Socialism and Agriculture

The only socialist thinker of note who drew attention to the deep incompatibilities between agricultural and industrial production, and who had any international political impact on other socialists, was Eduard David. The fact that he fails to appear even once in the index to, for example, Lichtheim's A Short History of Socialism may be taken as an index of the lack of importance attached by socialists and their historians to agriculture (as compared to the external politics of peasantries, for example). None of David's writings are available in English and the available discussions of him are, for the most part, tendentious self-vindications by opponents of his views (with the outstanding exception of Elie Halevy's brief account in his Histoire du Socialisms Europeen). Here follows an overview of David's thoughts about agriculture marshalled under three themes: the political, the technical, and what could be called the "macroeconomic." David was concerned around the turn of the century to defend politically the position of the small peasant proprietor, who, he said, was the victim mostly of unproductive fractions of capital, namely, commercial and money-lending capital. The "development of the productive forces" was emphatically not the historical cause of the decline in the status of peasants. Moreover, peasant proprietors were assimilable neither in outlook nor economic function to the proletariat. There was nothing, therefore, to prevent peasants from staving off the supposedly inevitable fate of proletarianization predicted by Kautsky (and other more orthodox Marxists) if they would only organize themselves enough to be able to apply the sort of cooperative principles developed in, to take the outstanding example, Denmark. David was here engaged in a kind of rearguard, contemporary politi-

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cal defence of the peasantry against the solidifying orthodoxy of what I call "industrio-Marxism." The members of David's camp also argued that small-scale private property in land or other means of production was perfectly compatible with socialism, provided that self-employment was the rule amongst such petty proprietors.86 Contingently, this defence may be strategically valid in many contexts, but it is hard to assess on its own as a contribution to the question how socialist agriculture ought ideally to be organized, unless it is integrated with, for example, specific plans substantially to deurbanize the populations of the industrial countries (as the early English socialists thought best). Such deurbanization might well be a good idea, but it does not seem to have been argued for systematically. David's political focus on agriculture may have been admirable, but it was in a very real sense merely partisan. It does not seem to have been informed by coherent theoretical considerations, ecological or otherwise. The less explicitly political of David's contributions, in contrast, were more theoretical and seem to be more profound, although some of his arguments have been overtaken by changes since World War n (maybe not permanently). First, there is his claim that agriculture and industry are two utterly different types of human activity. The reasoning behind David's distinction anticipates in some respects the Japanese thermodynamic critique of production, which was elaborated in chapter i into an ecological definition of industrial production. David's conception also recalls the acute protoecological understanding of the Physiocrats and seems to be consistent with my revised analysis of the real basis of the high productivity of classical English farming. Agricultural work, David claimed, consists in the exploitation, through the direction, of natural forces that are already present. The process of agricultural production is essentially biological; humans are only able to act passively, as it were, or "par persuasion," as Halevy aptly translated it.8y Industrial processes, by contrast, are mechanical processes in which humankind is able to unite and separate material elements at will. The effects of mechanization in these two spheres are consequently very different. In agriculture, mechanization does not actually augment production, it merely speeds up certain operations. In fact for purposes of intensifying cultivation, it is better to eliminate machinery and, ceteris paribus, to reduce the scale of production. The other theoretical asymmetry between agriculture and industry manifests itself in the different ways demand has historically impinged on them. David argued that fresh demand for labour in industry due to increased demand for the new industrial products had easily out-

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stripped the tendency of industrial mechanization to reduce the demand for labour in industry. Demand for European agricultural produce, by contrast, had not at all kept pace, and the number of workers in agriculture was declining absolutely, unlike in industry. Since there has been a powerful trend this century to assimilate agricultural production to industrial production through the heavy use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and animal confinement, David's point about the differences between agricultural and industrial processes is less valid now than it was, at least with respect to agriculture as it is practised today in wealthy countries. His other points about the effects of mechanization and scale are still generally valid, but again in places somewhat overshadowed by the subsequent industrialization of agricultural production. The use of artificial inputs has allowed for increased production per unit area even on largerscale farms, although not without ill effects. However, when it comes to the problem of demand for agricultural produce, David has been vindicated over and over again. The curious thing about David is that there does not seem to be any logical link between his political support for the small proprietor and his two theoretical points about the inherent differences between industry and nonindustrialized agriculture. David offers the former as a political value judgment, as it were, albeit backed up by references to proven, alternative social institutions extant in his day (and still thriving in ours). By contrast, he offers his claim that agriculture and industry are very different as a bald statement of fact. Leaving aside that it is far less true now than it was in his day, David did not seem to see it as a value judgment, a statement of what should be. Doubtless he simply did not foresee that agriculture could ever be industrialized in the (mostly chemical) way it has been, and so he thought he was pointing to an eternal condition of substantive economy. We may be confident that, were he alive today, he would enrol with those environmental and ethical critics of industrialized agriculture who point out that contemporary agriculture is, above all, unsustainable. Of course, I am here employing current terminology to make a point that is related to, but different from, any of David's explicit points. The concept of sustainability is only latent in his thought. Kozo Uno on Agriculture and Socialism Compared with David, the Japanese socialist Kozo Uno has had little direct political impact,*™ but he is remarkable in the context of this discussion for having drawn explicit attention to the economic imbalance between agriculture and industry in this century.

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Uno was a notable social thinker on a number of counts, but little is known about his eccentric but, from my point of view, prescient and justified suggestion that socialists must decide how to rebalance agriculture and industry before setting about constructing a socialist polity: "If socialism is not able on the one hand to solve the class conflict which constitutes the internal contradiction of capitalism and on the other hand to solve the agricultural problems which constitute external contradictions, it will not be able to manage the new society."50™ The present work can be counted as a deliberate exploration of the second half of this advice. Indeed, here the idea of rebalancing has been carried even further, issuing in the demand for an end to the hegemony of the industrial paradigm of production.30™1 But just what is the deep connection between socialism and opposition to the hegemony of industrialism? I have already considered Uno's idea that capitalism brings to light an incompatibility between agriculture and industry that is always latent at least. But in that regard Uno does not seem to have had looming ecological problems in mind. Rather, he was concerned with the fundamental cause of the famous interwar "scissors crisis," the expulsion of agriculture from the European metropoles. However, in casting the incompatibility between agriculture and industry under capitalism as the special (and inevitable) result of the general but inherently artificial attempt of value to subsume use-value, Uno was pointing an accusing finger at economism, which in all its guises assumes both the feasibility and appropriateness of just such a subsumption. Uno evidently sensed that the problem lay not within economic theory in the narrow sense, but in the very idea of imposing that theory on nature at large. That is to say, Uno knew somehow that socialism must treat agriculture and industry differently but could not show that from inside economic theory. How then did this ultratheoretical thinker come to that view? Let us first consider Uno's general background thoughts on socialist construction. Although he thought socialists must deal with agriculture as an absolute priority, it was hardly the depredations of twentieth-century agriculture that provided the main reason for his enthusiasm for socialism. Indeed, Uno's desire for socialism appears to have had nothing in particular to do with agriculture. Unfortunately, Uno, like Marx, made few specific comments on socialism, but for different reasons. Marx apparently refused on political grounds to try to second-guess the eventual structure of socialist society, although it has recently been made clear that at the end of his life he was more flexible on this point.88 Subsequent "Marxists" have tended to be concerned primarily with the social injustice of modern (what they care-

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lessly call "capitalist") society. They apparently think socialism will somehow manage to take its cue from benign tendencies inherent in, for example, the contemporary increases in the "objective socialization of labour."89 Indeed, what seems like a deliberately uncritical attitude towards modernity became a hallmark of "Western Marxists." Socialization processes in general are evidently regarded by them as inherently positive, except when markedly unjust. In striking contrast, Uno, on the whole struck more by the inhumanity than the injustice of capitalism, thought that capitalism would bequeath to socialism, not a cluster of useful "objective" tendencies as a kind of husk or shell for the developing socialist polity, but rather only the opportunity to perceive some universal substantive economic principles. This peculiar idea has to be explicated at length in order to be fully understood. Surprisingly, it will be seen, it leaves us in a perplexing but recognizably humanist quandary. Sekine has translated Uno's terms for these universal principles by the phrase "the general norms of economic life." Uno held that the general norms were discoverable only after the historical spectacle of a self-regulating economic system attempting to realize itself had long come and gone. Independent of any behavioural postulate (such as Homo oeconomicus), general norms have no structural (or logical) resemblance to the propositions of orthodox, formal economic theory. Consequently they are no more specifically enlightening about socialism than they are about, say, "ancient societies." Indeed, Uno considered them a step towards an answer to a general but otherwise baffling question: how should we conceive the economy in all cases of noncapitalist society? Uno argued that the theory of a purely capitalist society, and only that theory, can lay bare the general norms of economic life applicable to all societies. Making use of Polanyi's terminology I will try to explain Uno's reasoning as follows. Uno saw that the liberal dream of a purely capitalist society requires that political arrangements be regarded as intrusions on the economic; that, to put it in Polanyi's terms, the economy must be "disembedded" from the other aspects of society. But Uno also thought that this very sequestration of the economy in its own sphere presented us with a special opportunity for studying the general economic aspects of society. This special opportunity is an artefactual result of the disembeddedness of the economy in the capitalist case. In Polanyi's parlance, an embedded economy consists of the substantive process in its social institutionalization. Capitalism made use of a supremely formal, supposedly apolitical (even asocial) set of social institutions, and that is why it has, or is, a disembedded economy. But if one distils away the formal aspects of this disembedded economy -

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distils away its own self-image, as it were - a residue remains. This residue consists of the fundamentals of what Polanyi called our substantive economic behaviour, our transactions with nature, with the institutional form left unspecified. If one is sensitive to the deep artificiality of formal economics, the disembedded capitalist economy allows direct study of the transhistorical substantive essentials of social organization aimed at successful interaction with nature. Paradoxically, it is easier to abstract from commodity-economic considerations when one supposes them to be operating with the utmost freedom. It may be noted parenthetically that this seeming paradox would doubtless have puzzled Polanyi, but to Uno it simply followed logically from properly grounded economic theory. All economies must recognize the general norms at least implicitly if they are to be "viable" (to use Sekine's biological metaphor). As Uno explained, "historical" ones must have done so. A purely capitalist society will observe the norms in particular ways; other societies have used, or may use, quite different institutions. It is the very formality (and dispensability) of the capitalist institutions that allowed us to perceive the norms clearly for the first time. In economies deeply embedded in their social milieux, the norms were too tightly interwoven with the institutional fabric to be visible as a separate category. Uno "discovered" the norms only in the course of his exploration of the concept of a purely capitalist society, for which purpose, mimicking capital itself, he deliberately held implicit all social and political considerations. Uno regarded a clear conception of the detailed workings of a purely capitalist society as the basis for any discussions about either the history of precapitalist societies, or proposals for postcapitalist societies. Without embarking on a lengthy discussion of other thinkers, it should be noted that Uno's use of capitalist society as the standard for general economic history was based on very different methodological considerations from the common ones employed by, for example, Max Weber. Weber developed his conception of the economy by a process of direct abstraction from concrete history. As hinted in chapter 2 there is no nonarbitrary way to carry out such abstracting operations. Uno argued that the correct path lay in facilitating the development of the concept of commodity-economy into a full, detailed picture of an imaginary, purely capitalist society. This entailed a logical enquiry at its own level of analysis that explicitly eschewed the direct consideration of historical factors, which, Uno said, should only be brought in after the development of a mediating "stages-of-development" theory that could link the theory of a purely capitalist society with concrete history in some coherent fashion. At the highest level of theoretical

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abstraction, social and political aspects are deliberately held implicit. Conversely, at the lowest level of abstraction, that of empirical studies in concrete history, the theory (of a purely capitalist society) is present only in the background. From there it serves only as a guide to thought, never as an explicit source of putative historical propositions. It follows also that the role of the abstract theory in social explanation recedes the further the society under study is from the capitalist epoch. Polanyi unfortunately followed Weber in employing the less-subtle method of direct abstraction from history. Polanyi also asserted that market society must be the central case for general economic history, and he may seem similar to Uno in that respect. But without a fully developed concept of the technical peculiarity of the (hypothetical) purely capitalist case, Polanyi could not generate the general norms of economic life (except by intuition, as it were). Uno argued that the possibility of capitalism has to be demonstrated, that is, fully comprehended, before it could be declared a standard and therefore a candidate for supersession. Polanyi distinguished the economic process from its institutionalization but he went on to discuss only the institutions. He could not flesh out his concept of the economic process in itself beyond a laconic definition.90 Uno's general norms, by contrast, involve some specific propositions. They are, in a sense, illustrated in the very content of his theory of a purely capitalist society. Uno never systematically presented the general norms. I attempted to do so by extracting bald propositions from Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society. Here are some of the results: (i) All labour is applied directly or indirectly to land (considered generically). (2) Since labour can produce anything (in principle), all products are more or less difficult for society to obtain depending on the amount of labour needed to produce them. (3) Given that tools (considered generically) cannot be expected to wear out simultaneously, there must always be a social cost associated with propagating a new method of production. Listed on their own like this, outside any concrete context, most of the norms are apt to appear rather obvious. Individually, they are only striking when one is considering the capitalist case, which of course is when they are met automatically, whether or not anyone is aware of them. The norms considered together are rather hard to order rationally, and they seem to be of uneven generality. Sekine has suggested that perhaps, unbeknownst to Uno, the norms really comprise two sets of considerations, one a subset of the other. Some of the norms pertain only to systems in which optimization in the use of resources (somehow deemed commensurable for purposes of "calculation") is added in as an extra constraint on the choice of production methods. Put

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another way, some norms arise and apply only in those social systems in which it has been decided for some reason that "noneconomic" considerations are not to be allowed to bear on "economic ones." Where the economy is thus socially "disembedded" (as Polanyi acutely put it) one recognizes Engels's "political economy in the narrow sense." Norms for this case must fall within the set of norms for political economy in the broad sense. An example of the narrower sort of norm would be the following: (4) All impediments to the reallocation of labour must be removed. It is clear, given that optimization has become a social goal, that so special a norm simply follows from the truth of the second and third general norms listed above. One can see here how social tensions are bound to arise once such an inherently general burden as optimization is imposed on society. Mutual interdependence will feel like bullying for some; hence the considerable resistance, historically, to this special case. Regardless of the subnorms, the great significance of the general norms is that they centre around the concept of reproduction, which Uno borrowed from Marx (who borrowed it from the Physiocrats). Sekine has suggested that one criterion of an "historical" (viable) society is precisely that it be continually, if tacitly, demonstrating its reproducibility. The norms demand more than one-time solutions. Sekine's criterion allows one to make a distinction between social arrangements that are merely conceivable and ones that are actually possible. This has implications for socialism, as we shall see, but also for explaining the various more recent developmental twists and turns taken by modern society. The overarching norm that Sekine has called the "fundamental constraint" is the precondition of any social reproduction. This norm states that direct producers must have guaranteed access to the product of a part of their labour equal to that spent producing whatever is necessary and sufficient for them to be able to continue to live and produce. Note particularly that the access must be guaranteed, but need not be direct. The product of their "necessary labour" may be received in the form of money but the constraint then requires that that wage packet and the price of whatever goods workers and their families consume "match." If optimization is added in as another constraint it becomes dear that the resulting special norms, such as the one concerning the mobility of labour, are bound to give rise to complex problems in the distribution of wealth. It is this fundamental constraint that lies behind the particular version of the labour theory of value required for the case of a purely capitalist society, which must meet the norm without appearing to try to.91

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This point is the key to understanding the lure of laissez-faire ideology in which the economy, merely by the use of a system of freely moving prices, manages to observe the general norms by means unbeknownst to economic agents or even the state. Of course the rise of cartels and unions, the growing self-conscious influence of the state on economic affairs (especially during war and preparations for war), and many other familiar phenomena of the second, third, and fourth quarters of the twentieth century show us that the general norms of economic life are no longer being satisfied in that strictly capitalist (commodity-economic), indirect, formal way. Uno argued that since World War i we have been in an age of transition. In the nineteenth century, capitalism made a bid to run the world but it undid itself because it could domesticate neither the use-values it spawned nor the protests it aroused. Its ad hoc but arrogant war-conceived "replacement," what people loosely call "modern industrial society," cannot be demonstrated to be viable. It cannot even pretend to be a self-contained system the way a purely capitalist society could. It will likely prove incapable of managing an historical epoch of its own, and that is why ours is an era of transition (or "uncertainty" as Keynes sensed and Galbraith later explicitly claimed, each on his own slightly different grounds). The analysis of agriculture over the last century developed earlier in this text is certainly compatible with a negative assessment of the intrinsic viability of today's industrialized societies. As to the terminus of the current transition away from capitalism, Uno was unsure. Like Polanyi and many others (Rosa Luxemburg in particular comes to mind), Uno felt the outcome might be socialism, or then again it might be something worse than capitalism. Certainly Uno denied that there was anything automatic about the arrival of socialism. But if Uno thought the construction of socialism was inevitably in our hands, did he offer any concrete advice as to how we should go about the task? Did he, for example, think the general norms could be used as design principles? It seems not. Sekine has argued that the discovery of the norms only proves the dispensability of the commodity-economic way of meeting them. Only the general possibility of socialism is thereby grounded. Not even a hazy structural outline can be gleaned from the norms, even if one tries to consider them systematically. For the purpose of positive construction, for example, they are far too vague with respect to several crucial human, rather than technical, considerations. The norms are only negatively useful, as it were, giving us information about constraints (more or less universal). For one thing, there is nothing inherent in the norms to prevent their being satisfied by a series of social institutions that would

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be quite different from, but every bit as inhuman as, those deployed by capitalism. We must first decide what we want and then test it against the norms. The reverse procedure, trying to build a conception of socialism from the norms, cannot take us where we want to go, except by chance. What is disturbing here is the disparity between Uno's acuity and prescience in urging that socialists look at agriculture before they consider the problem of socialist construction and his vagueness about the utility for socialists of the general norms he discovered, which give no positive guidance as to correct solutions to the imbalance between agriculture and industry. In the most extended of his discussions (available in English) of the general norms,92 Uno appears to have assumed, of all things, the universality of the desire to economize on labour in the production process by the use of machines. He refers to the notion of an "economically advantageous machine." One wonders whether Uno had in mind any principle that would be used to set limits to mechanization. Recalling Sekine's suggestion for classifying the norms, one wonders whether Uno was somehow still hanging on to the goal of optimization, which, as Polanyi showed, is not an absolutely universal norm. Uno followed his enigmatic reference to machinery with a gesture towards socialism as a system relying on conscious planning aimed at realizing the norms.93 If Sekine is right and there are two sets of norms, then much more would have to be said to elucidate such a notion. Nor, apparently, did Uno question whether the general norms refer to problems that are continuous only because the separation of production from consumption has gone beyond a certain point. There arises the disturbing possibility that many of the supposedly general norms may be in some ultimate sense culture-bound, congenitally modern, so to speak. The ecological theory and historical material presented here so far suggest that the way to carry out Uno's call for a rebalancing of agriculture and industry is to deindustrialize the former. But I have just hinted that Uno did not really break out of the industrial paradigm and may have been uncritical of modernity. His comment on twentiethcentury agriculture thus seems to hover in a haze of arbitrariness, since its implications clearly go beyond his approach to political economy. Recalling my final criticism of David, it may be concluded that Uno's concept of an "historical" society as one that satisfied the norms (one that is viable, in other words) shows that he was close to the crucial concept of sustainability, but not quite there. The point can be put by drawing a distinction: by saying that the abstract

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achievement of social sustainability, the subject matter of the general norms, does not in itself concretely guarantee ecological sustainability. These two different aspects of sustainability overlap to some extent in both David's and Uno's thinking about the imbalance between agriculture and industry, but it is more a case of conceptual confusion than of deliberate assimilation, or attempted reduction, of one aspect of sustainability to the other. The want of ecological theory is the source of the problem here. Clearly neither David nor Uno, nor a fortiori any other thinkers in the socialist tradition, saw fit to view the sum of the effects on nature of our substantive economic activity as constituting of itself a dimension of the problem of how to construct a Utopia. As I argue in the next chapter, however, further reflection on some profound points made by Uno about the inhumanity of the contradiction between value and use-value points to a more radical kernel in Uno's work than the foregoing suggests. Uno appears unwittingly to have initiated the transcending of an entire cultural paradigm. I hope to demonstrate that these positive aspects of his thought can be meshed most effectively with the ecological concepts developed in chapter i. Uno is above all distinctive for having done the most, as an economist, to open the gates wide for antieconomism.

4 Agricultural Biocontexts for Future Persons: Possible Forms for Communities Securely Placed in Nature

The spheres in which the world of relations arises are three. First, our life with nature. There the relation sways in gloom, beneath the level of speech. Creatures live and move over against us, but cannot come to us, and when we address them as Thou, our words cling to the threshold of speech. Second, our life with men. There the relation is open and in the form of speech, we can give and accept the Thou. Third, our life with spiritual beings. There the relation is clouded, yet it discloses itself; it does not use speech, yet begets it. Martin Buber1 SECTION I TYPES OF RELATIONS A M O N G PERSONS, NATURE, AND USE-VALUES

I shall begin by summarizing the argument of this book so far. In the first chapter I suggested that there has been an entire dimension missing in the literature of social criticism. I then reviewed in brief the early history of our relations with our environment in the light of ecological theory as applied to agriculture and raised the implications of industrial production. The conclusion emerged that any future society hoping to achieve a sustainable relation with nature must make agriculture the type and controller of its productive economic activities. My particular concern, however, was the implications of this for socialism. Would it entail the abandonment of modernity? In the next two chapters that very question was addressed. First, in chapter 2, I showed that in at least one historical case it has proved possible for a

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society to be both modern and ecologically benign. Second, in chapter 3, I argued that since the mid-nineteenth century, modern societies have contingently disengaged themselves from their surrounding natural ecological cycles, to the point where the sustainability of their relations with nature is greatly to be doubted. Partly because of their general intellectual heritage, the so-called "socialist" countries failed, just as profoundly as nonsocialist countries, properly to consider the environmental dimension of substantive economic activity. However, I had earlier indulged in some optimism on the grounds that the proper incorporation of the environmental dimension might rejuvenate the socialist project and make it both more attractive and more practical. I suggested that the concept of bioregions might be apt for purposes of institutionalizing environmental responsibility. I even claimed that a society composed of bioregional subunits might constitute a means to transcend the old market-plan dilemma that has so crippled socialist thought this century. In the present chapter I shall extend the discussion of those optimistic themes, fortified by the positive example described in chapter 2 but mindful of the cautionary material treated in chapter 3. Before embarking on practical details, I shall consider at a general level what recognizing this extra dimension of social criticism entails, philosophically. At times over the last ten years public awareness of what I call the environmental dimension has seemed to grow, but most current formulations of the problem misconstrue the issues in crucial ways. This environmental confusion is particularly unfortunate given the continuing confusion in the socialist tradition about its own ultimate aims. There is little sense in trying to marry the environmental and socialist movements (as so many urge)1 until each has attained greater philosophical maturity. The Philosophical Implications of Our Environmental Unease Many people today are greatly troubled by our "environmental violence" in all its facets, and they have analyzed what they see as the essence of the problem in various ways. It is widely felt that effective solutions must go well beyond the merely technical, ad hoc measures indulged in sporadically as a result of government fiat spurred by single-issue public pressure. It is undeniable that there is a philosophical dimension to the problem. Some of our most fundamental attitudes must be reformed. Many have taken this to imply that we are in a spiritual crisis and should seek some form of religious solution. Others have sought to dethrone humanism (especially humanist morality) and replace it, in the extreme case, with the principle that no

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merely human purpose can justify our interfering with nature. My own thesis, in contrast, is that the problem is fundamentally social. It is a problem that can only be solved by persons in their relations to one another. It will not be solved so long as substantive economic relations between persons take the form of relations between things, which happens when production and consumption are sundered as they have been in modern societies, especially those close to the purely capitalist case. My emphasis on persons may seem paradoxical, but I will argue that the other proposed solutions to the environmental problem are thoroughly inadequate for a variety of reasons. I found some guidance in the passage from Buber that heads this chapter. The merely technical approach to environmental problems is inadequate because the problems are too pervasive, although less so than many think. It is not the case, for example, that our environmental problems are coextensive with modernity; this would indeed be a depressing conclusion. I hope to have dispelled that fear in chapter 2. They are, however, probably coextensive with industrialism, and inasmuch as the technocratic approach is incapable of transcending the industrial conception of the world as an inert substrate for our activities, it cannot promise a far-reaching solution, only shortterm emergency or palliative measures.11 The counsel of religious reform is inadequate because of its inescapable ambiguity. Buber, in pointing to the impossibility of full communication with spiritual beings, shows that our relations with them inevitably remain unclear. The essential vagueness of religious experience cannot be transcended, and so religion can never be fully discussed by human beings. If we cannot discuss it fully we cannot be sure that we share a religious perspective. And if a religious perspective were to be employed in order to invite (or compel) proper behaviour towards the environment, we would need to be sure it was shared. Otherwise the danger of environmental violence could appear from some unexpected quarter at any time. The fact of religious pluralism simply compounds this already crippling difficulty. Moreover, if we suppose atheistically that spiritual beings do not exist, then religion can be no more than another way of talking among ourselves, a spectacularly indirect way, at that, and one hardly to be recommended for the problem we are considering. The antihumanist attempt to recast morality so that the worst sins become those against nature entails a kind of wilderness purism that is itself flawed on at least three grounds. First, we have already in fact made much of our environment: little of it is strictly natural. So the puritans are too late. Second, it is not the case that at current population levels we could return to the hunting-gathering mode of maximal

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integration with natural cycles. Third, wilderness purism asserts, contrary to experience (notably in the English case), that we are capable only of environmental evil when we act on nature. The classical English rural countryside (or Chinese, for that matter) is very much a made one but it is nonetheless delightful. It is surely perverse to suggest otherwise; Lynn White's "ecological" attack on medieval European ploughing, for example, discussed in chapter i, betrays a typical North American bias in favour of "wilderness" preservation, which is quite a different priority from that of modifying our behaviour when interacting with nature so as to make it sustainable. Negative opinions of farmed landscapes are perverse fundamentally because they fly in the face of our experience of our own humanity: we respond to agreeable rural scenery partly because we recognize it as something made by persons.111 Our relations to each other inevitably seem more important to us than any other sort of relation. At base this must be due to the greater complexity of interpersonal relations, which in turn must be due to the ability to express those relations in speech, as Buber points out. Our relation to nature, while profound, can never be adequately expressed. Nature remains dumb and we must always return to mere conversation with other persons. Indeed, not to do so has traditionally been to court madness (at least as conventionally defined). Among the Romantic poets who were struggling with this question of the relations among us and with nature at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, Wordsworth illustrates the problem perfectly. In his famous poem "Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798," Wordsworth attempts to speak directly to nature: "O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods ..." Later in the poem, however, he comes to describe his mature sensibility as one in which the contemplation of mere nature reminds him in fact of us, of humankind: For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still sad music of humanity ...

This in turn conjures up spiritual beings to Wordsworth: And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused ...

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Strikingly, however, he then turns to address an actual person (his sister, as it happens) in whom for him the ultimate significance of the landscape is vested. The poem concludes: Nor wilt thou then forget That after many wanderings, many years Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs, And this green pastoral landscape, were to me More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

So in Wordsworth the priorities emerge just as I argue they should. But is a mere change in attitude all we need in order to be sure our environmental practice will change enough? The view that will be expounded here is that we must explicitly consult together about our action on nature. The hermit's way cannot collectively be ours. Otherwise, uncertainty about the content of others' relations to nature and the danger this carries would always be there, as it is in the case of the religious crutch. Indeed, the situation is worse, since people combine their attitudes and priorities differently. The mere fact of our implicit shared humanity cannot be an adequate guarantee in this regard. Neither can any conceivable change in our explicit, shared, overall attitude to nature. As with Rousseau's "General Will," the ineffable cannot be enough.lv The problem must be addressed in a concrete way. This requires ecological theory and special social institutions. A good attitude to nature, to be useful, must be expressed in particular sorts of action, not merely enunciated in words, or "felt." The eighteenth-century English gentleman who treated his land with scrupulous care and ensured the sustainability of arable production on it was typically also an enthusiast of various, to us unacceptably crude, bloodsports.2 The trouble is that the bloodsport enthusiast may be faulted on moral grounds but not on ecological grounds. We must harness our attention with precision. Mere "armchair" philosophizing cannot suffice. We must come to some humanly livable arrangement that allows both for open discussion about priorities and a continuous capacity for verifying that, in global sum, as it were, our substantive economic activities are sustainable. My position is that we require institutional empiricism informed by ecological knowledge. Let us try new ways of conducting our affairs. Contrary to the practice in most Utopian writing, no complete "kit" of institutions will be offered here. I wish to present merely a workable prototype that, it is hoped, can be expanded in scope, as needed and replicated widely, if it suits.

146 Agricultural Biocontexts for Future Persons Clarifying the Human Purpose of Socialism

If all this future-oriented institutional pragmatism is premised on the view that our relations with each other are the most important of all the kinds of relations humans can enter into, then it is legitimate to ask what sort of society we wish ultimately to build. What, for example, is socialism supposed to achieve? It might not go without saying that we would wish for maximal personal freedom. Likewise, we envisage a situation where justice is able to prevail in relations of persons with one another. These desiderata, however, are also elements in the classical bourgeois English self-image. English capitalism thought it had maximized juridical freedom and was intensely proud of its legal system. Its original achievements in this regard are not lightly to be dismissed either, as E.P. Thompson was fond of reminding us,3 but we must realize that here we are on dubious terrain. John Stuart Mill argued reasonably that the debate about the relative merits of capitalism and socialism must essentially concern itself with the best versions of both.4 At this point we can turn again to Kozo Uno, whose theory of a purely capitalist society serves to advance the case of capitalism at its best. But Uno was a socialist, so it would be appropriate to ask exactly what made him take up the anticapitalist point of view. One finds in Uno's negative verdict on capitalism an indication that there is also a self-reflexive aspect to the problem of the nature of personhood. Strictly speaking, a person cannot have a relation with his or her self, but can and typically does have one with his or her life. A life may be more or less satisfactory and the resulting problem is arguably the toughest one for socialism. This point requires some elaboration and also, first, some indications of what I am not trying to draw attention to. It is widely agreed that socialism must give us the opportunity for more personal relations with others in our substantive economic activity. On this score, if we are not thwarted by the way our economic activity is institutionalized, our mere humanity should suffice. Socialism cannot guarantee that people will be deliberately nice, but it should guarantee that we will not unwillingly harm each other. Uncontroversially (I hope), a socialist arrangement should also somehow compel the physically fit to help those debilitated by disease, age, accident, and so on. We must each be able to premise our lives on an adequate material base. Beyond that, concern for equality is misguided, probably actively pernicious, as D.H. Lawrence argued on grounds curiously reminiscent of Buber. After insisting vehemently on an equal, universal, basic "Material Standard," he had this to say:

147 Possible Forms for Communities We cannot say that all men are equal. We cannot say A=B. Nor can we say that men are unequal. We may not declare that A+B=C ... One man is neither equal nor unequal to another man. When I stand in the presence of another man, and I am my own pure self, am I aware of the presence of an equal, or of an inferior, or of a superior? I am not. When I stand with another man, who is himself, and when I am truly myself, then I am only aware of a Presence, and of the strange reality of Otherness. There is me, and there is another being ... There is no comparing or estimating. There is only this strange recognition of present otherness. I may be glad, angry, or sad, because of the presence of the other. But still no comparison enters in. Comparison enters only when one of us departs from his own integral being, and enters the material mechanical world. Then equality and inequality start at once.5

The point about a basic material equality is easy to see and considerable progress was made in this direction in so-called "actually existing socialism." But ideally, socialism must also minimally result in an individual's ability to experience his or her own life and work as an integrated and satisfying multifaceted whole. This is over and above the question of facilitating fully human (nonreified) relations between persons. It is this self-fulfilment test that the best-case "pure" capitalism and, thus far, the various forms taken in its aftermath all fail. Lawrence was clearly gesturing towards this problem in all his work (as were, to name just two others, William Morris,6 and Oscar Wilde, especially in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism"7). I will argue here that Uno's thought can serve peculiarly well as a basis for a discussion of this matter. I mentioned in the previous chapter that, on the whole, it seems that Uno was struck more by the inhuman than the unjust nature of capitalism. He judged that persons could not attain fully human being under that system, that is, even when juridically most free. What are the considerations that might lead to, and the implications that flow from, the judgment that capitalism is inherently inhuman, even antipersonal? The reason for Uno's position here is not transparent. Uno's student, Sekine, has tried to explain the ground of Uno's objections to capitalism by saying that although in Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society we are presented with a social arrangement that is feasible in principle, maybe even sustainable if properly instituted relations with nature are maintained, yet it constitutes the epitome of what we do not want. Such a society carries to the extreme both the tendency to reify social relations inherent in any sort of arm's-length trading and the alienation of persons from the products of their labour. The socialist hope has been, in effect, that capitalism could be inverted so that a more human economy could be constructed.8

