Subsistence Perspective

Lecture 1

There is an aspect to the kinds of processes and activities put forward here that is not made enough of in my mind.

There is, in contemporary Social Science, a new field of thought called post-development, of which there is a particularly applicable sub-set called the ‘Subsistence Perspective’, mainly championed by German sociologist Maria Mies and the Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva. (In fact, for those of us who find value in reading, I strongly recommend the publishing house Zed Books, which has an amazing list of books on environmental, activist, and social development issues, including almost everything the above authors have written.)

Essentially, the Subsistence Perspective (hereinafter the SP) is about, on the practical level, self-provisioning, and on the theoretical level about a non-accumulative outlook, in economic, political and philosophical terms. For example, growth can be quantitative (numerical, based on size, preferably XXXOS), which is the basis of the Western development model, or qualitative, which is about controllable, sustainable growth, necessary growth. The Western model is about exchange value, that is, what one can get in exchange for what one has, where value is judged by price, and the SP model, which is about use value, that is, where value is judged by usefulness, like providing food, shelter, medicine and clothing. The prophets of the SP believe that both aspects, the practical self-provisioning AND the ‘moral economy’ involved in the theoretical level, are necessary for SP to be an answer to the worsening ecological and human degradation n the world.

Now I don’t want to get caught up in deep and meaningful academic discussion here (I get enough of that in the current process of writing my thesis on SP), but it might be useful and interesting to initiate a thread on things like CSA (Community Supported Agriculture), or co-operative banking like Grameen in Asia and its replications in Canada, Germany and the US, or the many projects around the world that are turning industrial wasteland into co-operative market gardens, as in Detroit (4H Urban Gardens Project, Detroit Summer), or Tokyo (the Yabo project), or the Greening of the Towers in Britain, and so on. All of these projects have strong environmental applications and interests, from the organic gardening aspects of the agricultural projects, to the empowerment of women and the poor which comes through the new banking systems, and the anti-poverty and urban survival elements that underlie all these initiatives.

A second thread that runs through post-development writing is that of grassroots resistance to globalization, and all of the above initiatives also fit within this thread, from the Chipko movement in Uttarakhand (India) to the housing co-operatives in Latin America and the women’s banks and co-operatives in Kerala (India) and Bangladesh. Not all of these are self-consciously environmental or even anti-globalist - in fact, theoretical considerations like feminism, environmentalism, and even politics actually play little part in the thinking of these people compared with the practical, day-to-day survival issues that motivate their protests - but the results are almost invariably good for the environment and the human condition, and almost invariably have anti-global and anti-developmental effects. This is why so often the American Establishment and the large international organizations tied into American business interests, like the World Bank, the IMF, GATT and so on, react so violently and often militarily, as in Haiti, Costa Rica, Colombia, Iran and so on, or economically, as in the ongoing Cuban blockade and the financial blockade against Brazil in the 1980s, or the ongoing Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) which are forced onto Third World nations.

Another element of post-development is the growing application of globalization practices (GATT) to First World societies. Structural Adjustment (SAPs) work like this:

1. Abolition or liberalization of foreign exchange and import controls.

2. Devaluation of the official exchange rate.

3. A stringent domestic anti-inflation program consisting of:

(a) control of bank credits to raise interest rates and reserve requirements;

(b) control of the government deficit through curbs on spending, especially in the areas of social services for the poor and staple food subsidies, along with increases in taxes and in public enterprise prices;

(c) control of wage increases, in particular insuring that such increases are at rates less than the inflation rate (i.e., abolishing wage indexing); and

(d) dismantling of various forms of price controls and promoting freer markets.

(e) Greater hospitality to foreign investment and a general opening up of the economy to international commerce.

It is not difficult to see why this package of economic reforms has been met with resistance and, in some quarters, horror. If implemented in an indiscriminate way, the package of economic reforms could create widespread economic hardship and even destitution. But if we look carefully at the list, we find that most of these measures are now being replicated in Western countries, not just Third World ones, and that if they continue, the gap between rich and poor already seen in our societies is going to increase to the point where there will no longer be a distinction between First and Third worlds. And since it is this sort of income and wealth disparity that causes many of the ecological problems in the world, it cannot be ignored.

There are three possible essays here: self-sustaining, environmentally sound agriculture (the Subsistence Perspective); grassroots empowerment; and anti-globalization. All of which have deep ecological movement connections. I am aware that a lot of environmentally concerned people don’t like to work with the political and economic aspects of the problem, especially since such discussions simply cannot avoid critique of American and Capitalist practices, so for them, the essay on self-subsistence would probably suit best. For those who do enjoy the wider applications, the grassroots essay would be interesting. And for those with strong views on the Globalization issue, obviously the third essay would apply.

