Modern Agriculture and Left Dhimmi Fascism (3)

In this third installment on the development of modern agriculture we're continuing to provide context for our upcoming posts on ecology and fascism. Michael Moore is a fascist? What does multi-culturalism have to do with 18th century farming practices? Why is the modern West filled with urban intellectuals who base their ideologies on the way people raise crops and livestock? And why is the whole of Modernity at risk because some intellectuals hate the way the West farms? We'll explore these questions from the viewpoints of Marxist historians.

Capitalism is the enemy not only of the Left, as we all know, but it is also the enemy of the Right, which people either don't know or refuse to know. It should be obvious to all but it's not: the Right is anti-capital. The Right, dear reader, hates rational agriculture.

But, you object, Walmart is a vast Right wing conspiracy all on its own. Microsoft is a Right wing leviathan. Libbys Beans are genetically modified monsters devouring those who try to eat them. Conservative Right wing entities.

No. We have a major confusion of nomenclature here, and though we don't claim any good sense of economics we can immediately state that much of what passes for capitalism today is fascist corporatism, not capitalism.

Fasten your seat belts: Capitalism is Liberalism. Capitalists are Liberals. Capitalists are revolutionaries.

Of course, all of this is highly offensive to the average reader who knows better. The average reader knows all this is wrong because, LOL, it's not right. Everyone knows it's not right because it's wrong. LOL.

Capital, the cash nexus, wrecked 5,000 years of the idiocy of rural living. Suddenly, without warning, the Industrial Revolution began its steam-powered roll across the landscape and the mindscape equally. Behind it came the social revolutions of individualism. Man, having lived and died with his family and community from the time of creation was suddenly torn asunder from the Land and was replaced by sheep. By corn. By potatoes. By men who made money: Revolutionaries who over-turned the natural order of life itself, and who made life Hell on Earth. Man no longer had a personal relationship with the land but a cash relationship. He was no longer an integral part of the manor but was on his way to becoming a wage-slave in the dark, Satanic mills of Industry. He was moved from the land, not his but his place, to the swelling cities where he had no relationship to anything other than utter alienation from his previous life and then from the product of his labour: he couldn't even eat anything he produced. All was taken from him that he made by machines rather than with his own hands, and in exchange for his labour he was given some money to pay for other things he didn't make or have any relation to. With that in mind one might begin to understand the hatred the former peasant, now landless factory labouring proletarian, had for capitalism. For the majority of peasants in the new mode of production, capitalist, the meaning of life had gone totally rotten to the core. Life was wrong. Someone had done something to make it so. The bourgeoisie! The Capitalists!

And it's not just the poor peasant crammed into a filthy hovel with too many children working in chimneys who hated the New World Order: The former estate owners were as dispossessed as the peasants. The land owners too lost their settled relationship and ordered worldview. For them too the revolutions of Industry and French Modernity turned their mental world upside down-- if they were lucky enough to retain their physical heads.

In a rational and cash-driven economy the idiot to the manor born was out of luck if he couldn't find the needed skill to make a profit from the land he owned. And not only that: if his entitlements, his income due to him by virtue of his birth into an entitled family, were gone, so too was his status. In a modern world of the universal rights of man and fraternity, what made the penniless landowner better than his former peasant tenants? What made him superior to the burgher up-start who now was not only his social equal but who could bully and threaten him by virtue of cash in hand? The aggressive money-counter, man of science and ungodliness, of cold logic and cash, that man who had no titles passed down from antiquity from father to son could now simply buy a title.

The natural order had collapsed into chaos. The Old World Order is, as we read these lines, in flames. The Old World is still kicking in its death-throes. It's kicking me. It's kicking you. It's kicking buildings in Manhattan, tube trains in London, cafes in Bali, schools in Russia. And many of our own are cheering it on.

Most of us don't realize that we are revolutionaries. Most of us don't realize that we are hated bcause of what our world is doing daily to the fabric of traditional cultures. And those who do understand it usually hate it, thinking we're destroying a unique and precious state of innocence and beauty, a "natural" state of oneness with Mankind, of co-operation alien to the world of mere money, of a world before the men with cash came and turned everyone into a production piece for the sake of the fat cats and rich pigs and so on. Many of our own yearn for a lost paradise of purity before the life of man was reduced to the cash nexus. A time when things were organic, hand-made of natural materials, before the age of plastic. Before the revolutions of Modernity. It's among those critics of Modernity, of those who are nostalgic for the lost age, that one finds the likes of Michael Moore, Ward Churchill, and the Left dhimmi fascists we go on about daily.

In the making of this Modernist omelet we have broken a number of eggs. The forces of reaction, Left and Right, are hoping to put those eggs back together again-- or to destroy everything in the process.

Returning to Hobsbawm, he writes:

The very large number of those who now vegetated on the land to which all human history tied them, but who if it were productively exploited, would be mere surplus population, had to be torn away from their roots and allowed to move freely. Only thus would they migrate to the towns and factiories where their muscles were increasingly needed. In other words, the peasants had to lose their land together with their other bonds. (p. 187.)

"Vegetated" approaches perfection of description. Compare Hegel's tutor, G.E. Lessing, a lovely and interesting man who wrote of the cycles of existence, to Hegel, who wrote of the synthetic progress of History. What happened? To Hegel: Napoleon. To the Western world: The French and Industrial Revolutions. To the peasants and landlords: The end of the world. Progress. Machines. Capital. A complete and terrible over-turning of the natural order and life as it had been forever. And you, gentle reader, are a continuing part of it.
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Had we but world enough and time we'd continue this presentation immediately; however, such is not the case, and we will return at the earliest possible time to finish this post.

As always, you are welcome to leave comments below or at our secret address: dag.walker@gmail.com.