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Uno himself did not apparently expand on the cause(s) of the inhuman nature of capitalism, but the following points seem consistent with his overall conception, since they employ his starting point for the analysis of capitalism, namely, the contradiction between value and use-value. Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society clarifies the implications of the idea of a society in which use-values (the things we concretely use in living our lives) take the form of commodities (things we buy and sell at arm's length). All capitalist production occurs under the aegis of self-expanding value (profit). Since it is undertaken for the sake of expanded value, it follows that use-value production in capitalism actually occurs under the condition of indifference to use-value. This point can be elucidated by means of the following considerations. The capitalist organizer of production produces use-values only so that value may expand. The workers employed in producing them likewise have no interest in the use-values as usevalues. The workers have essentially no contact (except by the merest accident) with the eventual users of the goods they make, and they are remunerated in money-wages by the capitalist, not directly by the eventual user(s). The workers convert these money-wages elsewhere into the concrete use-values they need and desire, which in nearly all cases (because of the specialization of labour) are use-values other than those they produced themselves. The eventual consumers of usevalues, be they workers, capitalists, or members of the landed classes, are thus, as consumers, utterly remote from the conditions of production of what they consume. This is so even though it is precisely (and only) as consumers that they are interested in use-values as usevalues. Indeed, given that under this regime, use-values can only be obtained by exchange for money (and given also that all budgets are finite at any point in time), even consumers are obliged to consider use-values at least partly under the rubric of value and make (sometimes painful) choices among them. Consumers are consequently led to the entirely counterintuitive notion (warmly embraced by utility theorists with their ulterior purpose) that in a sense, at least some goods can be substituted one for another. This perverse notion feeds into habits of caprice that may or may not be fostered by, for example, deliberate marketing strategies aimed at convincing people to purchase substitutes even when they have no need for them. In any case, the final result is a chasm between the spheres of production and consumption. This system thus implies a separation of labour from life, and that- is fundamentally what renders it inhuman. I shall now consider the sphere of consumption more closely. Whereas consumption in itself, even under capitalism, is always undertaken simply as part of life and not to serve any "purpose,"

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production under capitalism, as I have said, is undertaken for a single, absolutely sovereign purpose, namely, the expansion of value. In the extreme opposite case to capitalism, perhaps most clearly exemplified in isolated communities of independent peasants/ production is integrally bound up with consumption, and both are simply expressions of life, nothing more, nothing less. Under those conditions production not destined for the community is a specific, potentially alienating experience only undertaken when force or necessity prevail. It is interesting at this point to consider the work of Chayanov,9 who developed, to use the same terms that convey the essence of Uno's project, the concept of a purely peasant society. Chayanov sought to account for the dynamics of peasant society in terms of the household structure and workload. Chayanov's theoretical peasants have clearly defined goals of comfort, to attain which they accept, however grudgingly, that they must toil. However, the relationship between their consumption and the toil required is so transparent to them that they know, as it were, when enough is enough. This is clearly illustrated in Oyler's account of mid-twentieth-century life in the Dordogne valley - for him an absolute peasant idyll.10 By contrast, persons living under conditions where production and consumption are split are apt, first (as it were) to work to an extent that is set either arbitrarily or socially (that is, not directly by themselves), and then to consume up to whatever point their work (strictly speaking, its equivalent in money) entitles them to. The quantity of consumption "earned" is thus only related ex post to toil. Socialism, by contrast, hopes to make labour directly fulfilling again, to allow it to be "life's prime want," as Marx put it. It is very difficult, however, to see how this can be done without reducing the effective scale of society, especially its perceived scale. Leopold Kohr has even argued that a civilized and unhurried mode of production, such as that involved in handicrafts, depended more for its beneficial aspects on the small size of its home community than on the technically different nature of the economic activities themselves.11 A generally unacknowledged corollary of the standard view that envisages the socialist organization of production merely as a planned and democratized modification of the capitalist economic conception (with the scale of society either left intact or, worse and more likely, increased) would be the continued embrace of the inhuman fragmentation of life into separate spheres of production and consumption. The resulting socialism could not but consist in an identification of the sphere of real human life with consumption alone. The vile consequences of such an economistic conception can be glimpsed in two highly regarded studies of life in post-World War n Hungary, Haras-

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zti's depiction of intensely alienating assembly-line work,12 and Kenedi's portrait of chaotic and utterly corrupt consumerism.13 Such a system would surely be repugnant in itself, the product of a kind of mauvaise foi peculiar to modernity. This is nonetheless the kind of social system recently counselled by Nove in The. Economics of Feasible Socialism. Nove's title in itself is quite presumptuous on purely technical grounds for the separation of production from consumption also has severe practical consequences in terms precisely of feasibility. These consequences are of two kinds, one relating to viability and the other to sustainability. To start with, as I first mentioned in chapter i, along with the separation of production from consumption there arises pro tanto a need for complex arrangements for circulating and distributing goods. In capitalism these promised to be self-regulating. In socialism they were to be planned, though exactly how, and by whom, remained nice questions with only vague, ad hoc answers. The "solutions" seen thus far tend overwhelmingly to repel, and I would argue that this is due, among other things, to the continued failure to think of devices for reducing the scale of the problem. Twentieth-century history is replete with failed attempts, both theoretical and practical, to solve the difficulties involved in this without recourse to frankly inhuman techniques. Planning, like other devices for making complex problems manageable from a central point, evidently requires calculation, which in the case of economics requires a postulate of the homogeneity of use-values that is at least functionally similar to that required by the capitalist system, with its integrated markets. The shared terms of the plan-market debate have effectively concealed the alternative posed by household, community, or otherwise "vernacular"vl production, which, being more directly integrated with consumption, does not need such a complex apparatus merely to ensure its viability. The second consequence of the incorporation into socialist models of the sundering of production from consumption has to do with the effects of studied indifference to use-value in production on the choice of production technique adopted. A society indifferent to usevalues in the course of producing them is always at least latently capable of infinite violence towards nature. This capability tends to be realized when countervailing institutions are either absent altogether or in the process of being destroyed, as shown in chapters i and 3. For indifference to use-value in production is a kind of indifference to life, a factor in the sequestering of life in this narrow sphere of consumption. As producers nobody cares how production occurs, and as consumers nobody can know how production occurs. As I pointed out in chapter i, the record on this score among production systems in

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many precapitalist societies was bad, but the point here is that capitalist society cannot even in principle rise above indifference, unless there are specific countervailing social institutions of the sort discussed in chapter 2. Postcapitalist societies making use of the separation of production from consumption, which capitalism exaggerated (indeed, took to extremes), will be in fundamentally the same position. The absolute separation of production from consumption is a bequest from capitalism that any future desirable forms of modernity must refuse. The ecological considerations advanced in section 4 of chapter i suggest another reason why, to make life into a human whole again, we must reconnect production and consumption at least to a significant extent. Short of "returning" to peasant society, we can only do this if we refuse to postulate the homogeneity of use-values and insist on some major classifkatory distinctions along the ecological and other lines discussed in the same section. The entire economic process must be taken apart, reconceived, and then reassembled, so that it can be reinserted into living nature in a way that respects the strictly finite capacity of our living environment for waste disposal. For that purpose we cannot be indifferent to use-value. The concrete environmental character of use-values must be taken into account in production, in trade (i.e., the division of labour), and in consumption. The homogeneity that had to be presupposed for the calculus of rational action to apply at all must be denied. We here break utterly, finally, with the essence of formal economics. The critique of political economy must recognize its completion in the final denial of the commensurability of use-values - the denial of the very assumption most basic to the concept of a society in which value subsumes usevalue. This argument can be illustrated by considering a revealing passage from Nove's Economics of Feasible Socialism. Nove offers a list of diverse, concrete use-values - ships, shoes, and onions - as proof that modern society requires the integrated market system.14 Only from the postulate of exclusively industrial production of goods, destined only for anonymous consumers, can it make sense to do this. I will consider these use-values in turn. The first item on the list, partly because of the physical materials involved, absolutely requires industrial production (but scarcely for an anonymous market; ships have always been made to order). Note also that ships are neither personal nor local in terms of their destination-inuse. The second good, shoes, involves recyclable inputs (mostly from agriculture) and ought properly to be in the sphere of goods personally crafted to order. In this connection it may be noted that neither mass-production capitalists nor state bureaucrats have been

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willing to face up to a biological fact that every preindustrial cobbler knew, namely, that no human being has two identically shaped and sized feet. The third good, onions, is a purely agricultural product, and while it would be absurd to arrange that individual onions be produced to order, they should in general be destined only for local consumption. They happen to be among the select company of vegetables capable both of being grown in unpropitious circumstances and of being stored by inexpensive, preindustrial techniques in most climes. Only someone in the grip of some such a priori concept as the "substitutability of goods" could fail to see the practical importance of these considerations. For substantive economic purposes the unidimensional concept of economic "value" is too blunt, indeed has no point at all. In the next section I will describe some approaches to production that try to incorporate awareness of the need to make distinctions among use-values. These share the premise that agricultural and industrial production must be considered as distinct. Some recent work in the emerging new agriculture is highly compatible with some of the considerations I have been discussing here with respect to the separation of production from consumption and may also have other implications highly interesting in their own light. In section 3 of this chapter I will explore a social mechanism for the division of labour that could allow us to give flexible social expression to the distinctions we wish to make among use-values and also ensure some institutional substance (even permanence) for those distinctions. The forms of trade in question could allow us to reconnect production and consumption at any scale, to any extent, and for any set of use-values. They are peculiarly appropriate for the products of agriculture. Because of that and because it is generally admitted that agriculture is in a mess anyway, it would make sense to start with farm produce. In section 4 I will argue that the piecemeal generalization of the novel trade mechanisms could perhaps provide a nonviolent path to a desirable and feasible socialism that would be securely embedded in nature. SECTION 2 FORMS OF THE NEW AGRICULTURE FOR BIOREGIONS

In profound reaction against the industrialization of agriculture (and consequent homogenization of once-distinct regional farming practices), a veritable panoply of "alternative agricultures" has formed. Most of these have come to be affiliated, if loosely, under an umbrella organization, the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. Represented in it are myriad points of view on how

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farming should be carried on. Common to all of them, however, is the belief that the characteristics of the land should fundamentally determine the nature of the farming, not the other way round. While not all of the movements make explicit use of the concept of a bioregion, it is implied in their conceptions of agriculture. But conspicuous by its absence in these alternative agricultural theories is sustained (let alone successful) attention to the problem of institutionalizing the alternative practices socially on more than a few scattered farms in a region. To generalize organic methods is impossible unless land ownership and trade institutions are altered fundamentally. I will consider some of the few initiatives that have been tried. Without exception, all the alternative agricultural theories advocate as a central point that biological recycling is crucial to success, but the lack of an overall unifying theory for these bodies of radical agricultural thought may suggest that their proposals are more tentative than they really are. In most cases, happily, practice is running ahead of theoretical sophistication, and the very diversity of action and theory is a sign of ecological sensitivity. I will describe just a few of the dozens of initiatives, attempting for each one to elucidate its theoretical significance. Several Alternative Conceptions of Farming A comprehensive history of the organic-farming movement has yet to be written but it seems that one great, early centre of organic-farming theory was England. There are at least three complementary strands to English critical thinking about farming. The first developed in reaction to the tendency around the turn of the century to pose as more or less absolute alternatives the arable and grassland systems of farming. As earlier indicated, English farmers came under enormous pressures to change their arable land into pasture at the time of the English Great Depression in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. During that period, however, it was found by Robert Elliot that pastures should not necessarily be permanent if they were to be most beneficial. Essentially he appears to have been reviving the earlymodern idea of ley farming, usually known then as "up-down" or "convertible husbandry." Elliot argued that land should be put under a proper mixture of grasses (including especially deep-rooting plants) for several years and then ploughed, in order to realize its full potential fertility. He argued that a proper turf, when ploughed, is the most fertile soil; moister, warmer, and better aerated because the deep-rooting plants allow a buildup of humus deep within the soil structure. Elliot made much of

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the need for regionally adapted agricultural research. Starting around the time of the Great War, Sir George Stapledon carried the biological basis of Elliot's so-called Clifton Park System further by pointing out that careful broadening and adjustment of the grass population used for seeds can allow much finer local adaptation, which in turn allows for much better production.15 The allied emphasis of Sir Albert Howard on the effect of decaying matter on proper soil structure has already been alluded to. In his research during the interwar era, Howard came to the view that the health of the soil is a reliable indicator and governor of the health of the animals and humans living off its produce. This theme was taken up with passion by Lady Eve Balfour, who achieved some notoriety in her book "The Living Soil" by claiming that organically grown food is better to eat and not just to be favoured because its production methods are easier on the land. (Note that the issue here is not pesticide residues, as it is now with most consumer advocates of organic produce.) Conventional agricultural scientists trained in the school of Liebig to believe that plants only take up nutrients in the form of inorganic molecules have never accepted Lady Balfour's claim as plausible. The debate is still alive, however, and new research apparently indicates that at least some small quantities of organic compounds may be taken up by plants. But the actual physiology of their conversion into plant tissue is not yet clearly understood. Certain more orthodox agricultural scientists such as Sir John Russell (who was active in the period after World War n and wrote a popular classic entitled The World of the Soil) can almost be placed in the organic group as well, because of their emphasis on the diversity of life forms present in good soil. Today English organic farmers tend to hold composite theories that make use of the various themes listed here. The brand of farming they favour, with its emphasis on continual renewal of the soil structure and biota, is of very general applicability/11 Somewhat different in emphasis, but by no means contradictory, is Wes Jackson's current work on the American prairies. In New Roots for Agriculture, Jackson held that the prairies should have been left under their original polycultures of perennial grasses.™1 However, instead of counselling either traditional ley farming (up-down) with annual arable crops grown from time to time as the primary goal of the system, or mere animal raising on restored permanent grasslands, he suggests that we try to breed special perennials capable of yielding seeds that are directly useful to humans. His idea is to reseed the prairies to artificial polycultures of these plants, which would be ploughed under perhaps only every twenty years.

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Jackson's scheme calls into question the very basis of traditional agriculture, where typically a bare field is seeded to one kind of annual cereal plant that is removed or otherwise destroyed once harvested. As explained earlier, there are good evolutionary reasons why the seeds on annuals are apt to be larger than those on perennials. So Jackson's plant-breeding project (which is housed in his Land Institute in Kansas) represents an attempt to trick evolution. Still, there is no a priori reason why his work should fail. Equally, there is no reason to expect instant success! Perhaps the closest forerunner to Jackson as an interrogator of the very concept of agriculture was J. Russell Smith. His 1929 book Tree Crops has the intriguing subtitle Towards a Permanent Agriculture. It ranges widely over the history of our use of trees, especially fruit- and nut-bearing species. Smith emphasizes the many advantages of trees as plants. Their roots dig far more deeply into the earth, thereby operating in a far wider band of nutrient-and-water availability than surface crops. They require no ploughing and in general very little maintenance. Once established as mature trees they do not face serious competition from other plants. Their minimal labour requirements in particular point the way towards what is perhaps the most radical body of work on farming theory ever conceived, that of Masanobu Fukuoka. It is instructive to consider how Fukuoka arrived at his revolutionary "no-work" agriculture. In One-Straw Revolution he tells how, as a microbiologist customs inspector for the postwar Japanese government, he passed an abandoned rice paddy every day on his way to and from work. He could not help observing over the years that the field, even though it wasn't worked at all, was producing a small but respectable annual amount of rice. Watching over the seasons Fukuoka determined that the fortuitous timing of rain floods and consequent weed die-back played a crucial role in determining how securely the rice held sway in the field. Weeding (in its various guises ranging from digging with a hoe through ploughing to burning or flooding) has always been a very large part of the work involved in traditional agriculture. Fukuoka set out to devise a farming system that would extend the operation of the principles he saw at work in the abandoned field. The key to his scheme is perfect timing. If potential weeds are watched carefully in their lifecycle, then an optimal time can be found for killing them with a minimal amount of labour. It is necessary to be absolutely clear on the radical difference between this conception of the possibilities for directing nature and more conventional views on how to farm. Traditional farming everywhere relied on a great deal

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of labour, and twentieth-century agriculture can be said to rely instead on a severe simplification of the biological activity on the farm aided by the application of chemicals (including fossil fuels), which substitute for labour. Fukuoka's system, in striking contrast, substitutes mere attention for both labour and chemicals. As a species of intervention in natural processes, Fukuoka's farming is actually far more profoundly disruptive or "unnatural" than old-fashioned farming, which consisted in resignation to toil in the face of the surrounding biological complexity (the inexorable phenomenon of succession). However, unlike chemical farming, which tries to banish biology, Fukuoka's method frankly recognizes biotic complexity and deliberately exploits it. Fukuoka found after several decades of experimenting that a virtually work-free system can be set in motion, requiring only a very sharp biological eye. It is a fine matter to determine how long a mulch should be allowed to smother a weed while still allowing the crop to get established. Likewise the timing of flooding operations. Fukuoka also practises polyculture within his system and makes use of tree crops. It is almost certainly not the case that Fukuoka's system as developed over a twenty-year period for a particular plot of land in Japan could be generally applied, but the principles ought to be susceptible of application to other bioregions. What is required is a polyculture of plants whose lifecycles are sufficiently different but that can be interlocked to our advantage. Once the magic combination has been found and, with luck, further refined, the plants could perhaps be incorporated in rotations to subvert further the possibility of the establishment of large populations of pests. The general lesson here is far more optimistic than might have been expected. I early made the claim that the opportunities for indulging sloth that are inherent in hunting-gathering modes of "original affluence" became an impermissible luxury once population levels had passed a certain point. As the Bible "says" in Genesis 3: 16-19, agriculture along with procreation was our punishment. For millennia now the vast majority of people have had to work to get food and have done so mostly by means of forcing nature to be simple and immature. Turning to chemicals to save on labour has only exacerbated this strategic reliance. But if Fukuoka is correct it is really we who were simple and immature. Fukuoka's method consists in essence of substituting a chosen for a natural complexity. It may be that merely in respecting the principle of complexity, Fukuoka is showing us how to transcend conventional agriculture entirely by developing a system with levels of biological productivity that are close to those of immature communities, but possessed of the stability and

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staying power of climax communities. Such a synthesis of huntinggathering and agriculture sounds like biological sleight of hand, a chimerical attempt to cheat the inexorable phenomenon of succession. Of course, Fukuoka's farming does require some work if his system is to remain in possession of the land it is set up on. But in managing to substitute attention for toil, Fukuoka may be pointing to a radically different way for us to relate to each other because of the drastic reduction in necessary toil. For over a hundred years socialists have tended overwhelmingly to predicate visions of abundance on industry. It was never acknowledged that these industrial dreamworlds depended utterly on the exploitation of finite supplies of concentrated energy (fuels) and finite concentrated supplies of materials. Nor was attention paid to integrating the inevitable generation of wastes from such activities within the cycles of living nature. Fukuoka sidesteps all this. His work implies that if we look carefully, we can get inside ecological cycles and go for remarkable "free rides" within them. Unquestionably there is much to be gained from experimental research along the lines of Fukuoka's work, but it would need to be done countless times and in countless places. It is highly doubtful whether a general theory could be devised for "predicting" reliably the local adaptations that would be required in each place. Fukuoka's system relies on the very closest attention to local conditions. Hitherto scientific research in agriculture has been centralistic in thrust. A typical problem has been isolated, studied, and its results widely applied. Generalizing Fukuoka's approach in a sense requires the precise opposite, the most widespread study everywhere of the untypical — that is, the local. This work should be done by the persons who actually inhabit the place under study. They must be able to set up their own local version of no-work farming and protect both its ecological integrity (by means of strict control over land use) and its economic vitality (by means of strict control over the fate of its produce at the point when it enters the sphere of the wider social division of labour). The Need to Protect Sound Local Practices The prudential decision to protect locally adapted food-production methods is at bottom a value judgment, a decision to refuse the ubiquitous economic pressures from outside. It would be hard to find members of the organic-farming movement who do not also value the land they work on for its own sake. They would all assent, for example, to Wendell Berry's argument for not commoditizing land:

158 Agricultural Biocontexts for Future Persons In the industrial economy, value in the form of respect is withheld from the source, and value in the form of price is always determined by reference to a juture usability; nothing is valued for what it is. But when nothing is valued for what it is, everything is destined to be wasted. Once the values of things refer only to their future usefulness, then an infinite withdrawal of value from the living present is begun. Nothing (and nobody) can then exist that is not theoretically replaceable by something (or somebody) more valuable. Things of value begin to be de valued. The country that we (or some of us) had thought to make our home becomes instead "a nation rich in natural resources." The good bounty of the land begins its mechanical metamorphosis into junk, garbage, silt, poison and other forms of "waste." In such an economy, no farm or any other usable property can safely be regarded by anyone as a home. No home is ultimately worthy of our loyalty. Nothing is ultimately worth doing. No place or task or person is worth a lifetime's devotion.16

One might quibble with Berry here and say that it is not the emphasis on the future that is the problem so much as how foreshortened the conception of the "future" tends to be in contemporary society. The case of the English landlords surely illustrates this point. In any case, how can one now achieve a transformation of values sufficient to reverse the devaluation of land that Berry speaks of? The only hope lies in returning the economic focus to the locality where people actually live, not only the producers, but also the consumers of agricultural produce. I will later propose a means for achieving this, but here I shall simply review the kinds of responses that have been seen so far in practice. The agrarian commune represents the most extreme reaction to the problem, since it involves in effect a wholesale return to the economics of Aristotle's day. The household is declared to be "the economy," and every attempt is made by its members to minimize dependence on the "outside world." This has been the approach taken in various attempts to establish farming communes for over a hundred years. A few have been successful but the overall record of failure is unmistakable. Among the causes of failure are lack of financial strength at the start (which, as a rule, translates into the purchase or rental of poor-quality land) and, often, an injudicious, even volatile, mixture of motives (radical egalitarianism, for example, has nothing intrinsically to do with good farming, nor do the beliefs of many religious sects). But the two main reasons for failure, lack of experience and what can be termed "unthinking antimodernism," re-

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quire some elucidation. The first, which I have called lack of experience, is really another way of saying lack of relevant tradition. In chapter 2 it was emphasized that the ecological sophistication of English farming was the result of centuries of unconsciously collective experience. It takes a long time to learn how to farm a piece of land effectively. People setting out in groups to found self-sufficient agrarian communes are taking on an agronomic task that has usually taken centuries to carry out. If they ever face this fact head on (the communes rarely survive long enough for the matter even to arise), then they have to concede that they must thenceforth and "meanwhile" try to farm with indifference to place. This, as I have explained, implies reliance on off-farm (probably artificial) inputs, which immediately and totally undermines the desired independence. There is no third way out. Thus, for modern people to set up agrarian communes is, above all, to attempt the agriculturally impossible. Perhaps better known as a reason for failure is the pressure-cooker nature of social relations in a self-sufficient commune. People have to learn new modes of behaviour from scratch and under the most intimate circumstances, and this is bound to lead to friction. This has been described with exceptional clarity and thoughtfulness by Ronald Duncan in his Journal of a Husbandman, in which he reports on his attempt to set up an agrarian commune for conscientious objectors in England during World War u. Although Duncan does not quite consider the point this way, it could be said again that social history and anthropology could have told us that the relevant successful behaviour has always been culturally embedded to a profound extent. It is quite absurd for people to suppose that they can just jump in and out of cultures as they fancy. It is probably a modern conceit even to think of it. Of course, there have been small groups that possessed ways to live together in reasonable peace, but these "ways" were actually entire cultures (viz. the Mormons, the Amish).1* Again then, we see that the idea behind the contemporary commune is inherently implausible. It should be underlined that it is not the direct study of "human nature" that tells us so. It is history, and that is because history (at least now that it speaks of more than kings and generals) tells us about the historicity of human nature. There is such a thing as modern human nature and we cannot expect to be able to shed it all at once. In any case, there is no reason to suppose that if one dislikes modern society one must then be an advocate of small-scale communes. The question just how much of modernity we have to abandon in order to rid ourselves of its most alienating features will be

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discussed in the next section. I will return to the question of the feasibility of totalistic changes of culture in the final section on socialist transformation. Let me here consider just two other, more contemporary, less extreme (indeed more social) attempts from within modern society to protect the land, one of which raises some interesting questions about the nature of ownership. In Japan there are several examples of organic farmers who have been strikingly successful at keeping the wider market economy out of their affairs by the simple device of making year-long contracts with several urban households to provide what the town-dwellers want, grown as they want. Typically a small farmer has an arrangement with some twenty or thirty households on whom s/he may even call for a few days of work at times of peak labour needs. The urban families consume what the farmer seasonally provides at a prearranged price. This kind of system has not yet proliferated in Europe or North America, although some have been set up. In response to the recurring bouts of takeovers of family farms in the us by giant firms and trusts, numerous rural communities have evolved a legal device that they call the "community land trust." Concerned members of the farming community pool their resources and buy the threatened property themselves. They then make it available on a rental basis, generally to the original owners who were typically forced financially into selling in the first place. The upshot is that control over the land remains in the community of local users. Strictly speaking, this involves a community of producers only, for consumers (who of course are indirect users, but rarely local themselves) have not been integrated into these schemes. The device is nevertheless an interesting one because among other things it constitutes a radical break with the basis of modern property rights, the sovereign will of the present owner. Ownership in a community land trust is not attached to a single sovereign will but to a group, one whose members are evidently defined by their shared activity as land users in that place. In centring ownership on the use to be made of the land by the community of users, it becomes possible to connect current users to future ones (a functional equivalent, at least potentially, to the strict settlement). It can even be said that in thus retying ownership to use rather than to private "wills," the community land trusts are returning to some premodern legal norms. These have been described for the Italian case by Grossi.17 They also resemble some of the many unusual property forms found in cases where a commons, such as a defined fishing ground, is being used by some defined community of users.18 These are all welcome reminders of the sheer variety of legal devices that

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can be conceived. The formalizing and streamlining thrust of modernity has done much to obscure this point in the last few hundred years. There are doubtless scores of interesting precedents to work with. But in light of the considerations advanced earlier in this chapter, it can be seen that the "failure" of the community land trusts, for example, to incorporate transformed relations with consumers remains a serious weakness. So long as consumption is not linked to the alternative proposals, the problematic features of modernity have only been tackled by half. In sum we may say that our problem is how to set up a fledgling local economy, incorporating both consumers and producers, centred on its own specially adapted food production, and able to survive in the homogenizing world economy. Obviously mere exhortation cannot be enough. The only things that can compel nonviolently in this regard are social institutions. Inasmuch as we are to a considerable extent defined by our institutions/9 especially our institutions of trade, we would be foolish not to consider designing them to suit our purpose. I will explore in the next section a social device for manifesting a division of labour that is capable indeed of allowing the secure institutionalization of local-protective economic behaviour. SECTION 3

F O R M S OF M O N E Y AND

THE

D I V I S I O N OF LABOUR

One element in the socialist vision that goes back at least as far as More's Utopia is the elimination of money. Money has, with some justice, long been associated by socialists with the capacity to exploit labourers. The mechanism for this was ably dissected by Marx in his famous formula: M - c ... P ... c' - M'

In this scheme the sequence of events is as follows. The possessor of a sum of money (M) uses it to purchase labour power and raw materials and other needed means of production in the form of commodities (c). In applying their labour to the raw material in the production process (P), the labourers convert it into another commodity (c'), which can command a higher price than the sum of the expenses on raw materials, other means of production, and labour power. The nature of labour contracts is such that this differential accrues exclusively to the original holder of M. The legal convention is that labour power is paid according to what it costs to maintain itself, not according to what it contributes to the production process, that is, not ac-

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cording to the size of the difference between c and c'. For of course if c were not in general smaller than c', labour power would not be employed at all. The differential is not realized by the owner of what was made into c', however, until c' is sold. At that point the sum of money M' (greater than M) can materialize in the pocket that initially contained only M. There is a distinct element of magic in the formula but it has been common for socialists to ascribe to money the role of institutional villain. In the garb of wages money appears to be adequately compensating the labourers but in reality it is not (and herein lies the element of exploitation), because it is actually the vehicle for sequestering from the possession of the labourers of part of labour's product. Hence the usual account of money's inherent evil. Most nonsocialists adopt the pure fetishist's perspective and suppose money is just inherently able to increase. Now any full explanation of the M-M' formula must account for labour power being typically in the position of having to accept this kind of deal. How comes it that at the outset one person (more properly, class) has M, and the others (of a different class) have only their labour power? Sociohistorical explanations dealing inter alia with land ownership are absolutely required to give substance to the story. Only those who lack direct access to land, the ultimate source of the means of subsistence, can be expected to "choose" to work for wages and thus subject themselves to exploitation. Nevertheless - and here a crucial confusion of issues occurs - Marxists have habitually argued that money in general (in itself) possesses the ability to be a vehicle for exploitation. Wherever there is money, so the account runs, the above kind of story is both possible (so much is claimed to be known a priori) and probably actual (so much is surmised). Such a conclusion about the general social meaning of money does not necessarily follow, as I will explain, but it has provided socialists with their background motivation in calling for the elimination of money under socialism. Strikingly, the real elimination of money has not been attempted on a large scale in socialist practice. To some extent, Soviet planners tried to make use of "material-balances" plans expressed in physical terms, but the Soviet system and all subsequent variants have always also used money - a temporary concession, according to those selfstyled orthodox Marxists who believed, with Engels, that money would finally disappear under communism because it would eventually lose its function. In this sanguine view, people properly socialized under communism would simply come to appropriate from the common stock what they actually needed and could use, and nothing more. There would be no need under such full communism for accounting

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of any sort, whether in monetary or physical terms. Either with abundance achieved or greed eliminated (a fortiori with both conditions obtaining), scarcity would no longer be felt and so the need to watch over resources would also disappear. So much for the old "orthodox" vision. Meanwhile, in recent decades as the (Soviet-style) system of central planning of large, complex economies came to be perceived as unwieldy and therefore wasteful, there developed a "reformist" call for greater use of the "market mechanism." This would certainly have entailed an increased role for a kind of money. For what the so-called "market-socialist" reformers of the 19605 and 19705 sought was really only a means to deal with the fact of overall social anarchy in supposedly "planned" production, rather than the dogmatic institutionalization of a system of strictly automatic price determination (as the "free marketeers" have since been allowed to do). The reformist aim had been somehow to pressure factories and other units of production to become less profligate with resources by making them take more responsibility over their own flows of revenue and expenses. There were some trends in that direction under Gorbachev, but even if the process had gone far the resemblance to capitalism would have remained superficial. For in such hybrid arrangements it need not be the case either that all goods get routed through anarchic "markets," or that all such "markets" be integrated in an overall price-setting system. One could say of Soviet-style economies in the period from the 19605 to the end of the USSR a) that the Soviet economy was relying increasingly on the "market," or b) that the Soviet system was relying increasingly on a kind of money. Many would carelessly suppose each statement to be expressing the same point, but the second is much more precise, though it might not appear so. In sum, it seems that a "moneyish" substance was playing an increasing role again in the Soviet system and that many reformers wanted the process to go further. If one does not appreciate all the possible uses for monies, the reformers' point is subject to misidentification or else remains obscure. Of course the "market-socialism" model has become irrelevant for the foreseeable future, given the developments of 1990-91. The new rulers decided with breathtaking naivety to try to institute fully price-setting markets for all goods. In any case, the old socialist vision of doing away with money altogether seems further away than ever. The more dogmatic advocates of the wider use of the "market mechanism" gleefully point to this whole episode and charge, rather hastily, that we now know that money can never be dispensed with under socialism because socialism cannot avoid the use of analogues of the capitalist market.20 This stick has been used with particular brutality to beat those Marxists who are

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most afraid of money's socially corrupting influence. However, as with the standard Marxist argument outlined above, the argument of the "marketeers" appears compelling and reasonable only because of systematic ambiguity in the concepts of "money" and "market" they employ. In fact, it is quite likely that socialism would use certain kinds of money well into any conceivable future, but it is not the case that any and every use of money is bound up with the possibility of exploitation, or entails the presence of the market mechanism. This rather complex point needs considerable elaboration. My purpose in this section is to advance an analysis of the relation between money and modernity (the latter defined as the presence of a complex division of specialized interdependent labour in society) so as to be able to sort out this confusion about the implications of money for socialist experimentation. I shall describe a successful current experiment with a special form of money that facilitates the division of labour but in no way implies the inevitability of exploitation or the presence of a market mechanism. It also has other virtues from the ecological point of view that is being advanced throughout this work. I will touch on that at the end of this section and elaborate on it in the next. Distinguishing the Several Functions of Monies

In the context of this discussion, the outstanding error thus far in both the Marxist and liberal traditions has been to pay insufficient attention to the social implications of the simple fact that money substances can (and usually do) serve several different purposes simultaneously. Karl Polanyi's work in theoretical anthropology21 is absolutely crucial to a proper understanding of money in general and of any special kinds or uses of money. In considering the question whether the presence of money in a ("primitive" or archaic) society allowed the inference that price-setting markets were operating, Polanyi clarified the notion that the various functions of money might be not merely analytically but also actually separable. He concluded that the common inference in question, from the existence of money to the presence of price-setting markets, was occasionally valid, but not necessarily so. In any given case, one had to bring in independent evidence to support the claim that a price-setting market was operating. Upon examination, a particular money stuff could often be shown to be serving only one function, e.g., that of an accounting unit. In some societies not all the possible functions of money are actually called for. The roles of money might be played severally, and only, by special-purpose monies incapable of playing more than one

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(or a few) of the possible roles. It is only modern society that has typically seen the coalescence of all the functions of money into one multipurpose money stuff.22 This artefact of history has greatly misled economists, both Marxist and non-Marxist. They have supposed that recourse to only one money substance is a given for modern society. This position is so deeply ingrained that it has never been seriously explored, let alone justified. At various times when the conventional monetary system has broken down, there has been recourse on an ad hoc basis to the use of additional special-purpose or local currencies. This was notably the case during the Great Depression in the us.23 The question of monetary alternatives to the unitary conception was given passable theoretical treatment prior to World War i by Silvio Gesell24 (who consequently merited an approving aside from Keynes),25 but orthodoxy was quite unshaken at the time and remains so to this day. The only monetary system known to most of the public (and approved officially) is that wherein all payments are made in, and all transactions of commodities are mediated by, the same kind of money stuff that is expected to serve all the other functions of money as well. The issue is of interest because I am here looking for ways precisely to institutionalize distinctions among use-values, on grounds both of humanity and ecology. The revival of special-purpose currencies could be of great assistance in this respect. But in order to forestall the cries of Marxist purists, who will suppose the door is being opened to exploitation, and the gloating of marketeers, who will be apt to suppose that any socialism using money (even many monies) must be a slave to the market mechanism, it is necessary to go into the theory of money at some length. The distinctions among the various functions of money must be clarified and the question asked whether each of these can exist on its own. This will involve clarifying the inherent social meaning of a division of labour, for clarity on that score is necessary before one can address the question how to forestall the possibility of exploitation of labour. I shall here discuss five of the conceivable functions of money, presented in order (more or less) of their likely actual historical appearance:26 means of payment, unit of account, store of wealth, means of exchange, and measure of value. In any society some good may be designated as a more or less official means of payment for discharging certain forms of obligation. The stuff in question may or may not play some other "moneyish" roles27 and may have essentially nothing to do with the substantive economic life of the society making use of it as a standard means of payment. The social division of labour may be completely unmediated by such or any other money.