Lecture 2

There is little land left in the world that is owned by small farmers. Most is owned by agri-business, mining corporations and the like - governments control some lands as preserves, and indigenous populations hold some rights to traditional lands or reserves. Most of these 'publicly held' lands (including indigenous lands) are under siege - on the grounds of "protecting the environment." There is no doubt that the world is headed for economic, social and environmental collapse. The present and future impacts of overpopulation, climate change, and global ecological devastation are now both recognized and acknowledged by the mainstream. For some time, insurance actuarial tables have reflected this knowledge, and most recently, the World Bank confirmed the analysis in a report called “Sustainable Development in a Dynamic World.” The report predicts a nightmare of global environmental degradation and poverty, including “a decline in the quality of life for everybody.” According to the report, “…governments (must) act now to avert a growing risk of severe damage to the environment and profound social unrest.”

Briefly, the corporate analysis and mainstream press say that the indigenous poor are going to destroy what’s left of the environment just to survive - by poaching for food and income (thus contributing to extinctions), burning wood for fuel (thus destroying forest), and the like. The corporate agenda is to gain global control of the world’s remaining resources: especially water, energy, and land (for resource harvesting, development, and use in the “eco-tourism” industry). Through the IMF, GATT, FTAA etc., they are establishing an international system of laws to ‘protect’ their ‘corporate rights,’ while at the same time working to prevent the institution of any congruent international laws which might protect human rights or the environment. The strategy involves moving towards large-scale appropriations of indigenous, traditional and public lands under the banners of “protecting biodiversity” and “sustainable development.” They are using front organizations like Conservation International, and the ‘voluntary partnerships’ recently created under the auspices of the UN. The argument is that impoverished indigenous populations threaten ‘bio-diversity’ and the environment. Agreements are being made that specifically "protect bio-diversity" by prohibiting logging, tree cutting and poaching: which effectively prevents indigenous populations from ‘living off the land’ and living traditionally (subsistence farming). The agreements do NOT prohibit resource harvesting, mining, or other development. The new agreements work in tandem with past efforts such as NAFTA, which caused the removal of communal lands protections from Mexico’s Constitution, and opened access to Mexico's real estate for "investment opportunities." As Brother Mark would point out, many indigenous people are enticed by promises of education, McDonald's and Nintendos in the big city. Unfortunately, the reality of urban migration is better characterized by lack of water and sanitation, shantytowns and filthy slums.

Lecture 3

One popularly held opinion is that, "We seem to want to protect indigenous peoples, but at the same time we want them to follow our rules for how they treat their environment. I do not disagree with your concern that they move to cities expecting a better life and end up living in terrible slums. However some times the slums are in fact better than what they came from. A lot of indigenous people live very harsh lives just as our ancestors did a couple of hundred years ago. Half the children die before they mature. The average live span is 40 plus or minus a little. The only places I have ever heard of where the indigenous live lives we might admire are some of the Polynesian islands. They controlled their populations to match the resources. They had to practice infanticide to make it work. What we need to do for the world is to encourage the control of the growth of the population and we need to apply the most advanced technology obtainable to include GM crops."

The belief that indigenous peoples live harsh and dangerous lives is based on Western understandings of wealth and comfort. Modern anthropology has shown conclusively that even the most 'primitive' of hunter-gatherers spend no more than six hours a day at 'work'; the rest of their time is spent in leisure or spiritual activities. They were happy and content with their way of life, and a damn sight better off in terms of matching their needs with their resources than we greedy bastards will ever be.

Yes indeed, they controlled their population to fit their environments, and sometimes that meant infanticide and even gerenticide. But mostly it meant the use of natural contraceptives or, something we Westerners and Moderns have a bit of trouble with--restraint. As for Third World overpopulation, what we 'superior' Westerners would do well to understand is that, prior to our greedy and unprincipled colonization of these countries, during which we destroyed their autonomy, their traditions, and their instinctive understanding of the way natural increase works, there was no overpopulation problem in the 'Third World'. India and China, and all the other South-East Asian countries had advanced civilizations that lacked only one thing we Westerners had - military power backed up by weapons of mass destruction (guns). Until we went in and destabilized their economies they had generally well-managed and reasonably stable, healthy populations.

It is our economic system that has destroyed their subsistence bases by forcing them into cash cropping; our paternalistic 'help' that has destroyed their subsistence base by building totally unnecessary dams and 'developing' their societies, forcing them into urban slums where they have no access to their traditional forms of birth control (to say nothing of food, clean water, and decent housing); our magnificent Western science (which, incidentally, is primarily based on Chinese, Arabic, and Indian discoveries in mathematics) that has given them a Green Revolution that has resulted in the destruction of their subsistence base by destroying the biodiversity on which it was built. We cause their problems, and then name them the problem. The only issue mentioned which has any validity at all is that of life-span, and even there it is only half right. What most Westerners conveniently forget is that our own life-span has only become what it is today over the past 150 years. Prior to that, despite our supposedly civilized cultures, it was little better if at all than the so-called primitive indigenes' life spans. We like to put this down to increased scientific expertise, but studies have shown that scientific medicine, to give just one example, which claims most of the credit for our improved health and therefore life-spans, had little if anything to do with the improvements. Better hygiene, cleaner water, and better education can all claim a far greater share of the credit than can science, with the one significant exception of the scientific discovery of bacterial infection and the ways to cure it. We Westerners also like to credit economic growth with much of the 'improvement' in health and lifespan, but the figures from a number of poor countries also puts the lie to that claim. For example, India and Cuba, two of the 'poorest' nations according to Western estimations of wealth, have life-spans, infant mortality rates, and literacy rates that are equal to and in many cases better than the so-called wealthy OECD nations. They are not rare exceptions, as I could quote figures from a dozen more, including that hotbed of communist depravity, Vietnam.