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Societies may also designate the same or some other stuff as a more or less official unit of account. Records may be kept, for example, of stores of a set of goods, all regarded as convertible for accounting purposes into a common unit of account. The convertibility may only ever be hypothetical. It need not imply that trades (actual acts of exchange) involving the goods within that set ever actually occur inside the society. It may happen that many different sorts of good are actually converted into just one sort for the purpose of storing wealth. This seems to imply the existence of trade, but still may not be an expression of the division of labour. It may be that the wealth is being stored exclusively against possible use in war, or trade between communities that are otherwise self-sufficient (i.e., not parts of some wider division of labour), for purposes having essentially nothing to do with substantive economic questions. A good (more usually, set of goods) may be designated as means of exchange. The presence of money stuffs serving this role does presuppose, and is entailed by, a division of labour that needs mediating over geographical or social distance. This does not in itself imply anything about the existence of price-setting markets. It can be that every deal is individually negotiated without reference to past deals involving similar use-values. Or it may be that all trade is conducted according to purely conventional ratios of goods to each other. These ratios (or "prices") may be decided by fiat of authority, public consultation, or other explicit social process. Money in its use as means of exchange only allows the inference to the existence of price-setting markets if it is also being used as a measure of value. The measure-of-value function is a very special possible function of a money stuff that has necessarily already to be serving as a means of exchange. In extremis, this function requires not only that all commodity transactions be mediated by the same means of exchange but that all use-values take the commodity form. This very special case (nowhere fully realized in history) is the supposedly general one addressed by economic theory. If realized, it would have the value of all goods (including inputs in their production) not only commensurable in theory but actually measured against each other. Before explaining how a kind of money can measure value, we must first ask why one would want value to be measured; in other words, what is value? The answer is unfortunately not clear. Many (Joan Robinson notably) have argued on seemingly plausible grounds that value itself is nothing, that it is a merely metaphysical postulate (in the bad sense of "metaphysical" borrowed from mid-century analytical philosophy).28 This is hardly satisfactory as an answer. Especially if value has no

167 Possible Forms for Communities meaning - is a matter of ratios and thus pure number, as it were then what is the point of any such complex integrated system as that presupposed for its quantifiability? Economic theory has generally just assumed that having all goods possessed of some quantity in terms of which all are mutually expressible is a desirable state of affairs. In fact, it is not at all obvious what useful social purpose is served by such an arrangement. One could set up a rational calculus with all inputs and outputs thus mutually expressible and go on to determine, for example, that for some given circumstance it would be advisable, for the sake of expanding the overall product (as measured in this single unit), to "economize" on such and such a commodity. All the advocates of an economic calculus under socialism make essentially this argument.29 But for any such putative guide to economic action rationally to compel our assent we must first agree that nothing important is lost by considering all use-values to be commensurable. No argument for this fundamental point has ever been advanced. It has always just been implied that it is true. As I have been at pains to argue, much may indeed be lost, even the very possibility of life, unless we take distinctions among use-values seriously. Of course in a society with capitalist relations of production (i.e., marked by the widespread presence of the kind of exploitative wage contract outlined at the beginning of this section), it is possible, by having all use-values commensurable, greatly to facilitate the accumulation of pure value in the hands of the purchasers of labour power. In that case it is clear what purpose all this commensurability serves: the private purposes of those in a position to hire labour power. It is Uno who has explained the social meaning of the measure of value function of money with especial clarity, and this is because it necessarily (in his view) forms the foundation argument for his theory of a purely capitalist society, defined as a society in which all wealth takes the commodity form. This notion of Uno's may need some explanation (the point was never properly clarified by Marx, whose analysis of capitalism arbitrarily and asymmetrically treated more of the production than of the circulation of commodities). If all commodities are put up for sale in an anonymous "market" by merchants who cannot know in advance what price consumers are willing to pay for any given class of item, then the merchants must be willing to experiment with the price. If they put too low a price on a commodity there will appear a queue of customers eager to take advantage of the deal. If they then put too high a price on the commodity the stream of customers will shrink or disappear. By such a groping process of trial and error merchants can thus "discover"

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iteratively what their society's demand for a commodity is. They convey this information to the producers, who then will be able to determine in the light of other prices (those of raw materials and labour power and rent) whether there is room for a profit margin or not. Thus are prices set. This is how a market system must work if it is to do the socially useful job of guiding decisions about the allocation of productive resources (the social usefulness premised, of course, on the assumed harmlessness of postulating the commensurability of all use-values). One little-remarked but crucial feature of this story is that it is money as the accepted means of exchange that is allowing the value of a commodity to be measured (and expressed) in a unit of account common to all commodities. The process could not happen at all without such money and it would not be a case of measurement as such were different monies to be used for different goods or for the otherwise distinguishable purposes of, on the one hand, accounting and, on the other, means of exchange. Further, for the measurement to take place, there must occur, for each good, multiple instances of purchase by consumers. It cannot be generally the case that merchants can simply guess correctly what the demand for a good is. Uno regarded this last point as especially serious for the theoretical conception of a purely capitalist society and its realizability in history. If the economy contains a great many goods that are very costly to produce and that consequently (or for some other reason) are not subject to several actual instances of anonymous purchase, then the value of such commodities cannot be measured. They cannot take on the full commodity form that requires their actually being compared, in principle, to any and all other commodities in a self-consistent system of prices.x What alone can make the system self-consistent is the use of the same money stuff as a yardstick throughout the economy. Under these conditions, with all use-values going through this inherently social (although anonymous) valuation process, the distance between production and consumption is great, indeed infinite. What could possibly guarantee that a society that passes its use-values through this complex process could reproduce itself from one day to the next? As I mentioned in the discussion of the general norms of economic life, Uno argued that it was crucial for at least the direct producers of use-values to have guaranteed access to what they need in order to live. They cannot do this unless their wages and the prices of what they purchase are somehow tethered. As Sekine explained it (and as Savran also noted),30 this is the true substance of the labour theory of value.31 The price system, to be a viable one, cannot merely be consistent, it must be realistic in just this sense.

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The vast majority of Marxists, however, have typically used the labour theory of value in the context, for example, of a discussion of the M-M' formula to try to prove that exploitation occurs. This is a perversion of the essential social meaning (and explanatory purpose) of the labour theory of value. The anchoring of prices to value is a solution to the problem of how society itself is possible at all under the condition of so extremely indirect a relation to use-values. This "indirectness" is a problem not only under capitalism but under any large-scale social arrangement that is complex in that way. Beginning with Barone, economists interested in the general problem of "rational allocation" have from time to time discussed whether central planning could solve the problem of measurement, of how to price goods. It was argued that planners could carry out the groping or "tatonnement" just as easily, probably more surely in Lange's view, than "the market." This was somehow held to show that a socialist economy was at least as possible as a capitalist economy.32 But this supposedly comforting result was achieved at the considerable expense of drastically reducing the difference between the capitalist case and the putative socialist case. It is not at all clear, for instance, why work should be less alienating under such planned socialism, even with the meaning of the wage contract redefined to banish the phenomenon of one class exploiting another. The classical socialist view was that with all work legally defined as having been performed for all people, rather than by some (workers) for other individuals (capitalists), work would ipso facto be more humanly meaningful. That this proved psychologically naive should not be a surprise, given that it has often been precisely the personal element in capitalist exploitation that has served as a countervailing force against alienation (witness the notorious phenomenon of proletarian loyalty to the master of a small workshop or farm). The socialist inattention to scale here betrayed a lack of realism about what truly human relations can be, and how they are inherently a function of scale more than any other variable. It thus predetermined (however unwittingly) a particular version of what "the problem" in socialist economics is taken to be. Participants in the socialist pricing debates evidently assumed that socialism would simply be more just as a social system, but no less anonymous, than capitalism. The operative word here may be "system." The new and better social system was conceived to be too complex to be entrusted to mere people. So complex, in fact, that its reproducibility from day to day would not be apparent to its members and indeed could hardly be ensured even by a vast array of special bureaucrats, unless the heterogeneity of use-values were somehow tamed by more

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or less arbitrarily making them "commensurable." As soon as goods are declared to vary in only one dimension, as it were, then either the market or the plan can be called in to ensure society's viability. Sufficiently well prepared plans can ensure viability just as well as any market system, and since planning can also facilitate the explicit inclusion of other considerations, viz. economic justice, it appeared to be the only sensible choice for socialists. Now, in sharp contrast to the other extreme of a self-sufficient peasant household, an enormous society relating indirectly to an enormous number of goods is too complex an entity to be directly comprehended by a person. In this Nove and Co. are surely correct, but it begs the question whether such complex but monolithic societies are suitable for humans. Why would anyone choose this form of unidimensional complexity for social relations among persons, and between persons and use-values, that results from making use-values commensurable (i.e., pretending that their differences do not really matter)? The commensurability of use-values was needed by capitalism but it is a bequest socialism should reject. If it is true that any large-scale modern society would nonetheless require this commensurability on other grounds, as seems to be probable, then the proper inference is that large-scale societies are to be eschewed. For those actually worrying about it, the nontransparency of society's reproducibility becomes less frightening as the scale goes down. In any case, properly speaking, the problem for socialism is how to facilitate the personal comprehension of social being. But such comprehension, to be real, need not imply a return to peasant life or other kind of anarchistic withdrawal; to suppose so is illogical and unimaginative. Surely some intermediate and more flexible position is possible. Can we not conceive of other kinds of social complexity than the unidimensional variety? Or, to return to earlier terminology, do we need to take modernity to the extreme just to reap some of its benefits? In fact, the general problem posed here can be tackled on two fronts. First, we need to reduce the scale of the social problem. Our proposal of federated, bioregionally anchored communities attempts to address that. Second, we need more in the way of institutions that facilitate direct relations (including substantive economic relations) between people, not more or better institutions that merely try to solve the problem generated by clinging to the kind of arrangement that was predicated on the abandonment of direct relations. A New Money for a New Social Form A device for facilitating trade between persons already exists in the experimental local currency in use in, among other places, the Comox

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Valley on Vancouver Island. The concept of Local Exchange Trading System(s) (LETS) in its final version is the result of experiments with prototypes carried out on Vancouver Island over the last several years by David Weston and Michael Linton.33 The original intention did not exploit the system's full potential. In relatively out-of-the-way towns and villages in a region whose economy is primarily resource extractive, cyclical unemployment can cause severe local cash-flow problems for individuals and local businesses. The original idea of a nonprofit local-currency system was that it could stimulate economic activity at the local level without implicating either the state or the conventional (national-level) banking system. While, strictly speaking, the LETS concept belongs to a whole family of local-currency systems, the mechanics of the particular system developed on Vancouver Island could not be simpler. Since overall the scheme is extraordinarily effective, it alone will be considered in detail here. When two member individuals (or businesses, or combination of an individual and a business) agree to a trade (a particular act of exchange), they contact the LETS office, typically by telephone, and announce their names and the sum involved. The latter is expressed in purely nominal (so-called "green") dollars. A debit is recorded under the name of the purchaser and a precisely equal credit under the name of the seller, using account books or a computer. In contrast to barter, however, the two parties need not wait until they can do a reciprocal deal with each other. The vendor may spend the credit (or part of it) with any other person or firm willing to trade under the system. Likewise the purchase may pay off the debt by performing some service or selling some good to some other party. At all times the system is in a state of perfect monetary stability. The absolute value of the money supply necessarily remains zero. LETS projects have generally found it advantageous to have some individuals carry large credits as a kind of pump primer for the minieconomy. People tend at first to be reluctant to spend, believing they have little to offer in return. But the system has eventually had a liberating effect on the self-esteem of many individuals who indeed may have had nothing of value to offer from the perspective of the conventional, "outside" economy. Small scale seems to be no disadvantage under this system. On the contrary, personal relations typically count for a great deal. LETS have been set up all over the world in different social contexts but have so far proven most effective in fairly small rural communities where people know one another. The bad-debt possibility is of course always there. A person could come into a community, run up a debit collecting goods and services, and then leave without making any, or adequate, return to the community economy. This problem is obviated by the optional nature of any deal

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and by both parties' access to continual knowledge of the other's current balance and total volume of trade to date. If for one party the former is negative and about equal to the latter, then it is directly clear to the first party that the other is failing to contribute. People tend simply to refuse a proffered trade with someone they are suspicious of. Of course, members are also at any time free to trade using conventional currency instead of, or in addition to, the "green" dollars. The flexibility of the system in this regard is such that any deal may consist of a mixture, in whatever proportion is mutually convenient, of both or more currencies. Only the part denominated "in green," however, is recorded by the system. Interestingly, in mixed deals, it has generally been the case that the system serves to single out what we can call the local value-added component. It is common, for example, for a person carrying out repairs for another to charge for parts (perhaps only externally available) in regular money and for labour "in green." This has the effect of heightening people's grasp of the nature and extent of their dependence on the rest of the world. LETS have thus been found to be educative as well as liberating. People come to see that it is obviously to everyone's advantage, locally, to try to recolonize the economy at large, but the crucial point is that they may do this at whatever pace and to whatever extent they feel comfortable with. And any change can easily be undone, if so desired. The standard of value implicitly in use is typically more or less the same as that found in the regular economy. There is no reason to expect the "prices" agreed upon by agents in the system for any given type of use-value to diverge significantly from each other, or from those in the wider economy. This is because the purchaser and vendor have precisely opposite interests in this respect. They are personally free, however, to express new valuations of services and goods that may, for example, have been chronically undervalued in the conventional economy because of historical conditions. The gender split in pay scales is a case in point. Any and every deal done using new valuations creates some degree of social pressure on other members to conform to the new valuations. The complete freedom of the community of users thus to alter some price ratios without immediately causing problems elsewhere allows a local flexibility to begin a process of social change that can be as specific, or as openended, as the members desire. The fact that the standard of value is only "more or less" in line with that in use in the rest of the economy should in no way occasion theoretical scandal or fiscal alarm.xl The implied price "system" can be internally inconsistent and there can be

173 Possible Forms for Communities

as a result no substance to value. It only matters when it matters, so to speak. This lack of "economic" meaning to the price system can have no deleterious social consequences so long as social reproduction is otherwise guaranteed. Now, under socialism, labour is supposed to be decommodified. How then could social reproduction be guaranteed if the price system were inconsistent, which it might well be in a socialism employing LETS, or a similar personal currency system? In the kind of socialist economic framework I have been sketching in this work, social reproduction would ex hypothesi be explicitly (and, as it were, self-consciously) in the hands of land-owning communities involved intimately in locally designed and planned agricultural intervention in nature. This is not at all the situation obtaining in the typical modern community, tangled as it is in a web of intricate and wide-ranging, more or less incomprehensible economic relations with nature (some of which are crucial, others of which are absolutely trivial). The orthodox, all-pervasive, unitary, multipurpose money system in use in modern society allows of no such distinctions between what does and does not matter for social reproduction. In his contribution to a recent book entitled Socialist Dilemmas: East and West, Sekine has developed a model for a socialist economy containing cities and a state sector, but fundamentally based in land-owning communities and able to manifest explicitly some sharp distinctions among use-values (viz. his "quantitative-qualitative" distinction described in section 4 of chapter i). Sekine called his model "Socialism as a Living Idea" and used his own "tableau economique" to demonstrate its viability in a simple but effective manner. Unlike a system where use-values are homogenized by the plan or market and reproduction can only have an indirect guarantee, in Sekine's "Living Socialism" reproducibility is susceptible of straightforward, deliberate institutionalization. For this general and inherently social purpose LETS or some analogues would be strikingly useful. LETS are also remarkably well suited to flexible institutionalization of ecologically grounded distinctions among use-values, as I will show. First I shall examine some of the likely effects of widespread use of LETS on certain characteristic economic tendencies today. One striking similarity between the purely capitalist and centralplanning ways of compensating for the possibly infinite social distance between production and consumption comes to light when one considers the way the consumer in extremis becomes a mere nuisance to either kind of economy. This insidious perversion is perhaps best set off by simply recalling the very origins of the word "economy" in the concept of household management. But centrally planned econo-

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mies have been notorious for not assigning priority to consumer goods. This was long deliberately intended because of military priorities and so may be a merely contingent result, but it is in any case unsurprising. Human beings have never been in control of such systems. A purely capitalist society, however, is supposed to have competitive production of all use-values, and so consumer sovereignty was expected by many economists to reign in economies tending that way.™ So it appears in theory, perhaps, but the probability of this theoretical possibility being realized is, as Uno pointed out, very much a function of the nature and scale of the typical use-values being produced in the economy. Obviously few producers will attempt use-values that require large-scale, expensive production facilities, and so competition in the supplying of such goods scarcely develops. The same considerations apply to use-values going through highly centralized networks of distribution, which is increasingly the case in the contemporary world. There is every advantage to the system in confining the consumer to fewer real choices, especially while consumer caprice is being pandered to more and more (by way, as it were, of compensation). As Raup disarmingly explained with respect to the business of making European agriculture more "efficient," it was essential first to realize that the "necessity now is to reorganize consumer preference scales."34 Significantly, the context of his remark included the "problem" posed for contemporary agriculture by the large number of local varieties of fruit in the EEC. The bureaucrats' goal, apparently, is fewer varieties more widely shipped. One advantage of LETS is that they constitute highly effective defences against such crypto-Stalinist "efficiency" directives from the centre, whether Moscow, Brussels, or some corporation's headquarters. There are several other advantages to the multicurrency idea. The transparency of any exploitation that might be attempted through a LETS is a strong disincentive to persons inclined to try. From the perspective of my earlier theoretical discussion of the functions of money, the most interesting feature of the LETS model is that, as used thus far, it isolates, perhaps for the first time in history, the means-ofexchange function of money. At present "green" dollars cannot serve as a means of payment for such things as local taxes or other formal obligations. Bearing no interest, they are in relative terms most unattractive as a store of wealth. Being tethered to a community of identified persons they are hard to use in an M-M' sequence of deals, so their usability as capital is minimized. This current isolation of one of the possible functions of money sanitizes it, as it were. Of course there is nothing to prevent, and much to recommend, the immediate implementation of Linton's interesting idea of having local taxes at

175 Possible Forms for Communities

least partially payable "in green." This would compel the local spending of the revenue collected, which in many cases would be beneficial. Since a LETS can be set up for any form of "community" that shares either space or some common purpose, it would be possible to confine some kinds of intercommunity trade to one or more specialpurpose LET systems. From my perspective the obvious candidate here would be agricultural goods. It would be easier to keep track of the cycle of production-consumption-waste undergone by these goods if the cycle were mediated by a specific money. I will discuss this further at the start of the next section. In general, as many (or as few) special-purpose monies as desired can be set up. For example, there is nothing to prevent the use of a special-purpose LETS for long-distance trade in specified goods, where that particular LETS is itself a member of another (perhaps community-level) LETS. In this way the interfacing of a lived-in, defined community with the rest of the world could be facilitated and yet monitored. When we use multipurpose money, we lose track of it, since such monies leave no traces. With LETS ecological accounting and trade can be carried out at the same time and essentially for the same amount of effort. I submit that such a flexible facilitating device opens up new vistas for socialism. In unitary money systems economic monitoring is typically not only an extra chore but also an inhibitory factor. Conventional socialists may expostulate that this is not really money at all but just an accounting system, or that all this accounting is not necessary and rather inhuman to boot. The first charge, I would argue, is absolutely true but nothing to get upset about, since an accounting system is all socialism can need. The second charge, which is somewhat inconsistent with the first, is both dubious and frankly visionary. Should any group of people decide completely to abandon the use of any and every kind of "money," any and every kind of accounting, they should do so without forcing their optimism on others less sanguine than themselves. On the other hand, it wouldn't require upheaval to further any detected "withering away" of money. The fact that no revolution would be required to alter the system is a corollary of the fact that no revolution is necessary to set it up. I will explore the general social implications of this point in the last section, after considering the usefulness of the LETS concept for instituting ecologically sound agriculture, in both the short and long terms. Socialists surely need no reminding how rarely they get to see such a linking of the distant future with possible "tomorrows."

176 Agricultural Biocontexts for Future Persons Establishing and Protecting Local Agricultures

Imagine a region in which the ownership of farmland was in hands other than those of the farmers themselves. If it were stipulated that a portion of the rent must be paid in "green" currency obtainable to the farmers only through sales of organically grown produce to locals, the landowner(s) would have also to spend locally the credits accruing in respect of the "green" rent. The local agricultural economy would thus have a guaranteed economic basis that could be set at whatever scale seemed suitable at first and then adjusted upwards as feasible. Alternatively, if land in a given region was held typically by owneroccupiers, the local township government could simply waive taxes and stipulate a "rental" charge in "green" payable by the farmers in return for a guaranteed local market. The local government could spend the "green" currency in hiring local people to labour on publicworks projects, such as road maintenance, and these persons would in turn purchase agricultural goods from the farmers. By adding locally produced "qualitative" goods into the fledgling economy an extension of the still locally grounded division of labour could be supported. There would even emerge an incentive within the system for farmers (and others with access to land) to develop locally sourced, agriculturally derived substitutes for some of the (typically industrial) quantitative inputs to the qualitative-goods sector. By such means a local community can begin to "take back the economy" and start the long process of marginalizing industrial methods of production. A region that decides to do this can go it alone or act as a player in a broader game of social transformation. If, for example, the country at large wanted to try to institute something resembling Sekine's model, federating agricultural communities with urban areas, it could be simply stipulated by a revamping of federal tax arrangements that "rent" accrue to each rural region in a special state-level currency on defined portions of cities. For example, Stormont County, Ontario, could be assigned this new rental on Place Ville Marie in Montreal. The inhabitants of the rural region would be able to spend their credits in this state currency only on quantitative goods produced in urban factories. Declaring the rural regions, rather than the monarch, state or any private interest, to be the final owners at law not only of the lands they farm but also of all urban real estate would give them an interest in imposing proper land-use restrictions on whatever state or other enterprises were severally producing industrial quantitative goods in the urban regions.™1 All this can be done without unduly disturbing existing legal relations since at one level it is purely nominal change. The inhabi-

177 Possible Forms for Communities

tants of each urban region (or neighbourhood, if it seemed better to subdivide) could negotiate to join some rural economies so as to gain access to agricultural goods. By the term "agricultural" I mean here something broader than field-produced, more like "life-produced," so as to include wood, fish, wool, etc., not just vegetation edible by humans. At this point the farmers would have a much-expanded and steady market on which to base expanded production plans. Presumably the farm communities would be happy to spend their credits with city-dwellers who were able to supply specialized services such as education, medicine, music, etc. Sekine has shown that the viability of such a division of labour can be demonstrated schematically. I urge here that by using distinct currencies for trade in distinct classes of goods and other transactions, the system's inner workings will become all the more visible to itself. The "circulatory system" of society would be highlighted, as if by the use of dyes. It must also be emphasized that as many or as few LETS, as large or as small, as people desire can be employed at any stage in this model. For example, if a community is fearful that the effective extent of the local division of labour might be inadequate, it can decide initially to cast a wider net. On the other hand, once a LETS becomes too large to be personally satisfying it can simply divide, like a living cell. Recalling the eventual promise of Fukuoka's methods, we might expect rural LETS to shrink geographically as the productivity of their land base is enhanced by ever-finer local knowledge of the potential of the ecological cycles on site. It is striking and even amusing that in the model advocated here the shrinkage of economic circuits is the best index of success. The contrast with the growth orientation of the conventional, ecologically blind economic systems in use today could hardly be more stark. Moreover, while open to taxation, the new wealth and its flows will be accessible neither to bankers nor to international speculators. The complete flexibility in matters of pace coupled with the constant entrenchment of whatever local economic gains are made renders the "pathway to Utopia" depicted here quite unlike any other proposal, past or present, for social transformation. SECTION 4

PATHWAYS TO U T O P I A

I have been urging throughout this work that agriculture should be made central again in the economy. This goal, however, is not only to be expected as the end result of a successful transition to an ecologically sound version of socialism. On the contrary, I argue here that it can serve as the starting point for the transformative process. By

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initiating LETS minieconomies for local agricultures, a set of catalysts for the further cultural transformation towards some "fuller" socialism can be established. I will show how this might be done and then go on to discuss, by way of contrast, the more usual conception of the transition to socialism through revolution, enumerating some of its characteristic defects. The revolutionary strategy arguably always entails an unacceptably dangerous degree of cultural upheaval. The flexible, nontotalistic model for socialism developed in this chapter promises to sidestep that problem while still heralding significant change. Revolutions and Cultural Change

Lamentations about the cultural violence visited upon persons and communities in England during the process of forced acclimatization to capitalist social norms are common in the socialist literature. As noted before, early socialist visions were of a markedly rural cast since they were developed at a time when industrial capitalism could plausibly be viewed as a temporary aberration. Now, while I have argued that the twentieth century has seen the disintegration of the nearest thing to a purely capitalist society - mid-nineteenth-century England - and that there have been no trends towards its establishment elsewhere, I would not try to argue that capitalist ideology and capitalist social norms are moribund today. Quite the contrary. The twentieth century has seen the real death of laissez-faire but also the recrudescence of its dream-life. People imagine or hear that we live in a "market system" but actually we inhabit a loosely integrated arrangement whereby government military spending in a few key countries underwrites the fundamental viability of corporate activity (both industrial and financial) while also including a "safety net" for victims of the shifting allegiances of industrial investors. Culturally, the consequences of this disjuncture between reality and appearance for the socialist movement have been extremely awkward. Consider the following passage from Karl Polanyi's The Great Transformation: A social calamity is primarily a cultural not an economic phenomenon ... Cultural catastrophes involving broad strata of the common people can naturally not be frequent; but neither are cataclysmic events like the Industrial Revolution - an economic earthquake which transformed within less than half a century vast masses of the inhabitants of the English countryside from settled folk into shiftless migrants ... Not economic exploitation, as often assumed, but the disintegration of the cultural environment of the victim is then the cause of the degradation. The economic process may,

179 Possible Forms for Communities naturally, supply the vehicle of the destruction, and almost invariably economic inferiority will make the weaker yield, but the immediate cause of his undoing is not for that reason economic; it lies in the lethal injury to the institutions in which his social existence is embodied. The result is a loss of self-respect and standards.35

Consider now the cultural basis of personality in the wealthy parts of the world today. If the psychological violence entailed by too rapid institutional change was needed to inculcate the ideology of capitalism, surely an equal violence would be required to dismantle the nowentrenched version. The first section of this chapter set out the particular considerations that make worthwhile the project of eventually dismantling the systemic atomistic individualism of modern society. The development of human personality to the limits of its potential is possible neither under capitalism nor under any of its monolithic successors. An unshakeable belief that vast repressed possibilities still exist in humankind is essentially what distinguishes a socialist (or an anarchist, for that matter). But if the cultural problem of revolution divined by Polanyi (and superbly described in detail by E.P. Thompson)36 is a real one, then eagerness to embark on the sudden, wholesale transformation of society towards socialism must actually be inconsistent with socialist values. A period of violent revolution must so deeply disrupt the structures of the lives of so many persons as to constitute a negation of the very initiative. As Kumar said, the complexity of industrialized society makes it more politically resilient than any ancien regime that fell in the last few hundred years. Revolutions now would have to be that much more destabilizing.37 To suppose, with most revolutionary socialists, that people will somehow just suddenly and widely see that the end justifies the means is to make a leap of institutional faith. If revolutionary social change destroys the institutional mainsprings of human personality, then full personhood must become, for a time, impossible. Since only persons can transmit culture in the full anthropological sense, how can one then be sure what culture will emerge on the other side of the social revolution? These considerations may seem to feed into the pitfall of reformism. But this impression is inaccurate. The classic reformist position as advanced by Bernstein at the turn of the century is commonly excoriated from the left for its veneration of compromise. Bernstein claimed that small goals are worth achieving so long as overall movement is in the right direction.38 To achieve small goals, compromise is often all that is needed; but notoriously compromise often leads to the strengthening of the enemy. What neither Bernstein nor

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his Marxist-Leninist critics saw was the cultural dimension of the problem and its relation to the problem of human personality. Bernsteinian reformism goes most wrong in its institutional naivety, while the hard-line advocacy of revolution indulges in a leap of institutional faith. Inattention to the institutionalization of culture will ensure that reformism never transcends its origins. There will in the end be no movement. Likewise in the case of revolutions. The lack of concern for culture makes them uncertain where they will end up. They may move towards something worse. It is hard to contemplate China's Cultural Revolution or Russia's earlier (or recent)39 one without seeing the reason at the very least for severe disquiet. I am arguing here that there is another way out. Flexible Disengagement as a Transformative Strategy

The mechanism for open-ended, gradual disengagement from contemporary economies I have been describing in this chapter is the kind of institution that might allow real advance towards an agreedupon, continually self-revealing, and thus continually revalidated goal. The key is the uncompromisingly transformative character of the institution, coupled with its susceptibility to drastic expansion or restriction in scope as desired or as contingently needed. A community of people who are at least secure in their agricultural bioregion and are making use of their own protective currency can go as fast or as slowly towards new modes of human relation as they at any time may choose. They can also make their range of economic activities as wide or narrow as they at any time may choose. Within the sphere of operation of this mechanism, however, the economic rules at any given time really are different. People may try on new relations and not have to face the old dilemma of plus fa change, plus c'est la meme chose. The point is that people must be allowed to change their culture at a pace that makes sense to them and yet be confident that the economic change associated with the cultural change really is transformative. The possible significance of even minor changes should not be overlooked. As earlier observed, in certain spheres of their lives even the most hide-bound individualistic capitalists will behave in an entirely human way; members of the most bourgeois families are never charged for passing the salt along a table. The frustration for socialists has been the utter lack of suitable institutions over the last few hundred years to facilitate the inclusion of some substantive economic activity within this residual sphere of undeniably genuine human behaviour. There has always been a kernel of truly human culture even under capitalism and we must preserve that cultural fragment, not throw it out in some senseless bouleversement.

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The old socialism of the planners sought to encompass, all at once, nothing less than all of economic life. Planning is pointless, indeed impossible, without control, so in theory planning was tied to the need for a complete overthrow of the old economy all at once. In practice, of course, what eventually occurred was usually a more or less gradual shift towards a society not very different from the capitalist ones. In absolute contrast, flexible vehicles for facilitating the division of labour in genuinely human ways carry no requirement for upheaval. As the scope of activities in a local economy expands, so the external economy will tend to lose its "contact with life." The old industrial core can be gradually but unequivocably marginalized by ecologically grounded, strong, local economies.xlv Such a process can be started anywhere at any time and it truly would amount to the turning of political economy inside out. What are currently ignored, pitied, or even envied as the marginal elements in economic life will become the core types. The farmer railing at the destruction of what he knows is absolutely valuable can then finally have his day: All my predecessors here have been excellent farmers and excellent men with the land. They built up the land. There was always a lot of manure and they used the best conservation practices. There is land adjoining the farm that in my time grew the best crops in the township, if not in the county. Today there are ash trees on it and scrub. What will happen to that land in fifty years' time I don't know ... There are new farmers that have moved into the country from overseas during the past few years, mostly good, but some bad. The bad ones may put a small down payment on the farm, cut down the trees, sell off the old fences, strip the barn, grow as many crops as they can, and move on, leaving the land derelict. It doesn't take long for the scrub to move in and for the work of generations to be lost.

These observations were made by Maurice Shaver of Stormont County, Ontario, some time in the late iQyos.40 One is most struck by the sense that, culturally, the erstwhile practices of the speaker and his ancestors have been utterly marginalized. This is a very important point for any socialist project in which the cultural dimension is taken to be central. For I have all along been arguing for the cultural centrality of agriculture. The Culture in Agriculture Societies that have marginalized agriculture are culturally deluded. My aim has been to convince socialists especially but others as well that agriculture should be returned to its rightful, central place in culture,

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but on both a new ecological basis and a new socioeconomic basis. The institutionalization of ecologically sound agriculture will facilitate the return of agriculture to culture, and of culture to agriculture. That this is true will only gradually be acknowledged and probably only in experience, that is, actual praxis, rather than theory. It is simplest to quote Wendell Berry on what culture has to do with agriculture and vice versa and why the matter is not susceptible of theorization (our general cultural reflex, unfortunately), but rather is a matter of praxis. To the textbook writer or researcher, the farm - the place where knowledge is applied - is necessarily provisional or theoretical; what he proposes must be found to be generally true. For the good farmer, on the other hand, the place where knowledge is applied is minutely particular, not a farm but this farm, my farm, the only place exactly like it in all the world. To use it without intimate, minutely particular knowledge of it, as if it were a farm or any farm, is, as good farmers tend to know instinctively, to violate it, to do it damage, finally to destroy it. And so one of the reasons it is impossible to give a full description of a good farmer's mind is that the mind of a good farmer is inseparable from his farm; or, to state it the opposite way, a farm as a human artefact is inseparable from the mind that makes and uses it. The two are one. To damage this union is to damage human culture at its root.41

It may be useful to labour the relation between this quotation and my overall thesis in this work. My aim has been to emphasize that people living in their place can learn how to live cheaply straight from the land and within the natural (living) cycles taking place on that land. I submit they will find this work pleasant and liberating. The sin of industrialism as a mode of life, above all, has been to condemn people to lives of senseless complexity in which they relate to their living environment in a way that is senselessly indirect. This way of living is not cheap, is not pleasant, and is in many ways probably not safe. The many and various compensations of industrial life are mostly just that: compensations. Surely a free people would eventually have the sense to try to procure the things they desired as directly as possible, only resorting to the industrial approach to production when it has been shown for an important good that it cannot be derived agriculturally. There is no reason to suppose that there are many such goods. It is striking that those recognized elements of a "good life" that are most strongly cross-cultural - good food and drink, nice garments, fine music and conversation, and comfortable housing - in no way require industry. Local materials and people willing to learn are all that is necessary for all these categories. Protection from causes of early death is another matter.

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Under the kind of pluralist socialism I have been expounding life would be pleasant and modern in that it would be complex, but the complexity would have for the first time in modern history a humanly compelling rationale. Our environment is complex, it needs to be complex (in order for life to be possible), and so we must respond to it in a complex way. Of course we cannot pronounce on details of socialist culture but we can ensure agriculture's centrality in it. That much we should know about our goal. Adopting a negative argument, I am inclined to speak more forcefully than that: so long as agriculture is not made central again, modernity will remain rotten at the core, indifferent to its surroundings. Many have thought modernity was only about social relations. It was always centred on them, but it also always implied institutions for relating persons to things and to places. Let us henceforth be explicit about all the implications of modernity. Seed eaters have responsibilities.

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Notes

CHAPTER

ONE

i In The Great Transformation Karl Polanyi made a strong case for Robert Owen as a sociologically original critic of capitalism. For more about Owen in general, see also Barbara Taylor's Eve and the New Jerusalem. ii It may seem from an individual's point of view that "the environment" includes human beings (and their works) as well. However, from the point of view of humankind as a notional whole, the point of view adopted in this book, "nature" can only mean all nonhuman stuff. It is recognized explicitly in this work that human beings have wrought great changes on that category over tens of thousands of years, iii The case of George Perkins Marsh is very interesting but only apparently a counterexample His history of the changes wrought by humankind on nature, Man and Nature, came out in the 18605 and was widely read for a time. Its practical impact, however, seems to have been confined to buttressing the American conservation movement, which has yet to transcend its rearguard-defensive role. It is striking how very little real influence Marsh has had on most social and political trends this century. It is perhaps fair to point out that whereas Marx possessed a rare analytical genius and thus deserves his influence, Locke's importance is partly a function of the way history unfolded. In his day other commentators such as Harrington might have seemed as likely to carry the day ideologically. iv No attempt is made here to try to determine exactly where Marx's philosophical inclinations might have led him had he had access to

186 Notes to page 7 modern ecological theory. Howard Parsons has done a most useful thing in assembling a compendium of relevant quotations, Marx and Engels on Ecology. But in the introduction and commentary to this rather tendentiously titled collection, Parsons argues both that Marx and Engels's predilection for "dialectics" shows that they would have embraced modern ecological theory (pp. 10-11), and that the latter really is (or could be improved by being recast) in the dialectical mode (pp. 4, 7). With respect to the first point, Parsons does not deal adequately with the embarrassing fact that ecological theory is emphatically not monolithic, that unresolved disputes continue. Goldsmith has argued in "Ecological Succession Rehabilitated" that the disputes are fundamentally political, suggesting that they can be resolved into contradictory views on the question whether nature can be destroyed by our activity. I have deliberately picked sides in some of these disputes on grounds of environmental prudence. This may seem grossly unscientific, and in a sense it is. However, any scientist committed to rationality in general must also concede that the current conjuncture is such that we have no choice but to support at least some pessimistic views (assuming that we wish to see human life continue indefinitely). We simply cannot afford to allow the Panglossian assumptions to hold sway. If we run to its end the de facto ongoing test of the question and then find that the Cassandras were correct, it will be too late. Those making use of ecological science are thus thoroughly justified in allowing value judgments to influence their pronouncements. Now, Parsons presumably takes the view that Marx and Engels would also not have scrupled to do likewise, but he does not have enough material to convince on the question which side in various disputes Marx and Engels would have supported. The real content of their ecological views must remain unknown. Parson's belief that dialectical reasoning in itself, if adopted by ecologists, would keep them all on the right track on vital questions is also sheer prejudice. It may be true, but we cannot tell. This is partly because the notion of dialectics it too unspecified (both in Parsons and in Marx and Engels), and partly (and less trivially) because scientific knowledge of nature is not yet complete, a consideration of crucial relevance, as Sekine pointed out in his The Dialectic of Capital (vol. i, p. n). In this work I have made a shorter circuit and tried to fashion a consistent blend of modern ecological views that will counsel sufficiently prudent behaviour to guarantee the continuation of the human species. Whether the synthesis advanced here could be analyzed as implicitly dialectical is a question of merely academic interest. I will not pursue it at length, but it seems likely that the answer must be negative. Sekine explained, in an essay included with his translation of Kozo

187 Notes to pages 7-8 Uno's Principles of Political Economy, why it is really only after the fact that one can see how Marx's analysis of capitalism comprises a dialectical whole. Sekine has shown in great detail in The Dialectic of Capital that his teacher, Kozo Uno, who first completed Marx's project and thus made the question come to light, was actually using a dialectical method. But a serious reading of Sekine's arguments gives grounds for doubting whether there could be any other fit subject for dialectical reasoning. Certainly, it would be foolish simply to choose a method in advance before exploring the subject matter in depth, which is precisely what Parsons's overly enthusiastic project implies. If the subject matter is open ended, the choice of method alone cannot determine that the destination will be appropriate, and of course Parsons, rightly, cares very much in what direction we go. v It is possible that Marx and Engels were here allowing their sociological views to colour their analysis of the human-natural relationship. If the only variable under consideration is degree of sociopolitical integration, one is likely to argue that peasants are more like hunter-gatherers than industrial peoples and thus become predisposed to see the preindustrial period as an undifferentiated whole. As David Mitrany made clear, Marx and Engels had a very low opinion generally of peasantries. In his Late Marx and the Russian Road, Teodor Shanin has made a case for the view that Marx was perhaps changing his mind about peasants near the end of his life. vi In The Concept of Nature in Marx, Schmidt gives his interpretation of Marx's views at this stage in the following passage: "As long as nature is appropriated through agriculture and is therefore absolutely independent of men, men are abstractly identical with nature. They lapse, so to speak, into natural existence. However where men succeed in universally mastering nature technically, economically and scientifically by transforming it into a world of machines, nature congeals into an abstract-in-itself external to men" (p. 81). Shapiro expresses fundamentally the same interpretation when he claims in his essay "The Slime of History: Embeddedness in Nature and Critical Theory," that Marx thinks that before capitalism we are unable to transcend a certain "embeddedness in nature" and so cannot realize our full nature (pp. 149-50). It is not at all clear whether this conception implies any alteration in the likelihood of our damaging, let alone destroying, nature when we thus move to the higher level of practical capacity with respect to our environment. vii The internal structure of Glacken's scrupulous survey Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, reflects very handily the two-way character of the relationship between humankind and the rest of nature.

i88 Notes to page 9 viii One reason for not accepting Parsons's breezy optimism about the good ecological sense implicit in Marx can be found in the following passage about English agriculture from the famous chapter on limiting the working day in the first volume of Capital: "The limiting of factory labour was dictated by the same necessity which spread guano over the English fields. The same blind eagerness for plunder that in the one case exhausted the soil" (p. 239). Evidently Marx thought that guano was applied to English fields because their fertility had been exhausted. There is no evidence for this view. There is ample evidence, however, that English farmers were enthusiastic about getting more out of their land. This point receives extended treatment later in this text, but here it must be pointed out that farmers added guano enthusiastically in order to increase the absolute quantity of nutrients in their soil, not to compensate for some supposed prior deprivation. As F.M.L. Thompson put it in his seminal article "The Second Agricultural Revolution," English farming in the early nineteenth century was "an extractive industry, albeit of a model and unparalleled type which perpetually renewed what it extracted " (p. 64). Adding a fertilizer from an external source does not imply that the system ceases to be a virtuous cycle. Such an action may simply raise an existing cycle on to a higher spiral. English soil was not at all exhausted and therefore in need of fertilizer; rather it was superproducing because of the addition. As Thompson goes on to argue, fertilizers did come much later to be used as a substitute for the virtuous cycle. But one cannot infer from early mentions of the use of fertilizers that the old system was supplanted. In fact it was still very much alive well into this century. Now, Marx may have foreseen in the English use of guano the eventual substitution of chemicals for labour in agriculture, but he certainly overstepped the evidence at the time and appeared not to understand what one could call the "essential principle" of classical English farming, as explained in the quotation from Thompson. Directly bearing on the question of guardianship of the soil is another failure on Marx's part to register the beneficial peculiarities of English agriculture. It is implied by the careless general claim (found in the writings that Engels put together as the "third volume" of Capital) about the baleful influence of landlords on farming practice (pp. 812-13). Marx did not examine the actual ecological import of the restrictions English landlords put on their tenants, which were generally extremely far-sighted and actually tended to ensure that farmers and labourers behaved like guardians. Marx simply borrowed his wholly negative view from the bourgeois Radicals of his day who had a vicious and uncomprehending bias against the landed classes primarily on political grounds, a bias, ironically, that Marx specifically claims in the

189 Notes to pages 9-10 same passage to have transcended. I have sketched a larger argument about this whole issue in my 1992 article "Legal Protection for the Soil of England." Some points appear in chapters 2 and 3 of this work, ix For another example of Marx's haphazard treatment of such matters, consider the last words of chapter 15, volume i of Capital: "... the original sources of all wealth - the soil and the labourer" (p. 507). At least some readers over the last hundred years or so must have puzzled over how to digest this highly parenthetical reference to what is at the same time heralded as a major issue. In relation to the very strong language Marx uses here, his treatment of the question is disproportionately brief. Marx's analysis of the capitalist mode of production tells us a great deal about the second of the two "original sources of all wealth" and does so in a highly systematic way. The references to the other "original source" are, by contrast, random, few in number, fleeting, and often (as we saw in note viii above) unreliable. It seems clear that they are afterthoughts included by Marx because of further reading at the time of writing. There is little point in blaming him now for not reconceiving the whole basis of the argument in Capital (although he did live for a further decade and a half after publishing the first volume). The point that matters here is that the overwhelming majority of Marxists, and anti-Marxists (for that matter), have failed to interrogate him since on this important imbalance. Indeed, the situation is worse, as the following discussion of a subtly written, highly influential, current Marxist text will make clear. In Socialist Construction and Marxist Theory, authors Corrigan, Ramsay, and Sayers argue insistently that Marx made a point of not starting his analysis of economic matters from a consideration of the abstraction "production in general." They praise his decision to start instead with the commodity as a sign of political engagement with the historically relevant case. I will not discuss other, very different ways of elucidating the felicity of Marx's choice here (such as the opening arguments of Uno's Principles of Political Economy and Sekine's Dialectic of Capital), but will merely advert to the dangers inherent in the position taken by Corrigan et al. If the decision to start with the commodity was grounded in considerations of historical (hence political) relevance, then we know why Marx could not accord dimension status to the environment and we can also take advance warning that Corrigan et al. will not do so either. What these authors apparently do not see is that while the analysis of capitalism must start with the commodity if it is to penetrate its inner workings, it does not follow that there is any universal negative methodological lesson here for analysis of economic matters in general. It is because of the extreme peculiarity of capitalism that one must start to

190 Notes to page 10 analyze it with the concept of the commodity. "Production in general" is, however, a fit subject to study in itself, and that is because it has varied not just in history (as Corrigan et al. stress) but also in space (as it should, for good ecological reasons). Furthermore, it can be shown that problems of social scale and integration are in themselves enough to confound any attempts simply to dismiss the problem of "production in general" as historically jejune. "Production in general" as a category raises acutely different problems in the case of, on the one hand, Chayanov's self-sufficient peasant household, and, on the other, Adam Smith's world of interdependent, anonymous beings. Not all the differences hinge on variations in the degree of commodification. Analysts of capitalism should already know that they are dealing only with a special case of modernity. Students of socialism should acknowledge that in the relevant respects they don't yet even know just what they want to be talking about. The sort of methodological stricture Corrigan et al. wish to impose in the name of politically relevant Marxism would actually constitute a barrier to the kind of analysis we need in order to incorporate what I have called the missing dimension. x In his discussion in The Concept of Nature in Marx of the famous passage in Capital about our eventual passage from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom, Schmidt emphasizes that Marx came to the view that, since we must always interact with and control nature, we can never in a sense completely leave behind the kingdom of necessity (p. 135). But the point to emphasize here is that we are restricted not just because we must deal with nature but also (and more importantly) in how we do so; moreover, we must always remember that the problem has been with us as long as agriculture has, not just since the advent of industry. It is therefore interesting that according to Schmidt (who seems to have conducted the closest study by far of the matter), Marx opted in the final analysis for an exploitative attitude to nature. This is Scmidt on what he calls "the mature Marx": "In later life he no longer wrote of a 'resurrection' of the whole of nature. The new society is to benefit man alone, and there is no doubt that this is to be at the expense of external nature. Nature is to be mastered with gigantic technological aids, and the smallest possible expenditure of time and labour. It is to serve all men as the material substratum for all conceivable consumption goods" (p. 155). Schmidt expresses considerable unease about what he believes to have been Marx's final view. Schmidt's disquiet, however, seems to have been moral. He is evidently unaware that the repulsive road could be one leading to collective suicide. xi The case of Marsh is again interesting. The last sentence of Man and Nature refers with truly scientific deference to "the great question,

191 Notes to pages 10-13 whether man is of nature or above her." But although one could draw some very alarming conclusions by extrapolating from past trends documented by Marsh, it would be going too far to say that he thought it at all likely that we could render the whole planet inhospitable to ourselves. One has to recall that he wrote prior to the advent of heavy industry, albeit on the very eve of its arrival. xii The word "sustainable" is certainly used in a very loose way in much environmental writing today. It is one of the purposes of this work to show that the concept has its provenance in the agricultural sphere, where the word has long been used with precision, and that there is no reason to suppose we could not give it an equally clear but more general meaning so that sustainability could become an attribute of a society, not just of a field system. xiii The tortured history of the word "socialism" not only derives from the gleeful efforts of antisocialists to confound the public with special senses of the word whenever possible but also is a consequence of its reductive definition at the hands of several types of self-styled socialists. There have been three outstanding reductions in this century. The Fabians came to accept reducing socialism to meaning caring for the less well off. Stalin defined it as state planning. Others have used it to mean popular control over investment decisions. All these reductions are arbitrary but each contains needful elements. The "real" meaning cannot be so specific or prescriptive. As I will try to show, it should, however minimally, connote recognizing the interconnectedness of modern lives, while allowing real economic freedom not to use others as a means to enrich oneself but to make needed and pleasant things from nature. If such a meaning is adjudged new, it is at least open and etymologically not unreasonable. xiv The loose term "Agrarian" generally refers to whole clusters of social groups that span a wide range of political and analytical persuasions. While the term has no systematic meaning it typically connotes some sort of enthusiasm for peasantries and peasant approaches to economics, in more or less explicit opposition to political parties and doctrines emanating from urban milieux. "Agrarian" has been used, for example, by Georgescu-Roegen (who is not in any simple sense an Agrarian himself) in two different contexts. It appears in his "Institutional Aspects of Peasant Economies" in a discussion of peasant (and peasant-supporting) opponents of communist parties in Eastern Europe. He had also used it earlier in "Economic Theory and Agrarian Economics" as a catch-all phrase for some alternative approaches to economics that caught his intellectual fancy. It is no accident that in his own intellectual trajectory Georgescu-Roegen should turn from neoclassical economics to analysis of the new science of bioeconomics; he did so as

192 Notes to pages 13-14 a result, apparently, of a personal need to rethink the significance of the continuing durability of the peasant society in his homeland, Romania, which he eventually came to characterize as an economic reality without a theory. My own book obviously supports many of the views espoused by "Agrarians" of various sorts, although its intellectual roots are considerably more varied. xv I should perhaps say more about what is not agriculture according to my definition. The Latin etymology is ager for field, cultus for tillage. Animal husbandry is not essentially an agricultural activity. Hence etymological and ecological principles both support the stipulative definition advanced here. While cultivation can be done with mere digging sticks (generic hoes), "tillage" connotes the use of ploughs. "Arable" land is land fit for ploughing. It is striking that the domestication of plants in meso-America, which occurred around the same time as in southwest Asia, gave rise to a different form of organized plant production. The "aboriginal" Americans tended to plant several very different species together in artificial mounds and did not tend to settle in villages near their sites for cultivation until a couple of thousand years later. They stayed more nomadic due to the relative scarcity (by that time) of big game (and the absence of easily domesticated herbivores). The southwest Asian peoples, by contrast, seem to have settled in villages in order to process seeds from stands of wild grains long before they began to plant them. They may have needed to settle near the growing grain plants in order to protect them from their wandering domesticated herbivores. Readers interested in this topic are urged to begin with Marvin Harris's "The Origin of Agriculture" in his collection Cannibals and Kings. xvi It would appear from Stephen Pyne's "Firestick History" as well as his later Burning Bush that some human cultures that we might be inclined on general grounds to classify as hunting-gathering, made extensive use of fire in order to influence local ecological cycles. The general aim was to attract herbivores by increasing the proportion of readily grazed species of plants on site, using fire to roll succession back recurrently. But such deliberate "intervention" may not have made the ecosystems in question operate very differently from how they would have done in the absence of humans. For in his book Fire In America, Pyne made an overwhelming case for the view that, regardless of human agency, the phenomenon of occasional fire caused by nonhuman factors (e.g., lightning) must have been deeply implicated in the evolution of most terrestrial temperate-zone ecosystems. In any case, it seems clear that living by agriculture is more "work" as well as safer and more precisely interventionist than living by fire. In general tribute to Pyne's prodigious labours I may say that, although I found no use for the concept of

193 Notes to pages 14-20 "wilderness" in this book; it was not until I read Pyne that I understood the full extent of the gap between the word and its supposed referent. Most people have immense difficulty imagining their favourite wilderness area on fire, let alone realizing that wildfire is thoroughly natural. xvii In his essay "Murders in Eden" in Cannibals and Kings, Marvin Harris suggests that it is possible that agriculture started us on a vicious cycle of population growth. Starting from the anthropological observation that mothers in surviving hunter-gatherer cultures tend to prolong breast feeding, and noting their low carbohydrate, high-protein diet, Harris used the medical fact that ovulation depends on the accumulation of a critical level of body fat to try to explain how hunter-gatherer populations could stay so small. Agriculture results in an increase in the carbohydrate component in the diet. A growing stationary population must extend its agriculture, which further reduces the protein component in the diet. Agriculture condemned women to spend more time pregnant but it has been able to feed the resulting progeny, xviii There is an ongoing debate on the absolute propriety of the concept of "climax" (which is critically reviewed in Goldsmith's "Ecological Succession Rehabilitated"). However, it seems that no currently conceivable resolution of the points at issue would alter the substance of my argument, so I have simply adopted the simple, straightforward, "oldfashioned" position enunciated by Eugene Odum in his elementary textbook on ecology. If there is no such thing as absolute stability in ecology there certainly is such a thing as relative stability, and that is all that matters in practical terms. Also see again note iv above on ecological disputation. xix According to the author of climax theory, the American ecologist F. Clements, the number of species peaks in the middle of a sere. xx It is likely that the storability of seeds explains not only the appearance of complex societies but also such hallmarks of civilization as the law of property and the state's (attempted) monopoly on violence. Until there were stored seeds and/or fields prepared for growing them, there was little worth fighting about and violence would have been purely recreational. xxi Pastoralism has been deeply implicated in the development of "capitalism" by some authors (for example, Grotty in Cattle, Economics and Development) inasmuch as domesticated grazing animals can be perceived as stored wealth or "capital," as indeed the etymology of the word indicates: the Latin capita means heads (of, e.g., cattle), xxii In Nature and Madness Shepard raises the interesting question why the severe desert religions were able to continue to hold sway in the moist and generous northern forests, with their thick mantle of soil deeply

194 Notes to page 20-6 impregnated with organic matter, and their gentle precipitation quite evenly distributed over the calendar year. It is possible that the persistence of desert religions through the "Dark Ages" facilitated the eventual emergence of what so many now characterize (without explaining) as the mechanistic and aggressive world views of "Western" science (so different from the science of Ancient China, for example). xxiii It may be necessary to forestall the criticism that I am arguing for an ecological form of "technological determinism." On the contrary, no attempt will be made to pronounce on the causes of population growth under different social arrangements, to take one notorious problem. My purpose here is just to register the simple point that the characteristics of an ecosystem and the farming techniques used at any time provide constraints on social change and population dynamics. Exactly which social factors led to population growth in each given case is beyond my scope. I intend merely to show the ecological/technical bases of the sheer possibility of population growth at given stages of history, and to assert that as population grew (as it manifestly did) the per-capita effort required and environmental degradation involved in producing food necessarily increased. Nothing should or can be inferred from such an account as to what was determining what. xxiv The term "household" is here deliberately used in a general sense denoting any collection of persons inhabiting the same living space and dealing directly with one another on a daily basis. Almost all people all of the time have lived and probably will live in "households" thus defined. The fact that the term covers everything from feudal manors to nuclear-family cottage-industry households may seem to complicate the definition of "modern" proffered here, but it need not. The division of labour has at least two evidently related spheres in which to operate: intra-and interhousehold. I wish to concentrate on the latter and feel justified in doing so to the virtual exclusion of the question of gender roles (or age-defined roles, for that matter), on two quite different grounds. First, it is surely the case in our present state of knowledge that those problematic aspects of the general, interhousehold division of labour that are linked to inequitably structured intrahousehold gender roles cannot yet (indeed, if ever) be categorically stated to be either mere epiphenomenal effects or crucial determining causes, one of the other. We still don't know whether it even makes sociological sense to ask which came first historically, the domestic oppression of women or the interhousehold division of labour. Second, it is surely not the case either that any new internal basis for households could guarantee that the interhousehold division of labour would simply stop being a problem, or that any new model for the interhousehold division of labour could in itself guarantee that relations between the sexes

195 Notes to pages 26-9 would thenceforth be uncomplicated and just. The two issues are inextricably linked in practice but logically separate/ xxv Keith Wrightson describes in his English Society: 1580-1680, a widespread, if sociologically variegated, phenomenon that must count as another way of expressing human interdependence, even thought it was actually more highly developed in early modern times than now. It would appear that, at all except the very poorest level of society, it was customary for couples to have their offspring raised in other (generally neighbouring) households for at least some years at a stretch. Persons raised wholly in the household of their own parents were exceptional in that regard. Families put their teenage children out to work on other people's farms or apprenticed them to craftsmen (or to merchants, if they were well-to-do) and took in servants in husbandry or apprentices in their own line of work in turn (pp. 113, 114, 118, 224). Now, it would be foolish to try to guess exactly what difference(s) this practice made, but it certainly gives the lie to any notion that early modern England was a society unused to what we could call (by way of emphasis) "thoroughly social intercourse." xxvi England is possessed of a much-indented coast that is never more than seventy-five miles away. It has no new (tall and rough) mountain ranges and as a result has a network of quiet rivers not subject to drought and thus well suited for inland water transport. Because water transport is incomparably the most efficient means available in caloric terms (all the more so in the absence of roads), England thus had relatively cheap transport long before many other countries. xxvii I hope that many readers of this text have never heard the unfortunate term "rural industry." It is one of the contemporary historian's terms of art used to refer to rural manufactures, that is, groups of workshops where materials were processed into goods and that were located in the countryside. Of course they did not just "happen" to be in the countryside. It is an essentially west European conceit (of less than two hundred years' duration) to suppose that the natural "home" for a manufacturing activity is an urban milieu. All complicated agricultural societies have indulged in manufacturing goods, but so long as most raw materials were produced either in fields or forests it only made sense to locate workshops in the countryside. Before abiotic industrial activities took over, the distinction between town and country was far less marked. It is often forgotten how much the success of the socalled Industrial Revolution whereby the towns were industrialized depended on a far-reaching deindustrialization of the countryside, a process that saw rural manufactures not only deprived of their old markets but also starved of inputs. The process, arguably, was mostly accidental in the English case but it was deliberately engineered in the

196 Notes to pages 29-30 case of the Soviet Union during the 19305. E.L. Jones's brilliant essay "Agricultural Origins of Industry" is the best explication of the European process in general. My own piece on the Soviet case, "On Rapid Industrialization and Collectivization," can serve as an introduction to the extreme opposite. By my definition of "industry," the term "rural industry" is essentially misleading. I prefer "rural manufactures" not just because it is less ambiguous but also because it allows me to use the word "preindustrial" with some hope of being coherent. As I explain in note v, chapter 2, many historians have some lamentable semantic habits. An otherwise useful collection dealing substantially with rural manufactures was entitled, amazingly enough, Industrialization before Industrialization: Rural Industry in the Genesis of Capitalism. In it the second of its trio of editors (Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm) opts to use as well the once-fashionable would-be technical term "protoindustrial" to refer to the same phenomena in the titles of his contributions. But there is little point in singling historians out for censure. Even the common phrase "industrial society" is highly problematic - in my view, dangerously misleading. Since all current societies are utterly and increasingly dependent on agriculture, it would be more accurate to call them "agricultural/industrial" societies. The idea of a purely industrial food-production system is doubtless a mere pipe-dream, so strictly speaking there can never be such a thing as an "industrial society." xxviii The example is taken from Bannock et al., The Penguin Dictionary of Economics, 173. Some economists, perhaps embarrassed by this situation, have been trying to detrivialize their discipline's treatment of waste; they run into a major problem, however, since waste is definitely a "product" but by definition one that nobody wants. xxix It may now be possible to justify the relative inattention to the agrarian societies of subcontinental and southeast Asia in this work. My main concern is with the relation in modern society between agriculture as an absolute necessity and abiotic (heavy) industry as a relative "luxury." In the sense developed here, industry on a large scale appeared at first only in European lands, notably England, and so I focus deliberately on those modern societies. Obviously, if modernity is defined as being mainly about the division of labour as it is here, then many of the socalled "agrarian civilizations" have to be classified as substantially modern. I know of no good reason for regarding that as a paradox. It only appears so if one is a priori committed to an industrial teleology that sees currently dominant industrial modes of production as an inevitable product of modernity. I am keenly aware that much additional light could be shed on the general concept of agriculture and its relation to the not essentially industrial conception of modernity developed

197 Notes to pages 30-8 here by the study of, for example, Chinese history or the histories of the lost civilizations of the Americas. xxx W.G. Hoskins, author of the classic, The Making of the English Landscape, looked for evidence of unprocessed wastes in preindustrial landscapes in England and was struck by their relative absence until well into the eighteenth century (pp. 211, 216, 222-3, 23°~l> see espe-

cially some of the photographs reproduced in his book, pp. 223, 231). In his "Swords into Ploughshares: Recycling in Pre-industrial England," Woodward described in some detail exactly where much of the waste went, or, rather, how it was used. These careful waste-processing habits, which were clearly taken for granted, lasted well into our century. In The Edwardians, Paul Thompson, who was evidently fascinated more by the intricate social arrangements involved in such thorough garbage disposal, termed the economy of the period "a peculiarly systematic" one but argued that it was supported by mass poverty (p. 50). It seems the rise in real wages established by the end of World War i put an end to such careful recycling. xxxi Since gases travel rather easily, high venting of gaseous waste products from industrial-production facilities - a practice adopted in the middle of this century in the hope of achieving adequate local dilution - has actually had the effect of globalizing some pollution difficulties more or less instantly. Another gas problem we face today that is neither agricultural nor industrial is due to the excessive levels of herbivorous livestock we are carrying on the planet. xxxii In his intriguingly conceived The Forest and the Sea, Marston Bates made an argument about the oceans analogous to Lovelock's one about the atmosphere. The peculiar composition of seawater is life-produced for living things. xxxiii The collection Environmental Evolution, edited by Lynn Margulis (a collaborator with Lovelock) and Lorraine Olendzenski and based on a course taught at Boston University, introduces the issues in a very interesting fashion. A highly readable recent personal survey of these matters is Life as a Geological Force, by Peter Westbroek, who heads the Geobiochemistry Research Group at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. The questions, of course, are not new. Gilbert Plass's 1959 essay in Scientific American, "Carbon Dioxide and Climate" makes interesting reading more than three decades later. It is clear that G.P. Marsh was attempting to deal with global climate questions well over a century ago in his Man and Nature. The subtitle of that work, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action, was a self-conscious reference to Gilbert LyelFs explicitly process-oriented and foundational approach to geology. It is worth reciting here the full title of Lyells' Principles of Geology: Being an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's

198 Notes to pages 38-9 Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation. According to Westbroek our generation is only now realizing that in order to understand the planet we must reintegrate biology with geology. It is fair to say it had not occurred to Lyell or Marsh to separate them; indeed Marsh would have thought it perverse to do so. Some very interesting relevant currents of thought in Russia during the interwar era are only now getting the renewed attention they deserve. Ken Stokes has been active in this revival. xxxiv Fending off attack from a diametrically opposed corner, I must confess that I find Bill McKibben's interestingly presented death certificate for all notions of a self-regulating planet to be premature and in any case of unclear import. In The End of Nature, which first appeared as an extended essay in The New Yorker, McKibben argues that it is now too late to complete our study of nature, that what we used to live in is now gone. There is a distinct family resemblance between McKibben's summary of perceived trends and the fashionable views of such ecologists as Daniel Botkin who are no less pessimistic in their assessment of the planet's current workings, but who make so bold as to think we could run it. Botkin's Discordant Harmonies: A New Ecology for the Twenty-First Century argues both that nature is essentially unstable and that we could operate it. xxxv Karl Polanyi revived for the English-speaking world a distinction introduced by Karl Menger (in Menger's posthumously published revised general text on economics) between the formal and substantive meanings of the term "economic." In his posthumous The Livelihood of Man, Polanyi says that in its substantive sense, the word "denotes nothing else than 'bearing reference to the process of satisfying material wants'" (p. 20). In its formal sense it refers to "'making the best of one's means'" (ibid.). He considers the point very important because it is standard practice for economists to define economics by referring (typically unknowingly) to what is in fact a special case due to a merger of the two meanings, as in the view that economics is about economizing on scarce material means. In Polanyi's view, the merged concept was suitable for the case of an economy integrated by the market system in which society enforces economizing behaviour. The concept's generality, however, is spurious because not all economies have been so integrated. The postulate of scarcity has no absolute validity, since it is always relative to social institutions and conventions. Only in some economies has it been made obligatory to economize as such. But in all economies it has been necessary to deal with nature in some more or less cooperative fashion, thus, capitalism had perforce to have its substantive side. Hitherto, however, most criticism of capitalism has focused on the often-vicious social implications of its formal aspects. In

199 Notes to pages 39-41 the present text the concept of substantive economic problems denotes only the range of actual, material difficulties in the way of procuring what we need or want, holding in abeyance all consideration of how we might wish socially to institute the required behaviour. The burden of this work, indeed, is to argue that direct consideration of some of the substantive aspects of our economic activity may usefully suggest, but cannot absolutely specify, what social institutions might be more suitable for that activity. A subtheme is that some of what we need and want could actually be fairly easily made more abundant, and that it is liable to become scarce in some absolute sense only if we destroy certain fundamental supports of our living environment. xxxvi Quesnay was the key member of a group of mid-eighteenth-century fiscal advisers to the French king (the earlier-mentioned "Physiocrats"). He set out to show by means of a diagrammatic representation of the national "economy" how wealth flows among the various classes. He invented and advocated "laissez-faire" policies believing that more economic freedom would lead to the growth of wealth in taxable forms. It is useful to recall that "laissez-faire" is thus a congenitally militarist dogma. Less readily taxable forms of wealth such as improved landscapes cannot so easily be mobilized for war. Outright coercion is required, or legislation backed by threats of coercion. xxxvii The debates on "socialist accounting" that raged in interwar Europe and were usefully summarized in Lange and Taylor's On the Economic Theory of Socialism are still read and alluded to today. It is remarkable, however, that Karl Polanyi's extraordinarily complex and original contribution (which arose from a debate in the early 19205 with von Mises that was published in Archiv jur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik) has yet to appear in print in English. Polanyi-Levitt and Mendell have recently drawn attention to that material again in their "Karl Polanyi: His Life and Times." The guild-socialist perspective, on which Polanyi partly drew for his unusual synthesis, is still mentioned today but is routinely dismissed out of hand. The antinomy of plan and market holds absolute sway. Consider, for example, the debate in 1986-87 between Alec Nove and Ernest Mandel in New Left Review, which was kindled by the former's explicitly provocative but intellectually conservative book The Economics of Feasible Socialism. xxxviii The truth of this generalization is underscored by the intellectual sequestration of the serious study of space in its social aspects within the subdiscipline of urban geography. David Harvey, for one, has been attempting to alter this situation. xxxix I would insist on the propriety of using "community" in the extremely loose, commonsense way it is used in ordinary speech. like "household," it is a term blessed by not having a core technical meaning.

2OO Notes to pages 41-2 xl Single-person households are currently quite common, of course, but single persons typically also do inhabit communities broader than their own household, at least for several of their many purposes, xli Leopold Kohr's grossly underrated work in social theory is highly relevant to this discussion. See for example his The Overdeveloped Nations. Kohr was perhaps the first scholar in the social sciences explicitly to raise the matter of social scale as a general problem permeating all aspects of human life and consistently to query the arbitrary but widespread belief that "big is (in itself) better." To explain his unfashionable but well-documented contention that smaller societies are both cheaper to run and more pleasant to inhabit, Kohr developed the idea that with respect to different human purposes the suitable scale of social interaction varies. To achieve what he calls "conviviality" some one hundred adults are ample; for an effective economy (enough consumers to carry a division of specialized labour in basic necessities) four or five thousand inhabitants should suffice; for a polity, some seven to twelve thousand is suitable; and for a full culture a much larger number is needed. The ideas of Kohr and others on the question how to constitute "society on a human scale" are ably summarized by Kirkpatrick Sales in chapter 4 of Part 3 of his Human Scale. A Germanlanguage biography of Kohr by Gerald Lehner appeared late in 1994. xlii I should underline that democracy requires critical public discussion of ends; not just means. All the more as the scale of investment rises. It is a point that our "free marketeers" conveniently forget. xliii It is just as well to emphasize here that there is no reason to doubt the thesis of a common genetic origin for all of humankind. It follows that each and every scheme of classifying human beings along "ethnic" lines is incurably arbitrary. At different stages in history more or less identifiable groupings come and go as the result of the vicissitudes of human migration all over the globe. There can be no compelling rationale for fixing on any of these classificatory schemes. At their most benign the commonly accepted rationales are merely expressions of more or less self-conscious aesthetic preference. The analogy with dog breeding is quite a dose one. My argument against classificatory schemes applies a fortiori to the irretrievably incoherent concept of "race identity." The offspring of couplings across boundary lines are always refractory to classification. The ineluctable fact remains that human beings comprise only one species and so the only morally coherent line to take is to deny the eternal validity of every single classificatory scheme ever proffered. There is some reason currently to fear that there are cultural trends operating in the opposite direction, towards a "retribalized world," as Edgerton puts it in his Sick Societies (p. 209). While we can expect

2oi Notes to pages 42-6 capitalist global-marketing strategies to take over from world communism and work effectively against such an outcome, I think it right to urge the virtues of a nonethnic scaffold for sociality. An accessible introduction to some of the biological complexities of human genetics can be found in Michael Brown's The Search for Eve. More rigorous as well as wide-ranging is Jonathan Marks's Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race, and History. xliv It would be wrong, of course, to suppose that we can simply do as we like when demarcating supposed bioregions, especially if things are changing. The work of the so-called island biogeographers such as E.O. Wilson is not yet complete but dearly ought to be consulted. In the event that climate change is patterned in the way expected by, for example, those who predict global warming, it would matter whether bioregions were oriented on the whole longitudinally or latitudinally. For example, isolated east-west-oriented forest ecosystems will be ripped apart if the rate of climate change exceeds their maximum rate of latitudinal climb. We can learn much about these processes from the study of deglaciation. See E.G. Pielou, After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. xlv It is appropriate to include some figures for reference purposes. The following estimates are all borrowed from Cipolla's The Economic History of World Population. Substantial population growth is a phenomenon only two or three centuries old (pp. 116-18). Over the period 1650-1750 the rate of growth in world population was 0.3-0.4 percent per annum and the level at the end was 650-850 million. Over the next hundred years the population grew to some 1.1-1.3 billion. Then, by 1950 it was thought to be some 2.25-2.75 billion. The most disturbing thing, of course, is the growth in the rate of growth. From 1850 to 1900 it was around 0.7 percent per annum, but from 1900 to 1950 it was i percent per annum. It is thought that in the summer of 1988 the planet had five billion living human beings. xlvi Many so-called "weeds" are species that have specialized through evolution in the colonization of soils catastrophically exposed or otherwise disrupted by various causes (natural and unnatural) such as glaciers, drought, fire, overgrazing, or deforestation. It is germane to point out here that the wet-field techniques of cultivation that are so widespread in southeast Asia use flooding to control weeds. I will return to this matter when I consider Masanobu Fukuoka's work in chapter 4. xlvii The still unjustly neglected work of N.W. Pirie shows how much more we could be doing if we simply started to think critically about the ecology of agriculture. He has long been advocating the increased use of dark green leafy vegetables as a food source because they can make more use of incident sunlight than our traditional seed crops, thus

202 Notes to pages 46-8 allowing more crops per unit of time, as well as some other technical benefits. The Chinese hve long been growing some annuals several times each year. xlviii Georgescu-Roegen was for a considerable time the only scholarly voice demanding a thorough materialism in addressing the "energy question." He pointed out in a number of papers that "matter matters too" (see for example "Myths about Energy and Matter"). Energy pundits had been insisting that we need only secure an ample energy supply in order to solve all economic problems. Georgescu-Roegen argued that such a view depended on ignoring the phenomenon of entropy. We typically need highly concentrated supplies of, e.g., minerals. It is not generally the case that, if we only had enough disposable energy, we could always concentrate again supplies that have once been dissipated. The iron scattered all over Manhattan as a result of the phenomenon of rust for the most part originally came from extremely rich veins of ore and is now permanently scattered and therefore inaccessible to us. We have to face this problem as much as we have to consider our more direct usage of energy supplies. What is not so convincing is Georgescu-Roegen's claim that the entropy problem is just as severe in agriculture as in industry. He insisted on this point in his massive monograph The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (p. 302). There he gestures first to the inevitability of an eventually lethal decrease in the rate of solar energy reaching our planet (which is truly a case of pointing to a too-distant problem) and then, switching gears rather violently, insists that shorter-term pessimism is justified because soils inevitably degrade. The trouble is that Georgescu-Roegen ignores that if the conditions are right, soils also form, indeed cannot not form. He concludes his generally unconvincing discussion of agriculture by pointing out quite correctly that mechanized farming takes an unsustainable free ride on good low-entropy (clean, pure) sources of scarce materials. The countless examples of past materials profligacy due to foolish design applications that are scattered through J.E. Gordon's two popular books on materials scienc could serve as strong evidence that our society grossly overindustrialized. xlix Although Georgescu-Roegen does not moralize in his discussion of entropic degradation, his work carries overall the implicit philosophical message that we should not use future generations as means to our own ends. It can even be argued that if a nonpresentist morality had been established and basically adhered to, the present ecological crisis would not have materialized. Many who clamour today for major changes in our attitudes towards nature do not realize that a change of attitude to future persons would probably be much easier to achieve and just as

203 Notes to pages 48-51 effective. For no radically new ethical concepts are needed thus to compel environmentally sound behaviour. We need merely become serious about including future persons within the pale of existing morality. It is most unfortunate that a great deal, probably the bulk, of the environmentally motivated thinking current today seems not to have noticed this simple point. Consider the following powerful argument from Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons: "Remoteness in time has, in itself, no more significance than remoteness in space. Suppose that I shoot some arrow into a distant wood, where it wounds some person. If I should have known that there might be someone in this wood, I am guilty of gross negligence. Because this person is far away I cannot identify the person whom I harm. But this is no excuse. Nor is it any excuse that this person is far away. We should make the same claims about effects on people who are temporally remote" (p. 357). 1 David McNally's Political Economy and the Rise of Capitalism presents a detailed and, I think, conclusive argument in support of this point. C H A P T E R TWO

i One example is the still-unresolved debate over the question why peasant agriculture should have been so refractory to marginalization in this century's troubled agrarian history. For a flavour, see Vergopoulos's "Capitalism and Peasant Productivity" and the piece by Mann and Dickinson strikingly entitled "Obstacles to the Development of a Capitalist Agriculture," both in the Journal of Peasant Studies where the subject is explored continuously, but unfortunately without a clear focus either on the lessons of English history or on the theory of a purely capitalist society. ii The process of industrialization displays great historical variety, of course. iii It is unfortunately necessary to provide some more general information about Uno's approach for the benefit of most non-Japanese readers of this text. Some hints about Uno's distinctive method were given in the final paragraph on dialectics of note iv to chapter i. Interested readers are urged to consult at the least T. Sekine's "Uno-Riron" and Albritton's A Japanese Reconstruction of Marxist Theory, as well of course as Uno's Principles of Political Economy. Aware that some of my readers will be historians (unlike Sekine and Albritton), and that all the other readers should doubtless spend more time thinking about history in any case, I would like to add my own historian's perspective. In a very early piece, "Under the Cloud of Capital," I made an attempt to compare the meaning for historical studies of Uno's approach to capitalism with the bodies of work carried

204 Notes to page 51 out by Karl Polanyi and E.P. Thompson. A few points made there are worth repeating and elaborating here. Uno was put on the right track as he saw it by the inability of early-twentieth-century Marxist theorists to establish a theory of the imperialist stage of capitalism on anything like the same methodological fooling as Marx's Capital, which dearly based itself somehow in the liberal stage. Uno then embarked on an immanent critique of Capital in search, as it were, of the right method. It is impossible to overemphasize that Capital was left uncompleted by Marx. Uno literally reworked the whole project, introducing many innovations in the style and order of presentation. He also provided solutions to all the technical problems that Marx had grappled with but been unable to solve. It is no exaggeration to say that Uno had a much clearer understanding of Marx's project than Marx did himself. Perhaps Uno's advantage over Marx in this respect was simply that he lived later in the history of capitalism. Uno's ultimate advantage over the theorists of capitalism who came after Marx has its origins in his unswerving focus on the contradiction between value and use-value as the defining problem for the very idea of a capitalist society. The commodity form attempts to mediate the contradiction, but regardless of how it makes society twist and turn it can never rest easy. Uno's Principles can be described as an ordered and exhaustive catalogue of the problems the commodity form faces and the panoply of attempted solutions. The importance of this may be suggested by comparing Uno's work with various other currents in twentieth-century economic theory. Uno's work is utterly different from the two most fashionable schools in contemporary English-speaking Marxist theory. So-called "analytical Marxism," typified in the work of Roemer, has tried to expand Marx's project so that it becomes merely a general theory of exploitation. The peculiarities of the commodity form are completely obscured by this approach, which makes some interesting transhistorical points but sheds no specific light at all on our world and times. The other influential school, the so-called "neo-Ricardians" associated with the work of Sraffa, make a different but equally fundamental error in trying to erect a general theory of commodity production while forgetting the complex social role of money in any actual capitalism. Uno could say of them as Keynes said of his classical colleagues that inattention to the reality of the roles of money so compromises the theoretical project as to render it trivial at its core. From the Unoist perspective it is clear that Karl Polanyi, who wrote no works of theory as such, was much more nearly on the right track than any other twentieth-century analyst of capitalism because he realized the fundamental importance of the commodity form in general for understanding the history of capitalism and, like Keynes, made a special

205 Notes to pages 51-2 study of the highly peculiar and revealing fate of money under the attempted rule of that form. The so-called neoclassical theorists who have so zealously tried since World War n to save the simple classical faith from Keynes's criticism have consequently elected to ignore the complexity of real money forms just like their intellectual forebears. They evidently do not believe that there is any fundamental contradiction between value and use-value and so they construct an imaginary world in which the commodity form always gets its way. Two hundred years of history show how essentially fantastic this point of view is, so it should be no surprise that the economics profession as a whole has paid far less attention to history over the last half century than it used to. Arguably there has been no progress since 1922, when Clapham made his famous gibes in "Of Empty Economic Boxes." Some economic historians have taken Clapham's point but their work, in many cases extremely valuable, has had no impact on theory. It seems that either you see it or you don't want to. Uno's approach, which yields the most satisfying theory, depends on realizing continuously that the commodity form is fundamentally an alien entity that may nonetheless persist in trying to insinuate itself into our economic life. The problems it creates have varied historically, but that there will always be massive problems we can surely by now agree is an established historical constant. As the discussion of money in the final chapter of this work indicates, I believe future progress depends on admitting the power of the commodity form while deliberately trying to restrain its ambitions. The attention to money in a work on agriculture has surprised many readers, but it seems completely natural to me. I like to suppose that Uno would have thought likewise. iv It may be worth noting that since the noninterventionist ideal is most nearly realizable within the liberal stage.we can see it is characteristic of the previous mercantilist stage that the state intervenes to set conditions so that it can eventually retreat from intervention. Uno's sense of English history coincided amazingly closely with the account given by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation. I realize that speaking of the state in terms of "intentions" is highly problematic, but policy developments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exhibit such a striking degree of patterning that it seems to be the best shorthand way to put the issues. It is always worth recalling that the first thinkers to experience it, those who were there at the time such as Adam Smith and Hegel, were sure it was the work of God. v Reflections on this aspect of Uno's stage theoretical conception of capitalist development is what lay behind the sociological boldness expressed in section iii of chapter i. Uno's theory of a purely capitalist society in particular is specified with such a high degree of detail that

206 Notes to pages 52-3 no confounding of capitalism with modernity in general is possible after acquaintance with it. This makes it harder to relate history and theory to each other and also frees one from any naive habits of determinist thought. As I have tried to explain in my article "Under the Cloud of Capital," intellectual liberation results from realizing where the outerbounds of the domain of theoretical explanation are to be located. Michael Fores's strictures on the use of the term "industry" and its cognates constituted the other stimulus behind my three-way distinction between modernity, industrialism, and capitalism. Fores's ironic gibes at the historiography speak volumes: "Writers have discussed the 'industrial revolution,' without clarifying the concept sufficiently. 'Was it the economy, or was it industry?' asks Hartwell, without making the obvious point that if the answer is 'the first,' the phrase 'industrial revolution' is inappropriate" ("The Myth of a British Industrial Revolution," 182). Hartwell is not the only one accused of theoretical incoherence; but Fores was remarkably gentle with his victims, given his subsequent demonstration that Hartwell's own evidence strongly implies that the term "industrial revolution" should be dropped. The confusion surrounding "industry" and its cognates seemed to me to justify giving the word a new and deliberately narrow definition that helps explicate our current problems. Readers may wish to refer back to note xxvii in my first chapter. vi With reference to the formulation "a purely capitalist society," it should be emphasized that the last word, "society," is not there by accident. Some Marxists seem to believe that there is such a thing as "capitalism" tout court, which somewhat in the manner of a gas simply exists all over in the relative institutional vacuum that we call "the world economy." Such theorists then point with glee to the contradictions in this "system." But as Uno has taught, it is surely wiser to be gravely impressed by the at least latent ability of capital to surmount its contradictions. If it were not so able, its image would not have the ideological resilience it manifestly has. Uno took seriously capital's bold claim to be able to run the whole economy of a society and run it efficiently at that (according to its own criteria of "efficiency," of course). In exploring this matter Uno found that capital, in order to have its way, merely had to have some specific institutional buttressing. One necessity, a unified legal system, contingently constitutes capitalism in national units regardless of capitalism's internationalist pretensions. The world economy, precisely because of its institutional heterogeneity, lacks such things as a unified legal system and thus cannot pose as the basis of a viable society. The world economy is thus inherently more chaotic than a purely capitalist society would be.

207 Notes to pages 53-6 vii At least three other historical societies (Ireland, Israel, and the USSR) have also seen a severe separation between the ownership and actual cultivation of land, but none had a class of true capitalists managing its agriculture and so they are not relevant in this theoretical context. viii The very fact that the members of the English landowning class for the most part did not themselves engage in production but certainly did their share of consuming made them protomodern in a way utterly unlike even the most commercially oriented peasants, ix It would obviously be a good idea if systematic consideration of this point were inserted into discussions of what is called "development economics." x English agricultural wages were abysmally low but this is not a distinguishing feature of England. In every modern society agricultural labourers have been paid less than industrial labourers. No good reason for this has ever been advanced. xi It is striking how the vast majority of well-meaning commentators on social problems in the English countryside betrayed utter ignorance of the ecological details of English agronomy. Their consequent tendency to make absurd suggestions was greatly compounded by the fashion, after the world agricultural system was well embarked on the road to chronic unprofitability, of urging settlement on the land as a solution to urban unemployment. To abuse the authors of such suggestions for being "nostalgic" rather misses the point. Contemporary commentators who do that show no signs of being wiser in the crucially relevant respects. xii John Saville, in an article entitled "Primitive Accumulation and Early Industrialization in Britain," had also emphasized England's uniqueness in the course of attacking those historians who minimize agrarian upheaval and its significance in English history. Saville pointed out that "in no country save Britain has there occurred a total transformation of the rural social structure" (p. 251), and also that many other changes occurred prior to industrialization in Britain's historical trajectory, which was in any case much advanced relative to the rest of Europe. "In no other country did pre-industrial society attain the pervasiveness of the market economy, the widespread acceptance of the profit-motive, or the levels of commercial and financial sophistication that existed in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century" (p. 250). It is important to realize that there are three distinct (but in this case related) claims made in the discussion: Britain underwent some changes seen nowhere else; Britain changed the most prior to its own industrialization; and Britain industrialized first. The truth of the third has long been commonly acknowledged, the evidence for the second has grown rapidly since Saville's contribution, but the significance of the first has

208 Notes to page 56 only rarely been adverted to and, arguably, has not yet been properly understood. It is the special focus of attention in this chapter. xiii The older historiography's obsession with exports probably derives in no small measure from the past tendency of historians to rely overwhelmingly on state documents, but it is worth considering the resulting bias from the point of view of the definition of modernity argued for here. International trade certainly shows a widening of the gulf between production and consumption, but the really interesting sociological puzzles surround the cases where the gulf widens inside a society, not between societies. xiv Brenner's term "agrarian capitalism" seems an unduly presumptuous, because spuriously comprehensive, label for this regime. It is not clear how one is to integrate, for example, the international financial sector of Britain's early modern economy with what was going on in the countryside. For the stage preceding liberalism Uno employed the old term "mercantilism." But this term is perhaps equally partial in the other direction. The concept of mercantilism was developed during a stage in the historiography of Europe when the focus was strongly on state policy, especially trade policy. It was later given more social depth by the generation of economic historians of the textile sector, who came to associate "mercantilist" trade policy with the putting-out system of cottage production under merchant control. At this time the literature on agricultural history was rudimentary. It was assumed that agricultural technique underwent radical change only after the heyday of the woollen industry, and that it did so by a process analogous to that of the supposedly well-characterized "industrial revolution." The consensus was that the exciting and historically significant changes were taking place in the wool industry, not in arable farming. In any case the strategic centre of capital accumulation was textiles and that was what historically mattered in the old view. Even after the mists of sheer ignorance surrounding early modern English agriculture have been dispelled, however, it remains unclear how the various sectors of the preindustrial economy are to be integrated conceptually. The term "mercantilist agriculture" does not seem promising for the farming sector because it sets up a false scent inasmuch as agriculture was not on the putting-out system, or anything resembling it. On the other hand, Brenner's term "agrarian capitalism" misleads in several ways. As I will show, it led him to mischaracterize the nature of technical change in English agricultural history. The term may also mislead by connoting the fully developed labour market, which, strictly speaking, we only find in the nineteenth century and which, at first, we can associate only with the factory system. (It also

209 Notes to page 56 suggests that there was a substantial class of pure managers in early modern English farming, and this is to be doubted.) The full story of the commodification of labour is outside my scope, but suffice it to say that England's early modern agricultural field labour was for the most part performed by persons who were neither bondsmen nor independent peasant proprietors. They may not have been completely free juridically to enter contracts (as, when, and where they pleased), but they and their forebears had been quite completely "freed" from the land. The following figures for the situation near the end of the commodification process were reproduced by Saville in his "Primitive Accumulation." In the 1831 census there were enumerated 961,000 families engaged in agriculture, of whom 144,600 occupied land (as owners or farmers) and did not hire wage labour, and 686,000 worked on the land for wages (p. 256). In 1851 there were 134,000 families occupying farms of less than 100 acres, 64,200 farming 100299 acres, and 16,671 farming 300 acres or more (p. 253). These latter figures may suggest a considerable peasant class standing against a tiny group of substantial entrepreneurs, but the impression would be highly misleading. It is perhaps unsurprising that it was a French historian Francois Bedarida who picked up on that point. He tells us in his A Social History of England: 1851-1975 that the owner-occupier (true peasant) class farmed less than fifteen percent of the land (p. 30). For the agricultural sector as a whole he reports that (in terms of numbers of individuals rather than families) there were thought to be some 1,250,000 agricultural labourers and some 250,00 tenant farmers in 1851 (p. 29). xv Hoyle has recently argued in his "Tenure and the Land Market in Early Modern England" that Brenner's detailed chronology is partly wrong. There was a "detour" in legal history from about 1550-1650 during which landlords lost ground. xvi The average size was fifty-six acres but that is a misleading figure. In reference to an evidently typical estate, Brodrick gave the following information in his 1881 compilation English Land and English Landlords: "On a very extensive property, scattered over several counties, and distributed into 278 farms, 140 of these farms (or more than one-half) are between 100 and 300 acres, 62 farms are between 50 and 100 acres, and 59 are between 300 and 500 acres, while three only exceed 1,000 acres" (p. 198). In the whole of England in 1880 he tells us there were only 4,095 farms with acreages between five hundred and one thousand, and a mere five hundred farms over one thousand acres (p. 200). On this question see also my discussion on the more illuminating issue of the relation of farm size to farming type in section iii.

2io Notes to pages 57-61 xvii In light of England's uniquely sequestered land-ownership pattern, the precociousness of its extreme modernity stands out all the more. The proportion of the active population employed in agriculture declined to less than forty percent over a hundred years earlier in Britain than it did in Germany, France, the us, Sweden, Japan, and Canada (to name just a few). Indeed, in France in 1960 the forty percent mark had not yet been breached, as Cipolla pointed out in his 1962 summary The Economic History of World Population (p. 28). In all these "slower" cases owner-occupiers came to be the norm and most of them were substantially self-sufficient until well into this century. xviii I will here give just a few illustrations of the kinds and degree of conspicuous consumption in which landowners were wont to indulge. In The Making of the English Landscape, Hoskms notes of the famous landscape architect Capability Brown, when he was working on the garden at Burghley in the mid-iyyos, that "besides creating a lake nearly a mile long, Brown moved trees of the most enormous bulk from place to place, to suit the prospect and landscape" (p. 176). Needless to say, such extravagant aesthetic gestures were very expensive. In Hadfield's A History of British Gardening we are given several figures to indicate the scale of costs. For instance, the distinctly nonutilitarian "ha-ha," beloved of English aristocratic gardens, was reckoned in the late eighteenth century to cost just under ^700 per mile; a good park wall /i.ooo per mile (p. 242). The dukes of Atholl between 1740 and 1830 planted 14,096,719 larch trees, just for effect (p. 249). In 1840, George Spencer-Churchill (later fifth duke of Marlborough) ran up an account at his favourite nursery of/i5,ooo; many specimens having cost him thirty guineas each (p. 275). These sums can be put in perspective by looking at the tables of wages in Lindert and Williamson's recent article "English Workers' Living Standards During the Industrial Revolution." Around 1800 a farm labourer earned about £30 per anum, a surgeon around £175 per anum (p. 4). xix In Marx's terminology the "organic composition of capital" refers to the value ratio obtaining between capital invested in means of production and labour employed. Without going in detail into the implications of the concept within the theory of value, I should say that the organic composition of capital is related to the "technical composition of capital," which is the notional measure of quantity of means of production applied per unit of labour power. xx Robert Allen's very recent and highly interesting Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 contains a close regional study somewhat more circumscribed in time than the subtitle suggests, as well a more general argument. Allen generally supports the Kerridge view that it was the seventeenth cen-

2ii Notes to pages 61-71 tury that saw genuinely revolutionary agricultural change, that enclosures had little to do with it, that great landlords did less to bring about improvement than did the actual farmers. It is certainly true that in the seventeenth century landlords had some major activities such as the Civil War to distract them from projects of agricultural improvement. While I cannot disagree with Allen's inference that England could have become more prosperous without the participation of landlords, if so it would have become a very different kind of society in ways that would take us too far off topic to discuss in this book. Allen's wider arguments against the historiographically orthodox views of the relationship between agriculture and industrialization, which he rather vaguely calls "Agrarian Fundamentalism," overlap considerably with my own, but cannot be treated at length here. Our sociotheoretical purposes are only barely commensurable. xxi English farming was indeed beginning even then to brush up against biological limits. Beyond a certain point further enriching of the soil caused wheat plants to shoot up to dangerous heights, making them highly vulnerable in a purely mechanical sense to strong winds or rains. It was only the breeding of short-stalked varieties in the middle of the twentieth century that allowed this limit to be passed. xxii In this passage I have been summarizing the views of Kumamoto, a Japanese student of the ecological side of industrialization. His work is unavailable in English and I owe my access to it to Professor Sekine directly. I will be arguing in chapter 3 that the relations between agriculture and industry outside the English case have been from the beginning very difficult. xxiii Indeed, the remarkably labour efficient production processes of our century (as compared, say, to Adam Smith's) have caused a running problem for so-called "development economists." They typically think that industrialization in itself causes increased living standards (by means of industrial employment) on the at least plausible grounds that it did so in England from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. They go on to assert (quite groundlessly) that it is a process that can be simply repeated again and again elsewhere. Kozo Uno is one of the few thinkers to have questioned this naive teleology explicitly. Unfortunately, translations into English of his work on these questions have not yet been published. I had access, however, to a partial translation (1981 version) by T. Sekine of the 1971 revised edition of Uno's Types of Economic Policies Under Capitalism. In that text Uno pointed out, with particular reference to monopoly capital and the technical and social changes it wrought at the turn of the century, that the very externality of commodity economic relations implies that there is nothing natural about the spreading of a commodity economy through-

212 Notes to pages 71-2 out a society. Capital may or may not feel "obliged to further decompose the traditional social relations" (p. 10). It is surely this aspect of the problem that explains to a large extent the by now thoroughly characteristic twentieth-century phenomenon of large "residual" populations that are seemingly intractable to industrialization. Of course what development economists really wanted to see was the emergence of the sort of integrated, complex division of labour that England had by Smith's day, an economy in which everyone can and will take part. They thought industrialization was the key when really it was modernization as stipulatively defined in this work. Indeed, the importance of the distinction between the two (which seems wholly consistent with Uno's point about capital's different labour needs in different stages of history) goes up as Smith's world recedes from us. To expect ultralabour-efficient technology to be able to draw everyone together into a homogeneous economy signals a failure to segregate questions of economic organization from questions of industrial technique. xxiv Shigeaki Shiina's work is unavailable in English and Professor Sekine is my source of information on his ideas. The point in question is made in his Nogyo ni totte Seisanryoku no Hatten to wa Nanika?, 161-2. If it were translated the title would say: What Does Productivity Advance Mean in Agriculture? xxv Uno's writings on the agricultural question are not available in English. I have based my discussion of Uno's apprehensions about capitalism's ability to cope with agriculture on a fragment translated by my fellow student, Brian MacLean, of an article by Uno whose title, if translated, would be "The Method of Theorizing the World Economy." This was made available to me by Professor Sekine. xxvi It is my conviction that the full story of English capitalist development remains to be written properly. The following points suggest lines of approach to the question and arise in part from a valuable discussion with Professor Sekine in the summer of 1989. It may be that the traditional literature on mercantilism and the more recent literature on agriculture could be integrated with the help of the demographic literature, perhaps somewhat as follows. Jacquetta Hawke's "moment of balance" was also, significantly, Adam Smith's moment. At that time, rural manufactures and agriculture were growing in a symbiotic balance, and the possibility of underconsumption of agricultural products (an inherent threat due to the ultimately finite nature of the demand for food) was kept at bay by population growth. This latter was partly stimulated by the very success of rural manufactures which in turn was largely a function of foreign demand (for textiles, especially). Both differentially faster population growth and accumulation of capital were taking place precisely in the rural manufacturing regions at this June-

213 Notes to pages 72-3 ture. (Just possibly, rapid population growth in the arable regions could have supported the system as well, but in any case the accumulation of capital per se in agriculture is frustrated for reasons I have outlined already.) It was of course the remarkable, but contingent, historical fact that English agriculture had built up reserves, as it were, of agricultural productivity (due to Kerridge's agricultural revolution) that allowed population to grow without immediately conjuring up Malthus's trap. This arrangement was undermined at the turn of the eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth by the exceedingly complex changes in the gender division of labour and consequent demographic shifts sensed at the time by Cobbett and recently revealingly analyzed by K.D.M. Snell. Be that as it may, once the basis of manufacturing prosperity in England shifted from wool to cotton the system was bound to unravel. The shift to external sourcing in raw materials disembedded manufacturing from agriculture, ruining the earlier symbiotic relationship. The great acceleration in the cotton industry was getting underway in Smith's day and was overwhelmingly exportdriven. The world economy increasingly became England's direct concern during the Victorian era. The point here is that during the "moment of balance," England, while not uninvolved, had not yet made itself dependent on the world economy. xxvii One person who made a special effort to see this matter in a clear light because of his immense military ambitions was Adolf Hitler. On cultural grounds he revered German rural society but could also see that his ultraindustrial approach to warfare required his ideal polity to have two halves, as it were. While there is no doubt about his visceral antiBolshevism (see Bullock's Hitler and Stalin), it is probable that Hitler's eastern campaigns were economically motivated at base. To one engaged in millennial calculations the Soviets could only appear as relatively temporary irritants anyway. Hitler sought to colonize eastern Europe mainly so that his ideal future society could have its own "America" to act as a hinterland. On this see the striking report quoted by David Irving in his invaluable and highly disturbing Hitler's War (p. 425). It is almost certain that Hitler would have seen no essential moral difference between the handling of so-called Indian occupants of North America and his own plans to enslave the Slavs. Undergirding his military aims was a thoroughly self-conscious plan to marry the most advanced military-industrial techniques to a rather old-fashioned agrarian sector. We can be sure that Hitler did not want to risk Germany's losing another world war on account of food-supply problems (which were indeed seen as severe at the time, as Offer has recently argued in his The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation). On the other hand, Hitler also subscribed to the popular German view that

214 Notes to pages 73-7

xxviii

xxix

xxx

xxxi

farmers were the spiritual backbone of the nation. The resulting Nazi agrarian platform thus had two planks, one cultural and one economic. According to Clifford Lovin, it was a success, at least for a while. Certainly, few other countries did a better job of managing the integration of agriculture with industry. In the view of Jon Cohen, the Italian fascists failed notably and a yawning gap appeared between their cultural rhetoric and the emerging economic realities. There is a whole cohort of "New Left" scholars who maintain that this refusal of industrialization is still the main cultural impediment to the democratization of British society. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have been working this vein for about three decades now. I wish it were needless to suggest that they listen to Cobbett. They cannot apparently grasp the relevance of questions of agricultural technique to democratic projects. In the third volume of Capital (assembled from Marx's notes by Engels), Marx makes the claim that under the landlord system of farming, as well as in small-scale agriculture, "squandering of the vitality of the soil ... takes the place of conscious rational cultivation of the soil as eternal communal property, an inalienable condition for the existence and reproduction of a chain of successive generations of the human race" (p. 812). As indicated in note viii to chapter i, Marx seems to have been quite ignorant of the details of the organization of English agriculture, but we can now refine the criticism by suggesting that he failed to see the necessity of distinguishing theoretically between the greed of the capitalist in general and the greed of the landowning class. These may or may not coincide in practice. If change in the prevalence of absenteeism on the part of landlords is any index of shifts in their attitudes, it appears that they took a more detailed interest in their estates after around 1750 than they had previously. Moreover, as Roebuck shows in his "Absentee Landownership in the Late i7th and Early i8th Centuries" professional estate stewards of high calibre were quite rare in the earlier period. Information on this point has never been gathered systematically, but this is the unmistakable impression one gets from the famous earlytwentieth-century farmers' spokesman, A.G. Street, in his recently republished autobiography, Farmers's Glory, from which I have already quoted. [The crop] rotation was as unalterable as the law of the Medes and Persians. One always knew what crop a particular field would be growing two or three years ahead, and worked to that end. Any slight variation was considered a sin, and, like sin, it always left its mark. For instance if one were tempted - I use the words advisedly - to seed a piece of vetches

215 Notes to pages 77-82 or clover, the extra robbing of the ground showed in the ensuing wheat crop. It mattered not a whit that the produce of this immoral seeding might bring in more money than a good crop of wheat. One didn't farm for cash profits but did one's duty by the land. (p. 29) The last line is disingenuous, for the farming emphatically was done for cash profit. The point is that it was not just done anyhow. Specifically, it was not done under the imperious sway of the necessarily shorttime-horizon concept known as "opportunity cost." On this, see my theoretical arguments in "On Identifying a Sound Environmental Ethic in History." I intend to explain more about these matters in the monograph I am currently preparing, which is tentatively entitled "Capitalist Farming with Rules: An Environmental Interpretation of the Legal Institutionalization of Classical English Agronomy and Its Decline." xxxii Whether this remarkable rule was always observed is another matter. For information on the landlords not putting agriculture and sustainability before mining, see David Spring's article "The English Landed Estate in the Age of Coal and Iron" and Brian Osborne's "Commonlands, Mineral Rights and Industry." xxxiii For this period some considerable portion of this "doubling" must have been due to successful conversion from open field to enclosed farming, since rents for lands operated continuously under either of those agricultural systems did not double of their own accord. xxxiv According to Walter Bagehot in his classic, The English Constitution, the English Parliament of the mid-nineteenth century contained a highly disinterested group of men uniquely able to determine the national interest and legislate accordingly. He insists that the enfranchisement of a significant chunk of the middle class (the import of the 1867 Reform Bill) utterly ruined this mechanism. Bagehot's fine distinctions have usually been viewed in this century as canting elitist propaganda and then dismissed. But it violates the sense and structure of his argument not to take him at face value on what he maintained was the crucial issue. Government to Bagehot must be done by persons insulated from all impermanent interests. Who but the landowning aristocracy could meet this requirement? Cannadine's judgment in the following passage from The Aristocracy and the Towns is relevant here precisely because it shows that class bias alone did not determine legislation: The passing of the First Reform Act, and the Repeal of the Corn Laws ... were not so much a triumph of the middle classes but, in Parliament at least, the victory of one part of landed society over another since both issues were resolved in a legislature where both parties were preponderantly landed in composition. Even families were split. Indeed, over the

216 Notes to pages 82-90 Corn Laws, as over every major political issue from the time of the FoxNorth Coalition to Home Rule, fathers in the Lords and sons in the Commons could be seen going through different lobbies. However strong might have been their sense of family, of county community, or of national group solidarity, the fact remains that in nineteenth century politics, both parties were captained and supported by members of the landed classes, (p. 29, original emphasis) In this context it is worth noting that Adam Smith, who did sometimes criticize the aristocracy, made the following observation in The Wealth of Nations: "The interest of those [who live by rent] ... is strictly and inseparably connected with the general interest of the society. Whatever either promotes or obstructs the one, necessarily promotes or obstructs the other. When the public deliberates concerning any regulation of commerce or police, the proprietors of land can never mislead it, with a view to promote the interest of their own order" (p. 201). xxxv Kenneth Mellanby has recently reminded us in his short text Can Britain Feed Itself? that Britain's absolute capacity to produce food has not yet been tested. He reckons that Britain could certainly feed itself a nutritionally sound diet using current technology (chapter 6). Mellanby further says, "It is difficult to estimate the effect on British agriculture of'going organic' but I am convinced it would not be catastrophic ... there would still be sufficient margin to produce our basic diet" (p. 50). xxxvi This suggestion was made by David MacNally in a presentation to a seminar run by the Professors Wood at York University in 1983. xxxvii In the literature on this question, particular significance is commonly attached to the dating of the demise of the landed classes. In his The Aristocracy and the Towns: 1774-1967, Cannadine, remarkably, seems unwilling to issue a death certificate for the aristocracy for any date prior to World War n (p. 429). CHAPTER THREE

i I will, however, suggest that most investment in industrial production methods over the past 125 years has been fundamentally military in origin, undertaken either as part of military preparations or as a consequence of military activity. I intend to argue in a textbook on environmental history that once this is properly appreciated, the standard antiLuddite argument - that such prosperity as the world enjoys today depends on maintaining the current extent of industrialization - becomes a gross exaggeration at best, self-serving propaganda at worst. I have found Pearton's Diplomacy, War and Technology since 1830 a useful source on this question.

217 Notes to pages 91-9 ii Adams, however, has also suggested just such a move in his stimulating study Paradoxical Harvest: Energy and Explanation in British History, 1870-1914 (p. 74). But his analysis is marred by energy "reductionism" of a sort that falls foul of Georgescu-Roegen's stricture "matter matters too," discussed in note xlviii to chapter i. iii I employ the word "active" deliberately, because I am aware that there are two other periods when the world at large (the English-speaking part in particular) has been mightily bullied by concepts from political economy. In the 19305 authorities in the economics profession certainly affected policy, but purely passively, inasmuch as their message was that unfortunately nothing could be done. The world economy duly drifted under their tutelage until World War n made their ideas utterly irrelevant. In the 19803, however, some of the same notions experienced a recrudescence in the form of the monetarist dogma, which this time tried to cast nonintervention as a virtue. Of course, if one looks for effects, the 19803 policies were anything but passive. A massive program of disinvestment (except in the case of arms manufacturing) was encouraged by the high-interest-rate policies in the metropoles. Since we know Keynes was exasperated by the perverse inaction of his peers during the 19305 and was consequently led to outline a new approach that he hoped would eventually result in the dwindling to zero of the interest rate ("the euthanasia of the rentier"), we can be fairly certain he would have been driven insane by the monetarist policies of the 19805, which gave the rentiers a degree of control over the economic lives of their fellow citizens probably not seen since the demise of feudalism. We can safely guess that Adam Smith and David Ricardo would have been on Keynes's side had the three of them witnessed the 19805 together. iv Robert Stewart argues in his The Politics of Protection (p. 13) that even Peel was keen to repeal the Corn Laws - if he could be convinced they were the cause of manufacturing depression - and in any case was happy to try to solve the latter problem by the former "solution." The fallacy of irrelevance has been one of the most loyal servants of industry in its campaign to subjugate agriculture. v In his brilliant study Politics Without Democracy, Bentley does mention (p. 136) that for a time, at any rate, around 1849, Disraeli was exercised by fears of the emergence of a revolutionary movement (complete with republicanism) among the farmers (not, interestingly enough, among the proletariat). Nothing came of this, however. vi Another classic instance of such feudal regression induced by the world grain market was Rumania. See Pounds, An Historical Geography of Europe (p. 195). vii Another commentator who attached much general importance to what we are calling "the agricultural explanation" was the American diplo-

218 Notes to pages 99-102 mat John H. Williams. See his "Economic Lessons of Two World Wars." Also putting emphasis on disarray in agriculture at the time they wrote (mostly between the wars) and made use of here to construct the synthetic account below, were: Altschul and Strauss, Technical Progress and Agricultural Depression; Arndt, Economic Lessons of the Nineteen Thirties; Enfield, The Agricultural Crisis, 1920-3; Galbraith and Black, "The Maintenance of Agricultural Production during Depression"; Genung, The Agricultural Depression Following World War One and its Political Consequences: An Account of the Deflation Episode 1921-34; Heaton, Economic History of Europe; de Hevesy, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General; Higgins, "Agriculture and War: A Comparison of Agricultural Conditions in the Napoleonic and World War Periods"; and Timoshenko, "World Agriculture and the Depression." Also consulted were the publications of the League of Nations Economic Committee of 1931 and the United States Congress Joint Committee of Agricultural Inquiry of 1921. Among our own contemporaries, the following historians give agricultural disarray its causal due: Bairoch, "Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution"; Garraty, The Great Depression; and Priebe, "The Changing Role of Agriculture, 1920-70." viii Given that we are again hearing calls for such a reduction I cannot refrain from pointing out the continued relevance of Keynes's amusing comments on some of the more absurd postulates of the classical economists (in sections n and in of Chapter 2 his General Theory). Keynes explains very clearly why it is analytically bizarre as well as psychologically and institutionally naive to expect working people to be able to bring about a general reduction. ix The reader is referred back to note vi, chapter 2, in which the impropriety of speaking of a capitalist world market is implied. It follows from the theory of a purely capitalist society that a coherent theory of value can be developed only for the latter case, not at all for the former. Notions of "economic rationality" that abstract from institutional heterogeneity are actually deeply irrational by reference to the wider, more reasonable concept of rationality that does not hypostatize a consistent calculus where none exists. x Interested readers should consult the "Canadian Interlude" in A.G. Street's aforementioned autobiography, Farmer's Glory. The relish with which the young Street ploughed parts of Manitoba in the early years of the second decade of this century is personally compelling, however environmentally dubious. xi In his award-winning book on Chicago, Nature's Metropolis, the American environmental historian William Cronon has shown in considerable detail how this key city was inclined by world commodity markets to fashion its hinterland in what I would call a thoroughly nonorganic

219 Notes to pages 102-12 way, premised from the start on an extreme separation between production and consumption. The contrast with the typical European pattern of preindustrial urban development could scarcely be more extreme. For a complex modelling of the latter, see Part 2 of the first volume of Braudel's sadly uncompleted The Identity of France. xii In this connection I am happy to refer to Donald Worster, one of the relatively few self-styled environmental historians who has a thorough and critical appreciation of the wider importance of agriculture. In his Rivers of Empire (arguably his greatest work yet), he points out that in the us, critics pointed out as early as 1902 that government-sponsored immigration and land-reclamation projects in the arid West greatly exacerbated the potential for overproduction in agriculture even as industrial protection went relatively unquestioned (p. 164). It is by such means that industrialization became an immensely powerful process in our century but, it is being a little too unfair to our own capacity for common sense to see it as inevitable. xiii It should be mentioned that Stalin continued to export some grain from the Soviet Union even under the depressed market conditions obtaining in the early thirties, in order to import various industrial devices from capitalist firms. The convenience of such contracts for capitalist governments masked in their eyes the monstrous fact that there was simultaneously occurring a grain famine (in the Ukraine, no less). For more on the general ideological background to this most obscene case of industry triumphing over agriculture, see my article "On Rapid Industrialization and Collectivization." For more on the famine in particular, see the recent book on the subject by Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow. xiv Perhaps in this we can see a partial explanation for the decline of the popular antitrust movement at a time when industrial concentration was scarcely atrophying. In "What Happened to the Anti-Trust Movement?" Richard Hofstadter puzzled over this political sea-change in the us. Recalling Shepard's thesis in Nature and Madness on the effect of changing from the hunting-gathering lifestyle to the settled agrarian mode of existence, we must also not underestimate the cultural and ideological significance of the move for so many people from the land, with its relatively stable community, to the fluid, urban mosaic found so commonly in modern society today. xv The unfortunate case of Irish tenants, most of whom were not true capitalists but peasants, is another matter altogether. xvi In note ix, chapter 2, I pointed out that so-called "development economics" would have achieved more if it had not been based on a misinterpretation of the meaning of British history for our understanding of modernity. But I understated the case. Perhaps the point of first

22O Notes to pages 112-16 importance in the history of what came to be called the Third World is that over the last half century or more, its modernization has been attempted in a context of collapsed world agricultural markets. It is crucial to understand that this simple fact still has ramifying consequences. The impossibility of really prosperous farming (of English standards) made the rural division of labour in manufacturing much harder to establish. This further exacerbated a flight to hyperurbanized areas with inadequate infrastructure especially in poor countries. Many people came to these places not because there was a positive opportunity but because, for the poor, there tends to be easier access to food in cities. We should never forget Smith's advice about the proper sequence of what we now call "development," quoted at the end of chapter i. It is not that Smith was more intelligent than we are. It may simply be that he saw more clearly because in 1776 the world was far less cluttered with the detritus of foolishly premature capitalist globalization initiatives. xvii If the recent rounds of GAIT discussions result in a generalized replacement of price supports by income supports, it is possible that the global surpluses will be reduced somewhat. It must be remembered, however, that entrenched industrial interests stand to lose a great deal of their markets in agricultural inputs if production levels are seriously reduced in the wealthy countries, and so considerable further resistance to changes in the postwar system can be expected. I, for one, was not surprised that the negotiations have been so long-lasting and acrimonious. xviii In the area of processing and selling noncereal farm produce there has been a strong pattern that has reacted backwards to affect some onfarm practices. In the term "supermarket" the word market is used disingenuously, for a supermarket is not a market at all but a single shop. This gives the game away when one thinks of the effects of the development of supermarkets on agriculture. Because of their special transportation problems, the supermarket chains have instituted bulkorder procurement policies that have favoured consistently sized and coloured (unripe) produce. This has certainly led to a reduction both in real "market" opportunities for smaller operators and in the genetic variability of the favoured varieties of produce. What consumers save while inside the supermarket buying the inferior produce they generally lose in taxes to support the marginalized farmers. The now almost universal penchant for eating out-of-season vegetables in the wealthy countries has played a crucial role in cementing the position of the supermarket chains. xix Michael Perelman made this argument in a paper entitled "Considerations on the Efficiency of the us Food System." He points out that per

221 Notes to page 116 capita social costs go up with urbanization, especially when a rural exodus results chiefly in turning the rural poor into the urban poor. While this book is not intended to deal comprehensively with urbanism its arguments are not innocent of implications for urbanism as a cultural practice and some of the relevant points should be sketched here. I think it no exaggeration to say that the pattern of agricultural change in the last century made contemporary-style cities possible, and that the relative inattention to agricultural history in this century has resulted in a complete failure to understand in detail how that history has given specific cultural shapes to our urban milieux. While many readers may find my scattered references to what I call "hyperurbanism" offensive, few would argue that the phrase is absurd. Up to a point increased population density brings profound cultural benefits. That much should be obvious. (See my note xli on Kohr in chapter i.) The critical point is that the relationship is not constant; eventually regression occurs. Just consider the size of Florence in its prime and then consider contemporary London. There is every reason to encourage cities to attain a certain density and absolute size, but no reason to applaud their continued growth. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs argues that cities and the market system greatly favoured each other's development, but her point concerns means not ends, and few of those who are anxious about contemporary urban trends could honestly say that the market system is seriously underdeveloped in wealthy countries today. What has to be understood is that many of the specific features of contemporary cities result directly from the manner of our response to the chronic agricultural crisis of this century. Others are indirect results of the history of the relation between agriculture and industry. The following theses need to be worked into any full account of urban development this century; they matter to socialists and nonsocialists alike: i) Deindustrialization of the countryside turned the countryside into a culturally deprived milieu, relatively speaking, and by reducing opportunities for by-employment, it caused something of a rural exodus and also foreclosed on more flexible responses to mass unemployment, a constant threat under industrial methods. 2) The chronic agricultural depression that began some six decades ago exaggerated the rural exodus due to rural demdustrialization. 3) The increased concentration of industrial production and human populations in cities turned already major social costs involved in waste disposal into severe fiscal burdens. 4) The opening of the prairies to agriculture, which caused the chronic agricultural depression we live in, destroyed the competitiveness of agriculture in the immediate hinterlands of urban milieux and thereby lowered farmland values. As a result, so-called "suburban"

222 Notes to pages 116-23 development came to be viewed as a sensible pattern of land use. 5) The attraction of lower fiscal burdens in suburbs further exacerbated the pollution problems described in thesis number 3. Mike Davis's book on Los Angeles (which came out before the 1992 riots) is worth reading for a glimpse of the further downward spiral that may well occur in our time. xx Even the most careful, small-scale applications of regular artificial fertilizers probably have some negative consequences for certain soil organisms and likely also distort nutrient uptake by plants, thereby weakening them against disease, insects, and weeds and perhaps lowering their nutritional value. The judicious use of so-called "micronutrient" preparations can definitely be helpful for balancing some deficiencies. For reporting these current scientific opinions to me I am indebted to R. Macrae, Research Assistant, Ecological Agriculture Projects, Macdonald College, McGill University, Montreal. xxi Synthetic fibres have to some extent similarly resulted in the saving of labour in the textile industry. However, it is arguable that most of these fibres, since they do not have exactly the same set of useful characteristics as natural fibres, in fact constitute different use-values, not substitutes in the strict sense. xxii In the years since I began the research for this book, an eminently foreseeable generalized garbage-disposal crisis (even for small North American towns) has led to some glimmerings of a more ecologically enlightened approach to waste. The integration of waste management with agricultural production has not, however, seriously been revived as a solution. The whole episode thus far also illuminates the inherent and deep conservatism of so-called "market forces." It is one of the striking feature of contemporary ideology in "the West" that "the market" is credited with a bias towards innovation, when the opposite is true. Change calls for planning, as any factory manager will confirm. The quick response of the consuming public to municipal recycling initiatives greatly exceeded the expectations of economists in particular who were sure a priori that people would never spend time sorting trash they were used to mixing indiscriminately. An enormous supply of semisorted materials quickly accumulated, but for long it could not be sold at an adequate rate. Since in an integrated market system price effects cannot fail to spread, the old, stupidly low prices (for, e.g., paper) that were absolutely dependent on the most myopic unsustainable exploitation of resources (e.g., clearcurting forested slopes) continued to hold sway. The market system is above all a perfect mechanism for replicating price structures. It can only respond to change painfully and will always contrive to exaggerate the costs of change and underplay the benefits.

223 Notes to pages 123-7 Since there has been so much absolute nonsense peddled about "market forces" by the neoconservatives over the last fifteen years, it may be worth rehearsing here the only valid argument for the market system. In a complex society in which production and consumption are deeply sundered, the integrated market system is the cheapest method known for signalling demand. It is not the best method of signalling, just the cheapest. I describe how merchants can let it work in section iii of the next chapter. The neoconservative claim that "the market" is best at revealing what people want is either disingenuous or naive. The claim only seems plausible so long as one ignores the real incentives under an integrated market system. Of course, the market system could be used in such a way that it did reveal what people wanted, but it is not so used today. The suppliers of goods are perfectly satisfied as long as their goods sell. They have no intrinsic interest in whether the goods are actually appropriate. In contemporary capitalism advertising plays the role of creating sales. The precise meeting of actual needs or desires is merely an accidental by-product of the operation of the system. Perhaps the most striking evidence for this is the disarming frankness with which business spokespersons urge the public to realize that nowadays marketing is "vital." Indeed, in addition to contributing to an outrageously bad "signal-to-noise" ratio, the market-with-advertising arrangement we live under is not a particularly cheap system of signalling. I know of no thorough statistical analysis of the scale of the phenomenon, but for the wealthy countries of the world it seems unlikely that the surcharge on prices due to advertising can be much smaller than the burden of income tax. A related weakness of the market system is due to the awkward fact that the commodity form does not sit equally well on all goods, and so if wealth production takes the form of commodity production, those goods most amenable to the commodity form will tend to preponderate regardless of how inappropriate they may be on other grounds. The substitution of private automobiles for streetcars as a system of mass urban transportation is the classic example of the form shaping material reality. Advertising often plays the explicit distractive role of making up the difference to us so that we do not notice the added expense or other defects. xxiii Again, since this work was undertaken, there have been some signs of improvement. In the state of California a law was passed that required some portion of the agricultural-research budget of the government to be spent on explicitly ecologically conceived research. xxiv In a 1991 article in the Journal of Historical Sociology, Michael Cowen and Robert Shenton argue that some strands of socialist thought (Fabianism, especially) nonetheless reveal an "agrarian" bias when the focus is switched to colonies and ex-colonies. There is, little sign, however,

224 Notes to pages 127-43 that even this sort of self-styled "socialist" thinking ever paid much serious attention to agronomy, the real stuff of agricultural politics, xxv There is, however, a very considerable contingent of Uno-inspired Marxist academics in Japan. Itoh's 1980 collection Value and Crisis had Unoist economists providing one-fifth of the Marxist economists, or one-tenth of all Japanese economists (pp. n, 38). xxvi The reader is referred back to note xxv, chapter 2, in which the source for this quotation is described. xxvii It may be worth emphasizing how different Karl Polanyi's understanding of our chief problem was from Uno's (a fortiori from my own). The last part of The Great Transformation proclaims that the market system was society's first attempt to cope with the extensive use of machinery in production. Polanyi there hints at his pluralist conception of socialism, which he hoped might give society another chance to cope with the implications of machinery. It seems that Polanyi seriously questioned neither the extent of industrialization nor its relative dominance. While I do not doubt the extensive harmful effects on operators of the heavy use of machinery, I believe the old-fashioned focus on machinery as the essence of the contemporary problem misses the ecological point that can be captured by Tamanoi's way of defining industrial production. CHAPTER FOUR

i As an example of this tendency consider the title of the journal: Capitalism, Nature, Socialism: A Journal of Socialist Ecology. ii It should be noted that cost-benefit analyses could never, even in principle, provide proper guidance in environmental matters because for the analysis to be ecologically realistic the time frame has to be nature's, not one of ours. There is no way of knowing all the relevant future prices needed for the calculations. That much is true regardless of whether the future is discounted or not (it always is in such analyses). Although it is one of the most deeply engrained cultural features of modernism (no etymological surprise), it is actually hard to justify discounting the future, for as pointed out earlier, future persons are not obviously less worthy than we are, morally speaking. For introductory discussions of the technical problems of using cost-benefit analysis with respect to environmental policy, see the papers by David Pearce and C.A. Nash. In contrast to the economistic attempts of cost-benefit analysis to internalize the externalities, which thus produce results that are misleading at best, ecological studies can tell us directly what practices are and are not likely to be sustainable. Our aim must be to move to a situation where we choose only from among sustainable practices.

225 Notes to pages 144-59 iii It is striking how carelessly people often discuss these matters. People who are very fond of rural landscapes often react negatively (and often justifiably) to many urban areas, but then explain the ugliness they perceive on the illogical grounds that it is man made, as though the former were not. In Culture and Society Raymond William quoted the following ill-informed passage from D.H. Lawrence, who ought to have known better: "The real tragedy of England, as I see it, is the tragedy of ugliness. The country is so lovely: the man-made England is so vile" (p. 201). As one comes to realize after reading Oliver Rackham's masterpiece The History of the Countryside, it is now getting on for two thousand years since any significant chunk of England remained unaffected by human activities. iv Sartre's pessimistic but realistic assessment of political possibilities in the modern world in Existentialism and Humanism is concerned with the same sort of difficulty. "I cannot count upon men whom I do not know, I cannot base my confidence upon human goodness or upon man's interest in the good of society, seeing that man is free and that there is no human nature which I can take as foundational" (p. 40). v I am aware that Eric Wolf has insisted on defining peasants as politically subordinate presumably on grounds of political realism. But such a definition is surely insufficiently general to clarify some of the essence of the peasant outlook. The striking thing about peasants is that they look out from somewhere, from their farms, to be perfectly specific. It may be, contingently, that all known peasantries have been politically subordinate, but surely nearly all would have preferred freedom and, more to the point here, would have known exactly what to do with it, namely, get on with their lives on their farms. vi In Shadow Work, Illich has argued for the revival of the original sense of "vernacular" in which the contrast is with "commodity." Vernacular goods are homespun, examples of production intended for immediately local consumption. vii Most American organic farmers work a similar vein in agricultural reform, having been especially influenced by the work of the Rodale family. Their simple message to all American farmers is that the way to increase profits is radically to reduce costs by getting out of the habit of purchasing expensive inputs. viii A polyculture is simply a mixture of plants growing indiscriminately together in space. ix As Richard T. Ely made clear in "Economic Aspects of Mormonism," the Mormon agricultural efforts were an outstanding success in nineteenth-century Utah where they turned a section of virtual desert into a lush valley. However, the basis of their cultural independence, which included their own monetary system (discussed by Leonard Arrington

226 Notes to pages 159-76 in "The Mormon Tithing House"), was fatally undermined as a result of the dispute with the us federal government over the propriety of polygamy. Thus, a sound agrarian culture collapsed for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with farming. The Amish, who have managed to maintain their own culture, are increasingly noted as superlative farmers. See Berry's The Gift of Good Land. Apparently the Amish do even better financially than most of their conventional neighbours due to their policy of scrupulously avoiding habitual purchases of expensive, externally sourced inputs. It is worth remarking here that many long-lived, small-scale societies never were especially peaceful or pleasant, at least not according to Robert Edgerton, whose Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony evidently resulted from mounting irritation with fashionable tendencies to simplify human history in accounts that depend on mindless functionalist fairy-tales about "adaptive practices." x When the value of a good is not thus measured in the anonymous market, the pricing is generally done on a cost-plus basis with all the notorious attendant abuses this procedure allows. Quite apart from its potential for facilitating extortion, cost-plus pricing can never guarantee, as the social pricing process of commodities that do undergo the full market experience can, that the resulting allocation of resources, however reasonable it seems, is in fact socially valid. Only after an actual process of validation can results emerge that are meaningful in terms of the claimed virtues of the market system, xi In Canada at any rate, the tax laws clearly specify that any and every nonmonetized act of trading is subject to taxation, just like ordinary trading. Thus far the government has only been willing to take payment in its currency even for sums owing in respect of the "green" components of deals done in LETS. The reassuring thing, at least in Canada, is that starting to use LETS widely raises no questions for tax lawyers. xii It can be argued that real consumer sovereignty must imply freedom to take part in setting prices, too. But the kind of consumer sovereignty promised by a purely capitalist society with competitive prices only ensures that manufacturers are not conspiring against the public. There are good reasons to see that as no small thing, but it is merely a negative and passive blessing. It is hard perhaps for us - who dwell in an economic system in which, as Baran and Sweezy so well explained in Monopoly Capital, the advertising effort has penetrated the production process - to realize now how very competitive capitalist manufacturers originally were in, e.g., nineteenth-century England. xiii Polanyi's The Great Transformation is structured around the concept of the necessarily fictitious commodification of labour, money, and land.

227 Notes to pages 176-81 The discussion, however, concentrates overwhelmingly on the first two. Indeed, for the English case, which Polanyi holds central, he could hardly have found much evidence of the negative effects of the commodification of land. Although Polanyi points out that "land is only another name for nature" (p. 72) and argues that through its commodification "nature would be reduced to its elements" (p. 73), he does not really substantiate this claim in the systematic way he does for labour and money; moreover, he leaves us with no concrete notion of what to do about it. Many of the social problems in nineteenth-century England were due to excessively involuted urbanization, which was itself in many cases due to the unwillingness of the owners of rights in the surrounding open-field farmland to allow enclosure. Hoskins made this clear in The Making of the English Landscape (pp. 281-6). Polanyi does not seem to have grasped the fact of urbanism and the problems it creates for the possibility of socialism. (See my note xix in chapter 3.) How are the proper users of land, the farmers, to control the behaviour of urban-industrial "users" of land? The former deal directly with its real qualities, the latter only occupy it, merely geometrically, as it were, xiv If my proposals seem unduly Utopian in the pejorative sense, at least it cannot be by comparison with conventional socialist strategies. These latter rely on the direction, if not control, of investment flows, an impossibility in the foreseeable future given the deregulation and consequent further globalization of financial institutions imposed on us by the neoconservatives during the 19805. In any case although fresh investment of almost any kind is a balm to the kind of economic arrangements we are now used to (as Keynes pointed out), at the substantive level new investment is not what the inhabitants of the wealthy countries really need. Some past investment decisions should be corrected, for sure, but as the enormous scale of the marketing and advertising effort shows, the metropoles suffer from immense overcapacity in almost all lines of industrial production.

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References

CHAPTER ONE

1 Berry, "Whose Head Is the Farmer Using? Whose Head is Using the Farmer?" 24. 2 Polanyi, "Aristotle Discovers the Economy," 81. 3 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, ch. 12. 4 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, ch. 4. 5 Stanfield, The Economic Thought of Karl Polanyi, 12. 6 Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 323-3. 7 Marx, Early Writings, 127-8. 8 Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx, So. 9 Locke, Two Treatises, 332. 10 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 150. n Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, ch. i. 12 Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, 151. 13 Marx, Grundrisse, 474. 14 Marx, Capital, vol. i, 505-7. 15 Ibid., 506. 16 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 558-9. 17 Parsons, Marx and Engels on Ecology, 39. 18 Engels, Dialectic of Nature, 180-1. 19 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Feyerabend, Against Method. 20 Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 42, 559. 21 Helms, "Walter Lowdermilk's Journey." 22 Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, 28.

230 References, pages 13-37 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Sauer, Agricultural Origins and Dispersals. Cohen, The Food Crisis in Prehistory. Odum, Ecology; Worster, Nature's Economy, Part 4. David and Eileen Spring, eds., Ecology and Religion in History. Shepard, Nature and Madness. Carter and Dale, Topsail and Civilization; Hyams, Soil and Civilization. Hyams, ibid., 56. Braudel, The Mediterranean. White, Medieval Technology and Social Change. Cooter, "Ecological Dimensions"; Raftis, "A Medievalist Responds." Bloch, French Rural History; McCloskey, "The Persistence of English Common Fields." 34 Raymond Williams, Keywords. 35 Chapter i of Part Two. 36 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 10. 37 Mui and Mui, Shops and Shopkeepers. 38 Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680. 39 Kerridge, "The Agricultural Revolution Reconsidered." 40 Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism; McKendrick et al., The Birth of a Consumer Society; Langford, A Polite and Commercial People. 41 Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 138. 42 Perry Anderson, "Figures of Descent." 43 Samuel, "Workshop of the World." 44 Rubinstein, "The Victorian Middle Classes." 45 Ingham, Capitalism Divided? 46 Colin Duncan, "Agriculture and the Industrial Teleology in Modern English History." 47 Cannadine, "The Past and the Present in the Industrial Revolution." 48 "Dialogues on Civilization between Boulding and Galbraith; serial #16," Mainichi Daily News (English-language Tokyo newspaper), 31 October 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

1975Tamanoi et al., "Towards an Entropic Theory." Near the end of section i (see note 18 above). Chapman, Fuel's Paradise. Murota, "Heat Economy of the Water Planet Earth." Schroedinger, What Is Life? Murota, "Heat Economy of the Water Planet Earth." Myers, The Primary Source. Ibid., 10. Jenny, The Soil Resource, xv. Cousteau et al., The Cousteau Almanac, 485-7. Geertz, Agricultural Involution. Lovelock, Gaia.

231 References, pages 39-61 61 Smil, Biomass Energy. 62 Worster, Nature's Econmy, ch. n. 63 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. 64 Ignatieff, "Comrades and Strangers." 65 Marwick, The Deluge; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists. 66 Sale, "Bioregionalism." 67 Sekrne, "Socialism as a Living Idea." 68 Hazel Henderson, "Post-Economic Policies for Post-Industrial Societies." 69 Carson, Silent Spring. 70 Balfour, The Living Soil; Howard, An Agricultural Testament. 71 Price, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. 72 Berry, The Unsettling of America. 73 J. Russell Smith, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. 74 Jackson, New Roots for Agriculture. 75 Worster, Dustbowl. 76 Eckholm, Losing Ground. 77 Todd and Todd, Bioshelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming. 78 Lovelock, Gaia, 28. 79 Georgescu-Roegen, "Myths about Energy and Matter." 80 Chayanov, "The Journey of My Brother Alexis to the Land of Peasant Utopia"; Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant. 81 Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. 82 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, 293-4. C H A P T E R TWO

1 Young, Portrait of an Age: Victorian England, 73. 2 Sekine, "Uno-Rion"; Albritton, A Japanese Reconstruction of Marxism. 3 Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism. 4 Wrightson, English Society: 1580-1680, 134. 5 Brenner, "Agrarian Class Structure." 6 Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism. 7 Aston and Philpin, The Brenner Debate. 8 Clapham, Economic Development of France and Germany, 16. 9 Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 23. 10 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the igth Century, 7. n Uno, Principles of Political Economy, pt. 3, ch. 2. 12 Mantoux, The Industrial Revolution in the i8th Century, 211. 13 Habbakuk, "Economic Functions of English Landowners." 14 Hechter, Internal Colonialism, 135. 15 John, "English Agricultural Improvement and Grain Exports." 16 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?, 120.

232 References, pages 61-75 17 Ibid., 186. On this see also my "Legal Protection for the Soil of England." 18 P.K. O'Brien, "Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution." 19 Levine, "Industrialization and the Proletarian Family." 20 Tribe, Genealogies of Capitalism, 81-8. 21 Postan, Medieval Economy and Society. 22 Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution, 208. 23 Tribe, Genealogies, 91. 24 Kerridge, The Farmers of Old England. 25 Chambers and Mingay, The Agricultural Revolution. 26 Prothero, English Farming: Past and Present. 27 Jones, Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution; John, "English Agricultural Improvement." 28 Riches, The Agricultural Revolution in Norfolk. 29 Quoted in Holderness, "The Victorian Farmer," 228. 30 Saville, "Primitive Accumulation and Early Industrialization." 31 Holderness, "The Victorian Farmer," 228. 32 Thirsk, England's Agricultural Regions, 28, 39. 33 Evans, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, 112. 34 Street, Farmer's Glory, 35-6, 42. 35 Ibid., 40. 36 Bourne, Change in the Village; Kitchen, Brother to the Ox. 37 Timmer, "The Turnip." 38 Adams, Paradoxical Harvest, 73. 39 Saville, "Primitive Accumulation," 257. 40 Fussell, The Farmer's Tools. 41 Collins, "Labour Supply and Demand in European Agriculture, 1800-80." 42 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. 43 Cobban, A History of Modern France. 44 Wrigley, "Early Modern Agriculture," 68; Seccombe, "Marxism and Demography"; Levine, "Industrialization and the Proletarian Family." 45 Quoted in Hoskins, The Making, 213-14. 46 Hawkes, A Land, 127. 47 Hoskins, The Making, 212. 48 Rural Rides, 2$6ff. 49 Roberts, The Classic Slum; Paul Thompson, The Edwardians. 50 Woodell, ed., The English Landscape. 51 Georgescu-Roegen, "Economic Theory." 52 I sketched out an argument on this question in my "On Rapid Industrialization and Collectivization." 53 English and Saville, Strict Settlement. 54 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?

233 References, pages 76-84 55 56 57 58

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 164; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 206. Spufford, "Peasant Inheritance Customs," 176. Long, "Some Farming Customs." I discuss the wider meaning of this case in my "Legal Protection for the Soil." 59 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society. 60 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite? 61 Cooper, "Patterns of Inheritance and Settlement by Great Landowners, 304. 62 Christiansen, "The Causes of the English Revolution," 60-1. 63 Ibid., 63. 64 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?, 63. 65 Eileen Spring, "The Strict Settlement: Its Role in Family History." 66 Christiansen, "The Causes of the English Revolution," 67. 67 Frances Harris, A Passion for Government, 322, 328. 68 Hueckel, "Agriculture during Industrialization." 69 Holderness, "The Victorian Farmer," 231. 70 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 253. 71 Thirsk, Rural Economy of England, 284. 72 Wrightson, English Society, 134. 73 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?, 12. 74 Young, Portrait of an Age, 129. 75 Mingay, ed., The Agrarian History, vol. 6, ch. 2. 76 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society, 252. 77 Cannon, Aristocratic Century, 139. 78 Brodrick, English Land, 59. 79 Rubinstein, "The Victorian Middle Classes." 80 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society, 27. 81 Brodrick, English Land, 165. 82 Cannadine, The Aristocracy and the Towns. 83 P.K. O'Brien, "Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution," 179. 84 Rubinstein, "New Men of Wealth," 147. 85 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?, 188. 86 Chambers, Population, Economy and Society, 24. 87 Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, 91. 88 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 97. 89 Travis Crosby, English Farmers and the Politics of Protection, 219. 90 Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, 59. 91 Ross, Thatcher and Friends, 55. 92 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, Diagram 35. 93 Adams, Paradoxical Harvest, 39. 94 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 127, 182-92. 95 Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit.

234 References, pages 85-94 96 Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime; Perry Anderson, "Figures of Descent." 97 Stone and Stone, An Open Elite?, 187. 98 Travis Crosby, English Farmers. 99 Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, 329. 100 Holderness, "The Victorian Countryside," 229. 101 Mathias, The First Industrial Nation, 239. 102 Daunton, "'Gentlemanly Capitalism' and British Industry." 103 Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution; Harrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; E.P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory; Cannon, Aristocratic Century; Clark, English Society: 1688-1832; Arno Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime; Perry Anderson, "Figures of Descent." 104 Samuel, "Workshop of the World." 105 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 110-15. 106 Hartwell, "The Rising Standard of Living." 107 Ingham, Capitalism Divided? The City and Industry in British Social Development. 108 Robert Williams, "The Political Economy of Hub-Currency Defence." 109 Ingham, Capitalism Divided? no Adams, Paradoxical Harvest, 30. in Ibid., 41. 112 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire, 97, 104. 113 Adams, Paradoxical Harvest, 76. 114 Bedarida, A Social History of England, 219. 115 Hubert Henderson, The Inter-War Years. CHAPTER THREE

1 Kerridge, "The Agricultural Revolution Reconsidered," 470. 2 "USDA Answers Fertilizer Institute," New Farm (July/August 1988): 8. 3 Wiener, English Culture. 4 Barnert, The Collapse of British Power. 5 Smith, Wealth of Nations, 38. 6 Ibid., 201. 7 Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis, 473. 8 Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce. 9 D.C. Moore, "The Corn Laws and High Farming." 10 Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers, 63. n Briggs, The Age of Improvement, 315. 12 Max Nicholson, The System. 13 Morley, Life of Richard Cobden, 107. 14 Young, Portrait of an Age, 101.

235 References, pages 94-111 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Max Nicholson, The System, 42-3. F.M.L. Thompson, "The Second Agricultural Revolution, 1815-80." Ibid., 68. E.L Jones, The Development of English Agriculture, 1815-73. Burnett, Plenty and Want. Fletcher, "The Great Depression of English Agriculture, 1873-96." See also my "Legal Protection for the Soil." Perren, "The Landlord and Agricultural Transformation, 1870-1900"; Perkins, "Tenure, Tenant Right, and Agricultural Progress in Lindsay." 23 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society, 230. 24 J.R. Fisher, "Landowners and English Tenant Right." 25 Briggs, Age of Improvement, 409. 26 F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society, 283. 27 Atiyah, The Rise and Fall of Freedom of Contract, 134. 28 Bedarida, A Social History of England, 201. 29 Adams, Paradoxical Harvest, 75. 30 Hubert Henderson, The Inter-War Years. 31 Ibid., 379. 32 R.J. Hammond, "British Food Supplies, 1914-39." 33 Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire. 34 Mansholt, The Common Agricultural Policy. 35 Lipton, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development. 36 Friedmann, "The Political Economy of Food." 37 Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood." 38 Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange. 39 Ebeling, The Fruited Plain. 40 Rothstein, "America in the International Rivalry for the British Wheat Market." 41 Ensor, England: 1870-1914. 42 Macfadyean, "Dissenting Note." 43 Polanyi, The Great Transformation. 44 Collins, "Agriculture and Conservation in England: An Historical Overview, 1880-1939." 45 Enfield, The Agricultural Crisis: 1920-3. 46 Sturmey, "Owner Farming in England and Wales, 1900-50." 47 Worster, Dustbowl. 48 Rasmussen and Porter, "Agriculture in the Industrial Economies of the West During the Great Depression." 49 Pollard, European Economic Integration. 50 Weiler, "The us, International Labour and the Cold War"; Brett et al., "Planned Trade, Labour Party Policy and us Intervention." 51 Clay, "Britain's Declining Role in World Trade." 52 Morgan, The Merchants of Grain.

236 References, pages 111-39 53 54 55 56

Lewis, "Developed and Developing Countries." Wittwer, "The New Agriculture: A View of the Twenty-First Century." Garraty, The Great Depression. United States Department of Agriculture, Report and Recommendations on Organic Farming. 57 University of Reading Centre for Agricultural Strategy, Phosphorus. 58 United States Congress Joint Commission of Agricultural Inquiry, The Agricultural Crisis. 59 Ibach and Mahan, "Fertilizer Use Patterns." 60 De Hevesy, World Wheat Planning and Economic Planning in General. 61 Collings, Commercial Fertilizers. 62 Ibid. 63 Jenkins, The Road to Alto. 64 Carson, Silent Spring. 65 Schell, Modern Meat. 66 Berry, The Gift of Good Land. 67 Debach, Biological Control by Natural Enemies, 192-3. 68 Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise. 69 Howard, An Agricultural Testament. 70 Laird O'Brien, "Chiperzak's Ark." 71 Stedman Jones, "Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class." 72 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem. 73 Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists. 74 Walicki, The Controversy over Capitalism. 75 Mitrany, Marx against the Peasant. 76 Hyden, Beyond Ujamaa in Tanzania; Resnick, The Long Transition. 77 Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road. 78 Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. 79 Shanin, The Awkward Class; Lewin, "Who Was the Soviet Kulak?" 80 Laird and Laird, Soviet Communism and Agrarian Revolution. 81 Komarov, The Destruction of Nature in the Soviet Union, 145. 82 Nove, The Soviet Economic System, 172. 83 Yanov, The Drama of the Soviet 19605; A Lost Reform. 84 Sprague, "Agriculture in China"; King, Farmers of Forty Centuries. 85 Smil, The Bad Earth. 86 Hussain and Tribe, Marxism and the Agrarian Question, vol. i, 113. 87 Halevy, Histoire du Socialisme Europeen, 282. 88 Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road. 89 Mandel, "In Defence of Socialist Planning." 90 Polanyi, "The Economy as Instituted Process," 248-9. 91 Sekine, "The Necessity of the Law of Value." 92 Uno, Principles of Political Economy, Introduction. 93 Ibid., xxv.

237 References, pages 141-80 CHAPTER FOUR

1 Buber, I and Thou, 6, his emphasis. 2 Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society: 1700-1850. 3 E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters; Writing by Candlelight. 4 Mill, Principles of Political Economy. 5 Lawrence, Selected Essays, 92-3, original emphasis. 6 Paul Thompson, William Morris. 7 Wilde, De Projundis and Other Writings. 8 Sekine, "Economic Theory and Capitalism." 9 Chayanov, Peasant Farm Organization. 10 Oyler, The Generous Earth. 11 Kohr, The. Breakdown of Nations, 48. 12 Haraszti, A Worker in a Worker's State. 13 Kenedi, Do-It-Yourself. 14 Nove, The Economics ofFeasibk Socialism, 40-1. 15 Stapledon, "Introduction." 16 Berry, "Home Economics," 51-2, original emphasis. 17 Grossi, An Alternative to Private Property, 242. 18 McCay and Acheson, eds., The Question of the Commons. 19 Polanyi et al., Trade and Market in the Early Empires. 20 Nove, The Economics ofFeasibk Socialism. 21 Polanyi, The Livelihood of Man; Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies. 22 Rotstein and Duncan, "For a Second Economy." 23 Weisharr and Parrish, Men without Money. 24 Gesell, The Natural Economic Order. 25 Keynes, The General Theory. 26 Einzig, "New light on the Origin of Money." 27 Neale, Monies in Societies. 28 Robinson, Economic Philosophy. 29 Lange and Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism. 30 Savran, "On Confusions Concerning SrafFa (and Marx)." 31 Sekine, "The Necessity of the Law of Value." 32 Lange and Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism. 33 Weston, "Green Economics"; Linton and Greco, "The Local Employment Trading System." 34 Raup, "Constraints and Potentials in Agriculture," 146. 35 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 157. 36 E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. 37 Kumar, "Revolution and Industrial Society." 38 Bernstein, Evolutionary Socialism. 39 Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution: 1917-32.

238 References, pages 181-2 40 Ladell and Ladell, Inheritance, 37. 41 Berry, "Whose Head is the Farmer Using? Whose Head is Using the Farmer?" 28, original emphasis.

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Index

Abolition of money, 1614- 175 Aboriginal Americans (socalled), 6, 7, 2i3nxxvii Absentee landlords, 109, 2i4nxxx Abundance (old premise of "industrio-socialists"), 157, 163, igonx Access to food, for the contemporary poor, 22onxvi Accounting, 162, 171-5. See also monies Accumulation of capital, 74, 167, 2o8nxiv, 2i2nxxvi; once generally frustrated in agriculture, 122, 2i3nxxvi. Acquaintanceship, 25. See also Humanist orientation Acreage devoted to grain, excessive worldwide since last quarter of nineteenth century, 102, 106, 107, 114, 118 Adaptation (to place). See Local adaptation Advertising (and market-

ing), 148, 2oinxliii, 223nxxii, 226nxii, 227 Affluent society, the original, 14, 156 Africa, 127 Agrarian capitalism (Brenner's term), 56, 92, 2o8nxiv Agrarians (name of political tendency), 1912nxiv Agribusiness, 114-15 Agriculture, definition of: standard (entangled with origins puzzle), 13; elaborated ecologically, 14-17; new broad, n, 39,177; contestable, ig2nxv Agricultural prices. See commodity prices Agronomy: character of contemporary, 38, 45, 123; better future of, 157, 2oinxlvii Alienating work, 147-50, 169 Allocation (supposed general problems of), 40, 58, 137, 168, 169,

226nx. See also Economic calculation Allotments, 127 America, United States of. See us

Americas, i97nxxix; mesoAmerica, i92nxv; South America, 104. See also Canada, us, North American farming Amish, 159, 225nix Anarchists, 127, 170, 179 Animals: as ecological agents, 14; as pests, 120; human predation on and/or domestication of, i92nxv, i92nxvi, i93nxxi, I97nxxxi; fate under chemicalized agriculture, 117, 121-2; raising, 66, 95, 104, 154; rearing, 13, 66; role in English agriculture, 64-6, 96; role in improving European agriculture (especially when in right ratio to crop acreage), ; total confinement, 121, 132;

270 Index for traction, 21. Sec also bloodsports, dairying, goats, horses, manure, meat eating, oxen, sheep. Annual plants (characteristic of agriculture so far), 16, 46, 154, 155 Anthropology, conventional view of, on hunter-gatherers, 7. Sec also Affluent society Antibiotics, 121-2 Antimodernism, 158 Arable: as usually opposed to pastoral, 63, 96, 153, 154, 2o8nxiv; definition of, i92nxv; land in estates, 76; regions in England, 56, 66 Appropriation from nature (or land), as essential for human life, 6, 7, 57; direct, 8. See also Substantive sense of "economic," Land Aristotle, 3, 41, 158 Arm's-length trade (as characteristic of capitalist trade), 147 Arms manufacturing, 2i7iii. See also Military Arms race (late nineteenth century), 71, 98 Asia: southeast, igGnxxix, 2oinxlvi; southwest, 13, 18, I92nxv; subcontinental, i96nxxix. See also China Assarts, 22, 23 Atheistic views, 6, 143 Attention (as a substitute for toil), 156, 157. See also Speed, Timing Austro-Hungarian Empire, 104 Bagehot, Walter, 2i5nxxxiv

Balance of nature, bogus concept of, 37. See also Climax, Stability, Environmental change Balance of payments (not just of trade), 99, 100; English, 84; us, in, 113 Balfour, Lady Eve, 44, 154 Bankers. Sec Finance Banking policy, 93 Banking systems (national scale), 171 Barone, Enrico, 169 Behavioural postulates (implied in formal economics), 4, 41, 134. See also Economic theory Bernstein, Eduard, 179-80 Berry, Wendell, 3, 116, 123, 157, 182 Bible, 6, 156 Biogeochemistry, 37-8. See also Geobiochemistry Biological control (of agricultural pests), 124, 156; in classical English farming, 66 Biological forces in agriculture, 14-17, 45, 122-6, 131, 153-7 Biological production (in general), 15, 29, 45; utilizable by us, 177 Biology, importance of reintegration of, with other natural sciences, 123-5, igSnxxxiii. See also Ecological theory, Reductionism Bioregions, 41, 42, 142, 153, 156, 170, 180, 2oinxliv Birds, 14, 120, 121 Bloodsports, 145 Bolshevik revolution, 106 Booms, agricultural (in England), 61, 77, 81

Bourgeois culture (at its best), 146, 180 Bourgeois inheritance habits, 76 Bourgeoisie (in classical sense of urban, middleclass owners of means of production), 85-6, 92, 93; English rural version, 86; new emerging international version, 113. See also Tenants Bread, price of, 93-4 Breast feeding, I93nxvii Brenner, Robert, 56-7, 61-2, 63-4, 68, 2o8nxiv, 2O9nv Bretton Woods, 113 Buber, Martin, 41, 141, 143, 144, 146 Bureaucrats, associated with economic centralization, 169, 174 By-employment, 221 Calculus, economic ("rational"), 151, 167, 2o6nvi, 2i8nix, 224nii. See also Economic calculation Canada, 106, 2i8nx. See also North American farming Capital goods, 99-100 Capital/labour ratio, 2ionxix. See also Productivity Capitalism: as a partially defined term, 24-5, 27, 28, 51, 163, 2o6nv, 2o6nvi; deep origins of, I93nxxi; rise of, 20-31; and its supposed general relationship to nature, 8-9, 17, 71, iSgnix, igSnxxxv. See also English history, Purely capitalist society Capitalist agriculture,

271 Index loosely conceived (for non-English cases), 9, 50, 51, 127. See also English agricultural history, Purely capitalist society Capitalist ideology, 64, 125, 178-9, 180, 2o6nvi, 2i8nix. See also Laissez-faire Capitalist relations of production, 167. See also Capitalists in general Capitalist tenant farmers (almost all English). See Tenants Capitalists in general, fundamental category of modern human being, xi. See also Labourers, Landlords Carbohydrate in diet, effect of, relative to protein, 23, i93nxvii Carson, Rachel, 121 Cellulose, 16 Centralization, a vice of modernity, 150, 157. See also Commensurability, Planning Cereals. See Grains Chamberlain, Joseph, 98 Chapman, Peter, 32 Chartists, 42, 94, 126-7 Chayanov, 48,149, igonix Chemical fertilizers. See Fertilizers Chemicalization of agriculture, 101, 107, 113, 117-22, 125, 126, 156 188 China: and ancient environmental degradation (including deforestation), 19, 36; its agriculture and land stewardship under communism, 128-9; its ancient science, I94nxxii; its beautiful landscape,

144; its broad concept of agriculture, 39, 2O2xlvii; its Cultural Revolution, 180; its early benign industrialization, 86; its early modernity, i97nxxix; its role as supplier of fodder for European livestock this century, 104 Churchill, Winston, 108 Circulation of goods (as major social complication of modernity), 150, 167 Civil War (English), 75, 2IIXX

Class phenomena (social), 27, 49, 56, 97, 133, 162, 169, iggnxxxvi, 2i5nxxxiv. See also Bourgeois, Bourgeoisie, Capitalists, Labourers, Landed classes, Landlords Clay (heavy) soil, 66 Climate, 14, 15, 19, 21, 24, 35, 60, 67, 116, 125, i97nxxxiii, 2oinxliv. See also Drought, Precipitation Climax, ecological concept of, 15, 16, 34, 37, 157, i93nxviii, i93nxix. See also Ecological theory, Ecosystem, Succession Coal, 98; and Jevons's fears, 84 Cobbett, William, 70, 71, 2i3nxxvi, 2i4nxxviii Cobden, Richard, 94, 96 Coercion, iggnxxxvi. See also Violence Cold war, no, 113; fought in part with food, 101 Commensurability of usevalues (needed for planning an integrated system of price-setting markets), 136, 150, 151,

167-70. See also Commodity form, Economic calculation Commerce and commercialization, 26, 27, 40, 50, 78, 80, 130. See also Merchants, Trade Commodification process, 40, igonix; of labour, 70, 71, 128, 130, 162, 2o8-9nxiv, 226~7nxiii; of land, 58-9, 162, 226~7nxiii; of money, 166, 226~7nxiii Commodity form (attempt to bridge contradiction between value and usevalue), 51, 97; defined, 148, 166, 167, 168, iSg-gonix, 2O4-5niii, 223nxxii, 225nvi. See also Commensurability, Economic calculation, Political economy, Purely capitalist society Commodity prices, agricultural, 89, 100, 106. See also Scissors crisis Common grazing rights, 21 Commons, 160 Communes, agrarian, 158-9 Communism, as envisaged by self-styled orthodox Marxists, 162 Communist parties, igixiv Community, 17, 41-3, 45, 48, 149, 150, 160, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 180, iggnxxxix, 2oonxl, aignxiv; in ecological sense, 14-16, 34, 157 Comparative advantage, dogma of, 88, 99, 102. See also Economic calculation Competition, 58, 100, 107, 108, 122, 174, 226nxii

272 Index Complexity, need to be critical about different forms of, 24, 40, 41, 48, 156, 170, 182, 183 Compulsion (social), 146 Concentration: agricultural, 22onxviii; industrial, 107, 2i9nxiv Conservation, general principle (merely defensive), 39, i85niii Conspicuous consumption, 2O7nviii, 2ionxviii Constraints, agroecological, on social change, i94nxxiii Consumers, mere (really and notionally), 26, 39-40, 43, 44, 60, 83, 148, 167-8, 173, 174, 222nxxii, 223nxxii, 226nxii. See also Division of labour, Modernity, Production/consumption split, Trade Contradictions of capitalism: between value and use-value, 133, 204-5niii; in general, 2o6nvi; Uno's "internal" as opposed to "external," 72 Control over nature (oxymoronic), 10 Conviviality, scale for, 2oonxli. See also Community, Household, Humanist orientation Convertible farming, 63, 153. 154 Cooperative movement in agriculture, 104, 130 Corn Laws: defined, 82; repeal of, 73, 93-8, 2i7niv Corporations, 178; in agriculture, 114-15, transnational, in Corporatist ideology (in us), 109, 2ignxiv

Cost-benefit analysis, 124, 224nii. See also Economic calculation Cotton, 2i3nxxvi Crisis, agricultural (chronic since aftermath of World War i), 108, in, 221. See also Great Depressions Critique of political economy, as the guide to socialism, xi, 4, 151 Cropping restrictions. See Husbandry covenants Cryptoindustrialization of agriculture, 95, 97 Cultivation (inherent in agriculture), 6, 8, 13, 127. See also Ploughs Culture (broad anthropological sense): in general, 159, 170, 179, 180, 181, 183; scale for, 2Oonxli, 221, 225nix. See also Bourgeois, Institutions, Landed classes, Social change Currencies: 106, 112; extranational ("petrodollars"), 112; related to a so-called "hub" currency, 87, no, 112; speculation, 105, 113, 177. See also Gold, LETS, Local currencies, Monies Dairying, 96; specifically for export, 104 Dark Ages, European, 20-4, i93~4nxxii David, Eduard, 126, 130-2, 139, 140 Decommodification of labour, 173 Deflation, 106, 2i7niii Deforestation, 19, 35, 36, 2oinxlvi Deindustrialization: future, 139, 176, 181;

rural, i95nxxvii, 221. See also Industry, Manufactures Demand, in theory of a purely capitalist society, 166, 167-8, 223nxxii, 226nx Demand for labour: in agriculture, degree of skew in seasonal distribution of, 68, 96, 108; in general, 71, 131, 2ii-i2nxxiii. See also Productivity, Unemployment Democracy, 25, 42, 70, 97, 2i4nxxviii, 2i5nxxxiv; in economic matters, 149, iginxiii, 2oonxlii Denmark, 104, 130 Depopulation, rural. See Rural exodus Depressions. See Great Depressions Deregulation (financial), 112, 227nxiv Desertification, 9, n, 34 Deserts, 18, 32, i94nxxii, 225nix. See also Desertification Determinism: historical, 2o6nv, 2iinxxiii; technological, I94nxxiii Deurbanization, 131. See also Urbanization Devaluation, 105 Development, economic (so-called), 9, 50, 2O7nix, 2ii-i2nxxiii, 2i9~2onxvi; colonial, 223nxxiv. See also Stages of capitalist development Dialectics, 186, i87niv Direct producers, 137, 168 Directionality of production, 29. See also Entro-

py

Disinvestment, 112, 2i7niii Dispersal of substances,

273 Index 47, 123, J57> 2O2nxlviii, 2O2nxlix, 222nxxii Disraeli, Benjamin, 98, 2iynv Dissipation of materials. See Dispersal Distribution of goods, centralized commercial, 174 Diversity (biological), 15, 34.36 Division of labour (the general cause of modern social interdependence), 26, 40, 43, 48, 151, 152, 157, 161, 165, 166, 172, 176, 177, 181, i94nxxiv, igGnxxix, 2i2nxxiii, 2i3nxxvi, 22onxvi; scale for, 2Oonxli. See also Consumers, Modernity, Production/consumption split, Trade Domestication. See Animals, Plants Drainage, 60, 63, 95 Drought, significance of presence/absence of, 15, 16, 19, 34, 35, i95nxxvi, 2oinxlvi Dustbowl, American, n, 102 Ecological theory: usefulness of classical, 5, 8, 9, ii, 12, 14, 29, 125, 140, 141, 145, 186, 2Oinxliv, 20inxlvii; metatheoretical disputes in, 186, igSnxxxiv. See also Biogeochemistry, Biology, Ecosystem, Geobiochemistry, Geophysiol-

ogy

Economic calculation, possibility and usefulness of both grossly exaggerated, 151-2,

167-70, 174, 2o6nvi, 222nxxii, 226nx. See also Allocation, Calculus, Commensurability, Commodity form, Competition, Cost-benefit analysis, Economic theory, Economize, Efficiency, Market system, Opportunity cost, Optimal, Pricesetting markets, Rationality, Scarcity, Substitutability, Utility, Value Economic freedom, acceptable meaning of, xvi, iginxiii Economic "laws" (supposed), 79, 92, 98. See also Economic calculation, Economic theory, Economism, Formal sense of "economic," General norms, Political economy Economic motive (supposed). See Behavioural postulate Economic policies, 92, 2ii-i2nxxiii, 2i7niii. See also Development, Trade policies Economic theory, the very idea of, in general, iSg-gonxiv, ig2nxiv. See also Economy, Formal sense of "economic," General norms, Political economy, Purely capitalist society Economism (overweening belief in economic theory), 133, 140, 167, 224nii; Confined by landed interest in England, 85. See also Economic calculation, Economic "laws," Economic theory, Economists

Economists (so-called, as distinct from political economists), 4, 165; classical, 204, 2i7niii; neoclassical, 30, iginxiv, 2O5niii, 2i7niii, 222nxxii; socialist, iggnxxxvii. See also Economic theory Economize, supposed general need to, 167, igSnxxxv. See also Economic calculation Economy, the very idea of such a thing, 3-4, 24, 40, 173, iggnxxxvi. See also Economic theory, Political economy Ecosystem: entire planet as one, 15, 31, 32, 37, 38, igSnxxxiv; examples of looser concept of (suggesting locally grounded living cycles), 14, 15, 18, 20, 22, 30, 34, 36, 37, 42, 45-7, 142, i92nxvi, i94nxxiii, 2oinxliv; ignored concept in contemporary agriculture, 122-6. See also Bioregions, Climax, Ecological theory, Evolution, Farming regions, Succession, Water cycle Education, 177 Efficiency (narrow capitalist sense of), 174, 2o6nvi. See also Economic calculation, Productivity of labour Egalitarianism, 158. See also Equality Egypt, 19-20 Embedded (or somehow contained) practices/institutions, 4, ii, 18, 24, 49, 55, 122, 134, 137,

274 Index 152, 159, i87nvi, 2i3nxxvi Embodied knowledge of agricultural lands: importance of, 66-7, 159; loss of, this century, 66-7, 117 Enclosed land, social distribution of, in England in 1881, 81 Enclosures, 27, 58, 2iinxx, 227nxiii; rents and, 2i5nxxxiii Energy: consumption patterns in England, 87; costs due to artificial fertilizers, 117-18; significance of, generally misconstrued, 33, 2O2nxlviii, 2i7nii. See also Fuels Engels, 7, 10, 25, 27, 30, 137, 162, 2i4nxxix. See also Marx and Engels English agricultural history, 5, 9, 24, 53-5, 62, 72, 78-80, 103, 104, IO6, 109, 119, 122, 129,

131, 153, 188, 2O7nx, 2o8-9nxiv, 2i6nxxxv. See also Landed classes in England, Tenants English history, general significance of, 13, 51-5, 72, 80, 85-6, 91-2, 102, uo-12, 113, 146, 178, i95nxxv, i95nxxvi, igGnxxix, i97nxxx, 2O3ni, 2O7nxii, aoSnxiv, 2i2nxxiii, 2i2-i3nxxvi, 2i9nxvi, 227nxiii; in early modern era in particular, 26, 27, 28, 54, 56, 62, 69-70, i95nxxv, i95nxxvii. See also English agricultural history, Landed classes in England

Entail. See Strict settlement Entomology, 124. See also Insects Entropic degradation of the environment. See Dispersal Entropy, 30, 2O2nxlviii. See also GeorgescuRoegen, Thermodynamics, Tsuchida Environment: attitudes to (implicit), 23, 144; defined, 5; definition of, contestable, i85nii, igo-inxi. See also Land stewardship Environmental change, 12; catastrophic (for us), 5, 7, 9, 10, ii, 89, 101, 186, i87nvi, i9onx, iginxi; global, 38, 44, 88; of unknown or unspecified severity, 4, 89, 90, 125, 150, 186, i87nvi, I94nxxiii, igSnxxxiv, iggnxxxv, 2oinxliv, 2O2nxlix; moderate local, 34, 44, 45; severe local, 16, 18-20, 38, 129, 2omxliv. See also Erosion, Soil degradation Environmental concern, 142 Environmental dimension of social questions, 4, 5, n, 12, 141, iSgnix Environmental predicament (current), xiii, 13, 2O2~3nxlix. See also Environmental change (so-called), Wilderness Equality, 146, 172; importance of material base for, 147. See also Egalitarianism Erosion, soil: 10, 19-20, 35, 46, 108, 109, 113,

120, 128. See also Environmental change Ethics (of using others as means to ends), iginxiii, 2O2~3nxlix Ethnicity, 42, 43, 2OO-inxliii Europe, 18, 20-4, 36, 87, 95, 100-12, 119, 127, 134, i95-6nxxvii, i96nxxix, 2O7nxxii, 2i3nxxvii, 2i9nxi European Economic Community (EEC), no, 114, 174 Evolution, 16, 17, 155, i92nxvi Exchange, general sense of. See Division of labour Exploitation, 161-2, 164, 165, 167, 169, 174, 204 Export-driven expansion, 99-106, 2i3nxxvi External inputs in agriculture. See Off-farm inputs Externalities, 30, 124, 224nii. See also Economic calculation Fabians, 12, iginxiii, 223~4nxxiv Factory system (of production), 51, 54, 69, 70, 151, 176, 2o8nxiv. See also Industry Family farming, 101, 115. See also Owner-occupiers Farm machinery, 68, 69, 100, 101, 107, 117, 126, 127, 128, 131, 2O2nxlviii. See also Harvesting machinery Farm produce, marketing of, 23, 50, 55, 74 Farm size: in England, 56, 62, 65-6, 2O9nxiv,

275 Index aognxvi; outside England, 103 Farming regions (English), 65-6, 154 Fascism, xii-xiii, 87, 108, no, 2i4nxxvii Federation, 170, 176 Feedstuffs, 95, 104 Fertility of soil. See Soil fertility Fertilizers, chemical ("artificial manures," "synthetics"): implications of reliance on, in England, 188; in general, 104, 117-20, 121, 124, 132, 222nxx; nitrogen compounds, 23, 117, 118, 119; phosphorus compounds, 117, 118; potassium compounds, 118. See also Guano, Legumes, Manure Feudalism, 21, 24, 26, 56, 57, 77, 104, 129, 2i7nvi. See also Serfdom Feuerbach, Ludwig, 7 Fibres, 31, 39, 43, 70, 121, 177, 222nxxi Field: a defining feature of conventional agriculture, xiii, 13, 17, 125, 155, i92nxv; shapes of, 20-1; social implications of, i93nxx; unsuitability for many tropical soils, 36. See also Seeds, Rotations, Wet-field Field-systems. See Rotations Finance, the institutions of (not a directly substantive economic matter): bankers, 109, 177; the City, 28, 98; finance capital, 88, 89, 130, 160, 177, 178, 227nxiv; financial

crises, 100; insurers, 109; monied interest, 82; rentier interests. See also Currencies, Invisibles Fire, significance of: for farmers (especially those facing weeds), 46, 155; for huntergatherers, 14; for pastoralists, 16; in nature, 15, 32, i92~3nxvi, 2Oinxlvi Fish and fishing, 38, 39, 177 Fixation of nitrogen, 117, 119 Fixed capital: in agriculture, 60-1; in general, 92 Flooding, 155, 156, 2Oinxlvi Food, good, 44, 182 Food prices, 94, 98, 100, 107 Forage production, land devoted to, 23, 63, 64, 65, 66, 107, 153, 154 Forests: ecological vulnerability of, 34, 2Oinxliv; importance of, 19, 32-6. See also Deforestation, Temperate, Tropical Formal sense of "economic," 134-5, I 5 I > igSnxxxv. See also Economic calculation, Purely capitalist society, Substantive sense Fraas, Karl, 9 France, 56-7, 62, 69, 104, 119 Free marketeers, 2oonxlii. See also Capitalist ideology, Neoconservatives Free trade, 40, 45, 83, 87, 88, 94, 98, 99, 100, 104, no, 113 Freedom, 146, 182, 225nv.

See also Economic freedom Fruit, 22onxviii Fuels: distinguished from energy, 32; from fossil sources, 27, 29, 33, 47, 70, 71, 117, 118, 156, 157; from recently living matter, 31, 39, 43, 45; in general, 31, 32, 33 Fukuoka, Masanobu, 155, 177, 2Oinxlvi Fundamental constraint (for the viability of any society), 137, 168 Fungi, 124 Future, the (discounted), 224nii Future generations, 12, 47-8, 98, 107, 158, 160, 2O2-3nxlix, 224nii Galbraith, J.K., 29, 138 Garments, 182 Gender differences: changing in division of labour, i94~5nxxiv, 2i3nxxvi; in pay, 172 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), 113 General norms of economic life, 134-40, 168 Genetic manipulation, 113, 125. See also New varieties, Plant breeding Genetic variability of crops (and livestock), 124, 125, 22onxviii Genetics, human, 200inxliii. See also Racism Geobiochemistry, i97nxxxiii Geochemistry, u, 28, 37 Geography, iggnxxxviii Geology, i97-8nxxxxiii Geophysical theory, n, i97~8nxxxiii Geophysiology, 37

276 Index George, Henry, 96 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, iginxiv, 2O2nxlviii, 2O2nxlix, 2i7nii Germanic peoples, 21 Germany, 104, 119, 2i3-i4nxxvii Gesell, Silvio, 165 Glaciation, 38 Globalization (capitalist), 22onxvi Goats, 19 God, supposed role of: in early political economy, 2O5niv; for Locke, 6 Gold (as international currency), 100, 105 Goldsmith, Edward, 186 Good life, the (elements of), 182 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 163 Grains: as focus for classical English farming, 63, 64, 95; as focus of world agricultural trade, 95, 99, 101, 103-4, 128, 2i9nxiii; as point of agriculture typically, 13, 22, 23, 46, 155. See also Seeds Grassland, 15, 16. See also Prairies Great Depressions: late nineteenth century, 96; interwar, 15, 91, 92, 99, 104, 105, 109, 114, 115, 129, 165 Greed: capitalist, characteristically satisfied in integrated commodity economy, 64, 167, 2i4nxxix; general, 163; landlord, 2i4nxxix; Green Revolution (socalled), in Guano, 118, 188. See also Fertilizers Guild socialists, iggnxxxvii

Handicrafts, 149 Harrington, James, i85niii Harvesting, problem of (unrelated to production), 68, 103 Harvesting machinery, 68, 127 Health, 154 Heat. See Thermodynamics Hegel, 2O5niv Henderson, Hubert, 99, 100, 101, 105, in, 113 Herbicides, 113, 121 Herbivores. See Animals Heterogeneity of usevalues, 169. See also Commensurability High farming (so-called), described, 64-8 History, agricultural (earlier inadequate), 27, 28, 2o8nxiv Hitler, 2i3nxxvii Holism: bad guide in inquiry, xiii, 125; beneficial guide in praxis, 125 Home market (English), 26, 27, 61, 83, 88 Homogeneity of usevalues, 150. See also Commensurability Horses, 23, 107 Household: definition of, 3, 23, 26, 39, 40, 41, 42, 128, 149, 150, 158, 160, 173, i94nxxiv, i95nxxv, iggnxxxix, 20onxl Housing, 182 Howard, Sir Albert, 44, 124, 154 Human impact on nature (fact of), xiii, 5, i85nii, I94nxxiii, 225niii. See also Environmental change Human nature, 159, 225niv. See also Person

Human purposes, characteristic variety of, 4, 42, 48, 145, 2oonxl, 2Oonxli Humanist orientation, 4, n, 41-2, 134, 138, 142, 145, 146, 165, 169, 174, 179, 180. See also Community, Conviviality, Culture, Household, Human purposes, Humankind, Inhumanity, Person Humankind (as a notional whole), i85nii, 186 Hungary, 149 Hunter-gatherers, xi, 7, 14, 18, 123, 143, 156, 157, i87nv, i92nxvi, i93nxvii, 2i9nxiv Husbandry covenants, 76-7, 96, 98 Hydroponics, 120 Hyperurbanism, 22onxvi, 221 Idleness, human, 14, 20 Immaturity, defining characteristic of agricultural ecosystems, 14-16, 45, 156 Immigration (statesponsored American), 2ignxii Imperialist stage (of capitalist development), 52, 204 Improvement (to the land), 5, 45, 128; examples of, 23, 63, 65; landlords and, 60, 61, 122, 2iinxx; political implications of, 60, 73, 93, iggnxxxvi; tenant farmers and, 60-1, 97, 188, 2imxx Income support, in agriculture (as opposed to price support), 22onxvii

277 Index Indians (so-called). See Aboriginal Americans Indifference (a general vice of modern economies), 150-1; specifically to use-value, 43, 148, 150-1; to place, 39, 41, 122, 159. See also Indirectness Indirectness (a general vice of modernity), 70, 169, 182. See also Indifference Individualism, 25, 179, 180 Industrialism (posing as a mode of being), xi, 9, 143, 157, 182, igonx, igGnxxvii, 2i3nxxvii, 22onxvii. See also Industry Industrialization, 3, 7, 84, 91, 94, 98, 109, no, 115, 127, 128, 129, i95-6nxxvii, 2O3nii, 2O7nxii, 2iinxx, 2iinxxii, 2ii-i2nxxiii, 2i4nxxviii, 2i6ni, 224nxxvii. See also Deindustrialization, Industrialized agriculture, Industry, Manufactures, Overindustrialization Industrialized agriculture, 38, 91, 114, 115, 22onxvii. See also Cryptoindustrialization Industry: attempts at integration with agriculture, 50, 2i4nxxvii; changing relationship with agriculture in England, 74, 82, 84, 87; exaggerated benefits of, 86, 2i6i; heavy, 98, 151, iginxi, i95nxxvii, ig6nxxix; in balance with agriculture in England up to ca. 1800,

62, 69-71. 2i2-i3nxxvi; noninevitability of, 86; relationship of dominance over agriculture to be reversed, 38, 41, 141; relationship to agriculture needing rebalancing, 89, 99, 126, 132, 133, 139; specifically distinguished from agriculture, 29, 37-8, 51, 62, 116, 130-2, 152, 2O2nxlviii; specifically distinguished from capitalism and from modernity, 24-5, 28, 51, 52, 64, 178, i96nxxix; specific examples of abuse of agricultural by industrial interests, 73, 103, 2i7niv, 2i9nxii, 2i9nxiii; specific examples of cultural eclipse of agriculture by industry, 127, 181, 2i9nxiv; stipulatively defined, n, 29, 2o6nv, 2i2nxxiii; used loosely, 7-8; See also Concentration, Deindustrialization, Factory system, Industrialized agriculture, Living standards, Manufactures, Overindustrialization, Urbanization Inflation, 105 Inhumanity, 134, 139, 140, 142-3, 147, 148, 175. See also Humanist orientation Injustice, 133, 134, 147 Innovation, problems of, 26, 78, 136, 222nxxii Input/output (abstractness of analogy for production), 29, 123 Insecticides, 120-1, 124

Insects, 14, 36, 66, 120-1, 222HXX

Institutions and institutional factors in social analysis, 4, 12, 24, 49, 54, 80, 89, 109, 114, 129, 130, 134, 135, 136, 138, 142, 145, 146, 150, 151, 152, 153, 161, 170, 173, 179, 180, 182, 183, igS-gnxxxv, 2o6nvi, 2i2nxxiii, 2i8nix Integrated commodity economy. See Market system Intensification of agriculture. See Productivity Interaction with nature, general problem of (our), n, 12, 13, 30, 135, 144, 183, i87nv, i87nvii, igonx, igSnxxxv. See also Human impact Interest rates: as governor on landed investments, 78; high, 112, 2i7niii International debt, 112 International monetary problems, 99, 100, 105 International trade. See World trade Internationalism: capitalist, 2Oinxliii, 2o6nvi; world communist, 2Oinxliii Intervention in economic matters, 52, 134, 2O5niv, 2i7niii. See also Self-regulation of an economy Investment: control over, aimed at by socialists, 134, iginxiii, 227nxiv; cycles, 64; European overseas, 99 Invisibles, sector of English economy, 84, 87 Ireland, 54, 83, 93, 207nvii 2ignxv

278 Index Irrigation, 132; England, 63; Mediterranean basin, 19; us, 123, 2i9nxii, 225nix; southern Asia, 2oinxlvi. See also Fukuoka Israel, 2oynvii Italy, 119 Jackson, Wes, 46, 154-5 Japan, 119 Jones, E.L, 65, 95, igGnxxvii Juridical freedom (for persons), 147, 2O9nxiv Justice, 146, 170 Kautsky, Karl, 130 Kerridge, Eric, 27, 63-4, 90, 2ionxx, 2i3nxxvi Keynes, John Maynard, 99, 108, 138, 165, 2O4-5niii, 2i7niii, 2i8nviii, 227nxiv Kinship, 25. See also Humanist orientation Kohr, Leopold, 149, 2oonxli Kropotkin, Peter, 127 Kumar, Krishan, 179 Labour: applied per unit land area, 63, 68; as "life's prime want," 43, 148, 149, 182; the only generic input in production, 57, 136, iSgnix; wage contracts for (nature of), 161, 167. See also Alienating work, Commodification, Demand, Labour market, Labour power, Labour theory of value, Labourers, Productivity, Toil Labour market, 2o8nxiv. See also Commodification

Labour power, cost of, 60, 61 Labour theory of value, 137, 168, 169 Labourers, agricultural: English, 54, 57, 63, 67-8, 96, 2O9nxiv, 2i7nv; non-English, 103, 114 Labourers in general, fundamental category of modern human being, xi, 113, 137, 161, 162, 167, 224nxxvii. See also Capitalists, Landlords Laissez-faire, 88, 100, 105, 108, 138, 178, iggnxxxvi. See also capitalist ideology, purely capitalist society Land: area per capita an important variable, 14, 15, 16; in generic sense as source of all needed things, 57, 58,136,162, 189nix. See also Productivity Land law (sale and purchase), 97 Land ownership. See Ownership Land stewardship, 129, 188; among farmers, 77, 2i4nxxxi; among labourers, 67; among landlords, 77 Land trusts (contemporary), 160, 161 Land use (control over), 157, 160, 176, 227nxiii Landed classes (nonfarming typically): in England, 5, 6, 56-8, 60, 61, 64, 73, 74, 75-80, 81-2, 84, 85, 88-9, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 109, 122, 129, 145,

158, 188, 2O7nviii,

2O9nxv, 2ionxvii, 2i5-i6nxxxiv, 2i6nxxxvii; in rest of world, 24, 45, 50, 53, 54, 56-8, 102, 109, 131, 153, 162, 173, 176, 2O7nvii, 2i4nxxix. See also Feudalism Landlords in general, fundamental category of modern human being, xi. See also Capitalists, Labourers, Landed classes Landscapes, 144, 145, i99nxxxvi, 2O7nxi, 2ionxviii, 225niii Lange, Oscar, 169 Large-scale farming, 103-4,I28.114 Lawrence, D.H., 146-7, 225niii League of Nations, 106 Leases, agricultural, 59, 61, 62, 96-7, 98; with restrictive land-use clauses, 76-7, 98, 188; notional, 176. See also Tenancies, Tenantright, Tenants Legumes, 23, 64, 65 Lenin, Vladimir, 108, 127, 128 LETS (Local Exchange Trading System), 170-8, 226nxi Ley farming. See Convertible Liberal stage (of capitalist development), 52, 204, 2O5niv, 2o8nxiv. See also Purely capitalist society Liberal tradition (in politics), 5, 10, 86, 129, 146, 164 Liebig, Justus von, 8, 95, : 54 Life (general concept of

279 ^dex living things), 9, n, 12, 31; and local material cycles, 28, 122, 157, 182; examples of its global work, 33, 37, i97nxxxii. See also Ecosystem, Lovelock Life-produced. See Agriculture, new broad definition of Limited liability (company law), 97 Limits: biological in agriculture, 2iinxxi; to social theory, 2o6nv; to sustainable production, 31, 36, 151; to the commodity form and idea of economic "calculation," 151-2, 168; to the environment's capacity to absorb abuse, 5, 8 Linton, Michael, xvi, 171 Liquidity, 112, 113 Livestock. See Animals Living standards, 86, 96 Local adaptation, 38, 39, 41, 44, 45, 67, 157, 161, 177 Local currencies, 165, 170, 180, 225nix. See also LETS Local economies, 44, 161, 176,181 Locke, John, 5-7, n, 12, 14, i85niii Long-distance trade (connecting distant communities), 26, 175 Lovelock, James, 37-8, 47 Low Countries, 104. See also Netherlands Lowdermilk, Walter, n Luxemburg, Rosa, 138 Machinery (in general), mistaken focus on, 224nxxvii

Malthus, Thomas, 60, 83, 2i3nxxvi Mandel, Ernest, iggnxxxvii Manufactures (non-agricultural production susceptible to industrialization): in general, 24, 29, 60, 84, i95~6nxxvii, 2i3nxxvi; rural (i.e., largely preindustrial), 24, 29, 69-70, 83, i95~6nxxvii, 2i3nxxvi, 22onxvi. See also Deindustrialization, Industry, Putting-out Manure, 23, 24, 64, 65, 68, 95, 107, 120 Marginalization: of cultures, 181; of populations, 2i2nxxiii Market: Broader sense of (useless because irretrievably ambiguous), 40, 163, 164, 2223nxxii; in original sense of a place for trade, 22onxviii. See also Commodity form, Market mechanism, Market system, Price-setting markets Market forces, absurd concept of, 222~3nxxii. See also Market, Market mechanism, Market system Market mechanism (a price-setting market as a mere element in market system), 163-5. See also Competition, Market system, Pricesetting markets Market system, integrated (price-setting), 3, 150, 151, 163, 172, 178, igSnxxxv, 221, 222-

3nxxii, 226nx. See also Competition, Economic calculation, Price-setting markets, Purely capitalist society, Selfregulation Marketing. See Advertising Marlborough, first Duchess of (Sarah), 78 Marsh, George Perkins, ii, 18, i85niii, igo-inxi, i97-8nxxxiii Marx, Karl, 5-10, n, 12, 27, 51, 58, 61, 62, 72, 102, 127, 129, 133, 137, 149, 161, 167, i85niii, i85niv, i87niv, i87nv, i87nvi, 188, iSgnix, igonx, 204, 2ionxix, 2i4nxxix. See also Marx and Engels Marx and Engels, joint products of, 27, 186, i87nv Marxism-Leninism, 118, 128 Marxists and Marxist views, 86 130, 131, 162, 163-4, I^5. 169, i89nix, 204, 2o6nvi. See also Lenin, Mandel, Uno Meat eating: effects on modern agriculture, 96; role in population dynamics, i93nxvii Mechanization: in general, 72, 116, 131, 139; in industry, 132. See also Farm machinery, Productivity, Technical change Medicine, 177, 182 Medieval farming, 22-3, 63, 144 Mediterranean basin, 9, u,18-20,35 Mercantilist stage (of capitalist development), 52,

280 Index 54, 5^> 64, i95-6nxxvii, 2O5niv, 2o8nxiv, 2i2nxxvi Merchants, 167, 168, 2o8nxiv, 223nxxii. See also Commerce, Trade Method, the question of, 125, 157, 182, i87niv, iSgnix, igonix, 2O3-5niii. See also Uno, Weber Microbes, xvii, u, 14, 23, 35, 37, 120, 121 Middle-class, 27. See also Bourgeoisie, Tenants Middlemen, 107 Migration, cyclical, 17; human, 2Oonxliii Militarism, 86, 174, 178, iggnxxxvi, 2i3nxxvii, 2i7niii. See also Arms manufacturing, Arms race, War Military origins of industrial activity, 2i6ni Mill, J.S., 96, 146 Minerals: as raw materials for manufacturing, 29, 47, 71; in soil, 16 Mining, 2i5nxxxii Mixed farming, 66, 95. See also High farming Mobility: of capital, 79; of labour, 137 Modernity: consequences of, xiii, 116, 134, 137, 141, 150, 151, 159, 161, 165, 170, 172, 173, 179, 183, igonix, iginxiii, I95nxxv, I94nxxiv, i96nxxix, 2o6nv, 2o8nxiii, 2ionxvii, 2i9nxvi; deep origins of, i93nxx; process of attaining, 55, 128, 2i2nxxiii, 22onxvi; stipulative definition of and some of its key implications, 24-8, 39, 48, 51, 52, 55; supposed

implications of vague definitions, xi, 13, 25, 48, 86, 129, i87nv. See also Consumers, Division of labour, Production/consumption split, Trade Monetarism, 112, 2i7niii Monies: function of accounting, 164, 166, 168; function of means of exchange, 166, 168, 174; function of means of payment, 165, 174; function of measure of value, 166-9, I74function of store of wealth, 166, 174; in general, xvi, 25, 105, 173, 2c>4-5niii; special purpose, 164-6. See also Currencies, Monetarism Monopoly capital and technical change, 2iinxxiii Morality. See Ethics More, Sir Thomas, 161 Mormons, 159, 225nix Morris, William, 147 Music, 177, 182 Napoleonic Wars, 61, 65, 68, 94 Nationalization of land, 96 Natives (so-called). See Aboriginal Americans Nature. See Environment Nazi Germany, 105. See also Hitler Nazi ideology, 2i4nxxvii Neoconservatives, xvi, 112, 223nxxii, 227nxiv. See also Free marketeers Netherlands, 23, 80, 101, 119 New Deal, in New Left, 2i4nxxviii New varieties, 107, 113,

2iinxxi. See also Plant breeding New World, 43, 54, 101-2, 105 Nomadism, 17. See also Hunter-gatherers Nonliving matter, 29. See a/so Life Nonviolent social transformation, 152 North American agriculture, 46, 68, 101-3, 106, 109, in, 112, 113-14, 115, 118 Nostalgia, 126 Nove, Alec, 150, 151, 170, iggnxxxvii Nutrients, plant. See Fertilizers, chemical, Soil fertility Nutritional value of food, 44, 154, 222HXX

Oats, 23 Off-farm inputs in agriculture, 45, 104, 106, 113, 114, 159, 225nvii, 226nix Old age, 146, I94nxxiv Open fields, 2i5nxxxiii, 227nxiii; described, 21 Opportunity costs, 2i5nxxxi. See also Economic calculation Oppression of women. See Gender Optimal allocation of resources (supposed general of concept of), 136, 137, 139, 167. See also Economic calculation Optimizing. See Optimal Organic farming, 44, 115, 119, 124, 125, 152, 153, 157, 160, 2i6nxxxv, 225nvii Organic matter, contingently in soil, 15, 17, 35, 113, 120, 154, i94nxxii

281 Index Out-of-season produce, 22onxviii Overgrazing, 16, 2oinxlvi Overindustrialization, 91, 2O2nxlviii, 22ynxiv Overproduction, agricultural, 91, 100, 101, 106, 107, 108, in, 2i9nxii, 22onxvii Owen, Robert, 3-4, 12, 126, i85ni Owner-occupiers, 56, 59, 98, 101-2, 103, 104, 176, 2O9nxiv; outside England, 2ionxvii. See also Peasants Ownership of land, in general, 160, 176. See also Landed classes, Owner-occupiers, Property Oxen, 23, 107 Parity, 108 Parochialism, 26 Partible inheritance, 76 Pastoralism, 16, ig3nxxi Pasture. See Forage Peasants: definition of contested, 225nv; generally refractory to modernization, 128, i87nv, i9i-2nxiv, 203ni; ideal inasmuch as owneroccupiers, xi, 76, 103, 130, 149, 2O9nxiv; in loose sense, 48, 54, 56-7. 73. 75- i°2, 127, 131, 151, 170; Irish, 2i9nxv; protomodern inasmuch as contingently oriented to commerce, 2O7nviii Peel, Sir Robert, 60, 93, 95, 98, 2i7niv Perennials, 16, 46, 154, 155 Person (concept of a): personal relations, 25, 143, 144, 146, 159, 170,

171, 180, i94nxxiv; personhood, 4, 143, 146-7, 169, 170, 177, 178, 179, 180, 183. See also Human nature, Humanist orientation Pesticides, 113, 117, 120-2, i32. !54 Pests, 124, 125, 156 Photosynthesis, 33; reversed in respiration, 34 Physiocrats, 29, 30, 40, 116, 131, 137, iggnxxxvi Place, notion of, 38, 39, 41, 158, 183. See also Local Planning, 40, 91, 108, 128, 129, 139, 149, 150, 151, 162, 163, 169, 173, 181, iginxiii, 222nxxii; plan/market antinomy, 108, 142, 170, 173, iggnxxxvii Plant breeding, 155, 2iinxxi Plant diseases, 120, 125. Plants: factors in domestication of, 13, 16, 46, i92nxv; general ecological importance of, 14-16, 33 Ploughs and ploughing, 20-3, 46, 63, 65, 68, 109, 121, 144, 153, 154, 155, 192, 2i8nx Poland, 119 Polanyi, Karl, 3, n, 134, 136, 137, 138, 139, 164, 178, 179, i85ni, igSnxxxv, iggnxxxvii, 204, 2O5niv, 224nxxvii, 226~7nxiii Political clashes (confounding and confounded), 48, 73, 80, 97, 129, 130, 186, 188, iginxiv, 2i7nv, 2i9nxii Political economy: and policy, 4, 57, 93, 2i7niii; as a general

inquiry into social phenomena (distinguished into broad and narrow senses), 25, 29, 126, 133, 137, 189gonix; completion of critique of xi, 151, 181. See also Economic theory, Formal sense of "economic," General norms, Purely capitalist society, Uno Politicization, of theory, iSgnix Politics in general, 52, 60, 133, 179, 2i5-i6nxxxiv, 225niv Polity, scale for, 2Oonxli. See also Democracy Polyculture, defined, 225nviii; 154, 156 Pollution. See Waste Poor people, no, i97nxxx; common fate after rural exodus, 71, 22onxvi, 221 Population: catastrophe, 113; density, 14, 17, 22, 36, 128, 221; distribution between town and country, 9; growth (English), 62, 71, 83, 87, 2i2-i3nxxvi; growth (European), 99, 100, 101; growth (general), 13, 19, 23, 37, 47, 128, i93nxvii, I94nxxiii, 2Oinxlv; levels, 39, 44, 46, 143, 156; overpopulation (so-called), 16 Populism, 108 Portugal, 120 Post-capitalism, 25, 28, 138, 151, 178-81. See also Socialism Post-modern theory (socalled), xi, xiii Poverty. See Poor people Prairies, 93, 94, 102, 118, 154, 221

282 Index Praxis (as opposed to mere theorizing and directing), 182 Precipitation, patterns of, 16, 19, 33-5, I94nxxii, i95nxxvi, 2iinxxi. See also Climate, Drought Price, Weston, 44 Price-setting markets: integrated system of (capitalism), 138, 16 6-8; perhaps mutually isolated, 163, 164. See also Competition, Economic calculation, Market mechanism, Market system, Purely capitalist society Price supports, in, 114; as distinct from income supports, in, 22onxvii. See also Subsidization Prices, the general idea of, 166, 172. See also Price-setting markets Primogeniture, 75, 97 Processing of food (industrial), 81, 114 Production: biological, 15, 29; capitalist pressure on, 27, 28, 148; general concept of, 7, 14, 26, 44, 83, iSg-gonix, 225nvi; industrial, 27, 28, 29, 30, 44 Production/consumption split, 26, 30, 39-40, 51, 52, 55, 83, 88, 89, 122, 139, 143, 148, 149, 150, 151, 160-1, 168, 173, 2o8nxiii, 2i9nxi, 223nxxii. See also Consumers, Division of labour, Modernity, Trade Productivity (changes in): of agricultural labour, 63, 64, 73, 117, 119, 128; of capital (investment), 128; of labour in general, 71, 74, 86, 139,

2ii-i2nxxiii; of land, 22-3, 24, 63, 64, 73, 74, 78-9, 116, 127, 128, 131, 132, 2i3nxxvi. See also Yields, Mechanization Profit, rate, 58, 74, 78-9 Profitability: general possibility of, 168; in agriculture, 122, 2i5nxxxi 225nvii, 226nix Proletarianization. See Commodification of labour Property: deep origins of institution of, ig3nxx; modern bias of rights of, 160-1 Proportion of population in agriculture, 71, 116, 132, 2ionxvii. See also Rural exodus Protection: agricultural, 83, 98, 100, 108; industrial, 2i9nxii; industrial specifically via protected industrialized agriculture, 22onxvii. See also Corn Laws, Tariffs Protein in diet, effect of high level of, relative to carbohydrate, 23, i93nxvii Psychological development, 18, 179 Public Law 480, in Purely capitalist society, theory of, 51-3, 53-5, 57, 71-2, 74, 86, 109, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 143, 146, 147, 148, 150, 151, 166, 167, 168, 173, 178, i87niv, 2O3ni, 2O3-5nii, 2O5nv, 2o6nvi, 2iinxxiii, 2i8nix. See also Political economy Putting-out system, 56, 2o8nxiv

Quantitative/qualitative distinction among goods (Sekine's), 43, 173, 176; in politics, 48 Quesnay, Francois, 40, I99nxxxvi Racism, xiii, 2oonxliii Radicals (in English sense of bourgeois ideologues), 72, 73, 89, 94, 122, 188 Railways, 86, 94, 98, 102-3 Rationality, economists' sense of, 79, 218. See also Economic calculation Raw materials (for production), 2i3nxxvi Recycling, 222nxxii; biological, 95, 122, 123, 153. See also Waste Reductionism, 123, 124. See also Method Reformism: classical, 179; "market socialist" variety, 163 Refrigeration, 96 Regions: agricultural, 64, 65, 96, 152, 153, 154: future political, 176 Religions (relationship to attitudes to the environment), 6, 17, 18, 142, 143, 145, 158, i93~4nxxii Rent: future notional, 176; history of, 81, 2i5nxxxiii; theory of, 58, 60-1, 93 Rent relief, 60 Rentier interests, xvii, 88, 2i7niii Reproduction (of society), 39, 137, 168, 169, 170, 173. See also Quesnay, Viability Republicans (us), 111

283 Index Revolutions: genuine in agricultural technique, 20, 22, 63, 95, 2iinxx, 2i3nxxvi; industrial (socalled), 28, 68, 71, 75, 79, i95nxxvii, 2o6nv, 2o8nxiv; issue of future, 175, 178-81; past political, 103, 106, 128, 180; political, by farmers, feared briefly, 2i7nv; scientific (socalled), 17; supposed in agriculture, 27, 64 Ricardo, David, 40, 58, 83, 88, 92-3, 98, 99, 102, 2i7niii Rice, 155 Ridge and furrow, 21 Robinson, Joan, 166 Roman agronomy, 22, 23 Romanticism, 144 Rome, 20 Root crops, 64 Rotations, crop, 22, 23, 24, 62, 63, 64, 66, 156, ig2nxv Rousseau, Jean- Jacques, 145 Rural exodus, 71, 108, 116, 2i9nxiv, 22onxvi, 221. See also Proportion of population in agriculture Rural industry. See Manufactures Russia, 104, 106, 127, 128, 180. See also Soviet Union Salinization, 123 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 225niv Savran, Sungur, 168 Scale issues, social implications of, 131, 132, 149, 150, 169, 170, 171, 174, 177, igonix, 20onxli, 226nix Scarcity, bogus generality of concept of, 198-

gnxxxv. See also Economic calculation Science (in general), 10, 17, 123, 124, i94nxxii Scissors, price, 106, 115, 133 Seawater, I97nxxxii Seeds, importance of, 16, 183, i92nxv, i93nxx, 2oinxlvii. See also Plants, Grains, Feedstuffs Sekine, T., 43, 44, 52, 134-9, H7. l68- 173. 176, 177, 186, i87niv, i89nix, 2O3niii, 2i2nxxvi Self-employment, 131 Self-expansion of value. See Value Self-regulation: of an economy, 3, 52, 54, 58, 92, 100, 105, no, 134, 150; of the planet as a living entity, igSnxxxiv. See also Lovelock Serfdom, 103. See also Feudalism Settled (non-migratory) societies, 17, 18, 2i9nxiv; origins of, ig2nxv Sheep, 64 Shepard, Paul, 18, i93nxxii Shifting cultivation, 17, 21, 36, 102 Short-term. See Timehorizon Size of farms. See Farm size Small-scale farming: David on, 131; Marx on, 2i4nxxix; recent fate of, 22onxviii Smith, Adam, xi, 26, 40, 41, 48, 52, 55, 57, 58, 92, igonix, 2O5niv, 2ii-i2nxxiii, 2i2nxxvi,

2i6nxxxiv, 2i7niii, 22onxvi Smith, J. Russell, 155 Social change (transformation), 4, 23, 27, 43, 160, 172, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181. See also Future revolutions Social theory, limits to, 2o6nv Socialism: as a project for the future with definable obstacles and goals, xi, 28, 138, 146, 160, 163, 164, 167, 170, 172, 174, 178, 179, 181, 183, 224nxxvii, 227nxiii; history of word, igonix, iginxiii. See also Social change, Socialists Socialist accounting, 162-4, : ^7- 169-70, 175

Socialists (and their varying traditions), 4, 5, n, 12, 40, 41, 42, 48, 80, 91, 108, 115, 125-40, 142, 147, 157, 161-5, 169-70, 175, 178, 179, 180, iggnxxxvii, 221, 223~4nxxiv, 224nxxvii, 227nxiv. See also Socialism, Socialist accounting Soil conservation, 102. See also Erosion, soil Soil degradation, 63, 113, 118, 119, 129, 188, 2Oinxlvi, 2O2nxlviii Soil exhaustion. See Soil degradation Soil erosion. See Erosion, soil Soil fertility (intrinsic), 16, 35- 36. 95, 102, 118, 120, 124, 154, i93nxxii, 222nxx; maintenance and/or enhancement of, without chemical

284 Index fertilizers, 8-9, 60, 64, 153, 154, 188, 2iinxxi. See also Organic matter Soil mining, 97, 102 Soils, varieties of, 15, 17, 21, 128 Sovereign will (of modern owner), 160 Soviet Union, 50, 101, 103, 115, 128, 162, 163, I96nxxvii, 2O7nvii, 2i3nxxvii, 2i9nxiii Spain, 119 Specialization, agricultural (by global region), 89, 99. 104 Specialization of labour, 148. See also Division of labour Speed, in performing agricultural operations (often crucial), 23, 116, 131 Stability, relative ecological, 15, 156, I93xviii. See also Climax, Ecosystem Stages of capitalist development, 52, 135, 205V. See also Imperialist, Liberal, Mercantilist Stagnation, global economic, 112 Stalin, Josef, 7, 12, 73, 105, iginxiii, 2i9nxiii Standard of living, 2ionxviii, 2iinxxiii, 2i6ni State, the: active in economic matters (including agricultural), 52, 54, 91, 96, 100, 108, 109, in, 112, 171, 2o8nxiii, 2o8nxiv; benign future roles for, 43, 44, 173, 176; liberal minimalist version of, 53, 88, 138, 2O5niv; origins of, I93nxx. See also Banking policy, Political

economy and policy, Trade policy Stationary type of society. See Settled (non-migratory) societies Steady market, importance of, for agriculture, 50, 67, 106 Steamships, 96 Steroids, 121 Stone, Lawrence, 58; and Jeanne C. Fawtier, 76 Storability of seeds, i93nxx Storage and transport infrastructure, 98, 100, 102-3, I2 & Street, A.G., 67, 2i4nxxxi, 2i8x Strict settlement, 75-8, 97, 160 Submarine blockade, 105 Subsidization of agriculture, 108, in, 22onxviii. See also Price supports Substantive sense of "economic": defined, igSnxxxv, 134; elaborated, 39, 227nxiv. See also Appropriation, Formal sense of "economic," Political economy Substitutability, economists' sense of, 148, 152. See also Economic calculation Suburban development, 221. See also Urbanization Succession (ecological), 14, 16, 45, 157, I92nxvi. See also Climax, Ecological theory, Ecosystem Supermarkets, 22onxviii Sustainability, 4, 12, 13, 15, 17, 36, 42, 91, 102, 113, 132, 139-40, 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 150,

2i5nxxxii, 222nxxii, 224nii; origins of term in agriculture, iginxii Swidden. See Shifting cultivation Tableau economique, 173, iggnxxxvi Tamanoi, Yoshiro, 30, 38 Tariffs, 98, 105. See also Corn Laws, Protection Taxation: and militarization, 104, 105, iggnxxxvi; burden of, compared to advertising in the broad sense, 223nxxii; history of, intertwined with fate of modern agriculture, 115, 22i-2nxix; possible use of, in future economic arrangements, 174-5, 176, 177, 226nxi Technical change: agricultural (in general), 22-3, 24, 27, 60-1, 68, 99, 127, 2i4nxxviii; characteristic capitalist dynamic of, 62, 72, 93, 115, 2ionxix, 2iinxxiii. See also Mechanization, Monopoly capital, Productivity Temperate forests, 15, 20, 21, 35, 36 Tenancies, 56, 58, 59, 75. See also Leases, Strict settlement, Tenantright, Tenants Tenant-right, 96-7. See also Leases, Tenants Tenants, 57-8, 61, 64, 65, 67- 69, 75, 77, 78-9, 85, 86, 96-7, 98, 106, 109, 188, 2O7nvii, 2O9nxiv, 2ignxv. See also Leases, Tenancies, Tenant-right

285 Index Textiles: sector in English economy, 56, 69, 83, 2o8nxiv; synthetic, 222nxxi; world demand for, 2i2nxxvi Thermodynamics, 28, 30-3, 131. See also Entropy, Georgescu-Roegen, Tsuchida Third World (formerly clearly so-called), history of, 101, in, 22onxvi Thompson, Edward P., 146, 179, 204 Thompson, F.M.L., 71, 77, 95, 188 Thompson, William, 126, 127 Threshing, 68 Timber, 47; in estates, 76 Time: nature's need for, 30, 31; serious apprehension of variability of agricultural affairs over, 67, 79, 106 Time-horizon, 27, 79, 158, 2i5nxxxi, 224nii Timing, in farming, 155. See also Speed Toil, 6, 17, 146-7, 149, 169; as part of agriculture, 16, 46, 155, 156; per capita, 14, 16, 47, i94nxxiii Tools, generically considered, 43, 136 Town and country, 9, 26, 70, 126, 127, 176, i95nxxvii, 221 Tractors, 103 Trade, general sense of, 151, 153, 161, 166, 170, 175, 176. See also Commerce, Consumers, Division of labour, Modernity, Production/consumption split Trade, international. See World trade

Trade policy. See Corn Laws, Free trade, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, Mercantilism, Protection Transition from capitalism, 138. See also Future revolutions, Social change Transportation, 27, 100, 107, 128, i95nxxvi, 22onxviii Treadmill type of contemporary technical dependence: on fertilizers, 120; on pesticides, 121 Tree crops, 155, 156 Tropical forests, 15, 33-6, 37 Tsuchida, Atsushi, 31, 32, 33- 37- 38 Underconsumption (a running threat to agriculture), 2i2nxxvi. See also Overproduction Unemployment: mass, 100, 105, 113, 221; specifically industrial, in, 171, 2i7niv; specifically urban, 2O7nxi Uno, Kozo, 51-5, 57-8, 60-1, 72-4, 88, 109, 126, 130, 132-40, 146, 147, 148, 149, 167, 168, 174, i87niv, iSgnix, 2O3-5niii, 205niv, 2O5nv, 2o6nvi, 2o8nxiv, 2ii-i2nxxiii, 2i2nxxv, 224nxxv, 224nxxvii Up-down farming. See Convertible Urban transportation, 223nxxii Urbanization: process mostly determined by fate of agriculture, 23, 69, 101, 116, 218ignxi, 2i9nxiv,

22OnxVl, 22O-2I1X1X,

227nxiii; sui generis aspects, 9, 25, 27, 126, 127, 131, 225niii us: conservation movement, i85niii; Department of Agriculture, 91, 117; farming, 44, 50, 75, 106, 115, 117-19; foreign policy, 101, 105, no, in, 114; general economic history, 94, 98, 101, 105, 106, 108, 109, no-12, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 165, 2i8-i9nxi, 2i9nxii, 2i9nxiv. See also North American agriculture Use-values (useful things), 26, 40, 43, 51; ecological and social importance of distinctions among them, 43, 151, 152, 170. See also Commensurability, Value USSR. See Soviet Union Utility, economists' theory of, 148. See also Economic calculation Utopias, 140, 145, 161, 177, 227nxiv Value ("economic"): contradiction with usevalue primary under capitalism, 133, 140, 148, 204~5niii; limits to applicability of the concept and its theory, 102, 151, 152, 166-7, 2i8nix, 226nx; measuring violated by costplus pricing, 226nx; money's task to measure, 166-9; se^" expansion of, 27, 59, 148, 149. See also Commodity form, Economic calculation, Price-setting markets, Profit

286 Index Varieties (of plants). See New varieties Vegetables, 121, 152, 2Oinxlvii, 22onxviii Vernacular economic activity, 150, 225nvi Viability (in Sekine's social sense), 135, 137, 138, 139, 147, 150, 169, 170, 173, 177, 2o6nvi. See also Reproduction Villagization, 23, i92nxv Violence: attempted state monopoly on, i93nxx; explanation of, i93nxx. See also Revolutions Virgin soil (so-called), 54, 73, 102-3 Wages: agricultural, 96, 107, 2O7nx, 2 i o n x v ; general level of, 100, 107, 113, 127, 2i8nviii; implications of the institution of, 137, 148, 162, 167, 169 War, 138, 166, 2i3nxxvii. See also Arms manufacturing, Arms race, Militarism, Napoleonic Wars, World Wars i and ii Waste: agricultural, 39, 101, 117, 118, 119; animal, 64, i97nxxxi; disposal arrangements, 45, 47, 122, 123, 151, 175, i97nxxx, i97nxxxi, 221, 222nxxii; distinction between local and global aspects of pollution,

3i, 44- i97nxxxi; general capacity of ecosystems to process, 30, 31; industrial, 31, 37, 157; in general, 29, 30, 31, 39, igGnxxviii; Water cycle, 32-6, 38, 45, 46; detour through soil, 120 Watershed, 42 Wealth: in general, 29, 51, 53' 7^-9, 166, iSgnix; non-self-expanding form, 74; self-expanding (capitalist) form, 27, 78-9 Weather. See Climate Weber, Max (and his method of abstraction), 51, 53, 135, 136 Weeds and weeding, 22-3, 45, 120, 155, 156, 2Oinxlvi, 222nxx Welfare state, not the aim of socialism, 146-7, i9inxiii Welfare system (safety net), 178 Weston, David, 171 Wet-field cultivation, 2Oinxlvi. See also Fukuoka Wetlands, 37, 38 Wheat (English "corn") prices, 81 White, Lynn, 21, 22, 144 Wilde, Oscar, 147 Wilderness, 143, 144, i93nxvi Wine, 120

Women: and procreation in societies living on agriculture, 156, i93nxvii, Wood, 177. See also Fuel, Timber Woody matter, 15 Wool sector, 2o8nxiv; decline of 2i3nxxvi Wordsworth, William, 144 Work. See Toil Workers. See Labourers Working capital, in agriculture, 58, 60-1, 78, 79, 106 World economy. See World trade World trade, 54, 55, 82, 87, 88, 89, 98, 99-114, 2o8nxiii, 2i3nxxvi, 2i8nix, 2i8nxi, 22onxvi; homogenizing effects of, 161; pricesetting capabilities of, 94, 100, 102, in. See also Free trade World War i, 71, 98, 99, 100, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, no, 112, 138, i97nxxx World War n, 27, 91, 100, 101, 105, 108, no, in, 114, 119, 120, 121, 131, 159, 2O5niii, 2i7niii Yields (per unit land area), 23, 46, 62, 63, 65, 107, 118. See also Productivity of land Young, G.M., 5, 94