Lecture 4

The subsistence perspective is not anti-science, or against improvements in the quality of life. What it criticizes is the Western applications of science, which often seem to rely on an Everest complex - they do it because it's there, and because they can, without taking into account any ethical or humanist considerations. The fact that many of these unnecessary scientific 'advances' are then justified after the fact as being for the good of humankind (they usually put it as 'mankind') is often just self-serving bullshit.

The logic of the subsistence critique is that the social context is inbuilt into science and technology. Science is simply not system-neutral. And the system which runs science today is the system of economic maximization and homo economicus. Money before values, people, or ethics. What I would claim is that science and technology should follow a different 'moral' economy, a different logic. In simplistic terms, I work on the basis of, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it'. The logic of the development of nuclear power, I think most would agree, was to create weapons of mass destruction, an ironic little note at this moment in time. Later it was justified by saying that nuclear power would provide cheap and plentiful energy for all - which, like the wonders of DDT, has been proven to be quite mistaken. But it was a magnificent challenge to the scientific mind, and to the power-hungry political and military minds, so we went ahead with it despite the many warnings from scientists who saw the potential dangers. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle, and now we have President Wayne trying to take the world to war to protect it from the very scientific advances his own country created in the first place. Ironic. And astonishingly hypocritical, even by normal American political 'standards'. Improvements in agricultural technology are necessary, obviously, if we are to feed the growing population. The difference in Western and subsistence approaches is in the methodology and the logic behind new technology. Fertilizer and pesticide technology has been shown to have numerous ecological. health, and even economic results that range from the ludicrous to the disastrous.

Subsistence , or 'natural' if you wish, agricultural techniques have been shown to be quite able to provide all the food we need, assuming that first, people are allowed to practice it unhindered by commercial interests which couldn't give a blind flying fuck for local needs, and second, that useful technological advances are made available to farmers around the world. I can think of such space-age creations as pumps, solar power plants, and so on. What they don't need is hybrid, genetically modified, laughingly so-called High Yield seeds which destroy local biodiversity, or monocultures, cash crops, or high-tech machinery, with all the pollution and financial cost that involves. And yes, no doubt the poorer regions of the earth and its peoples need better hygiene, improved shelter, and complementary (additional, not free) medicines to go with the resources they already have and understand better than we will ever understand them. One clear fact has been demonstrated over and over, however, and that is that the single most important factor in improvements in these areas is not technology, it is access to basic education.

Kerala State in India, or Cuba, are prime examples. Both, for different reasons, fall within the bottom half of the world's countries in terms of economic development, yet both have social indicators which are the envy of many far better performed economies. Cuba can, in fact, be classed as the most successful socialist revolution the world has ever seen, since in spite of the American embargo, America's constant attempts to interfere in its internal politics as it has in so many other Central and South American states, and despite the loss of the only aid it got with the collapse of the Soviet Union, has an astonishing record of improvement in all social indicators. All studies of this phenomenon put it down not to any scientific advances or input of money, but to Cuba's education system, and its decentralized, grassroots decision-making - a genuine democracy, in fact. These figures compare favorably with America.

I see absolutely no necessity for the developments of genetically modified food, even apart from the glaring dangers involved in this technology. (We can provide the necessary food with natural processes; the problem is not technological, it is political, economic, and ideological.) There is a world of difference between genetic manipulation, as in breeding, and genetic modification, as in GM technology. The former reshuffles normal, existent genes through selective breeding, and the failures simply don't survive; the latter inserts alien genes, with absolutely no concept of what chimera may thus be created, nor any concept of what may then mutate from this new creation. Nor do we have any idea of what eating such genetically modified food will mean, even if a specific item never proves itself to be malignant. One wonders how long it will be before we discover the GM equivalent of the pesticide's biomagnifications within the human organism. "US experience suggests that a minimum of about five years of non-chemical agriculture - and on the average somewhat longer - is required to restore the natural systems of fertility and insect control. In the intervening period, income may be significantly below that achieved by conventional chemical-based farming. In that period, farmers may need subsidies to carry them through the transition." (Commoner "Making Peace With the Planet" 1990).

I could write an entire book on the fallacy of the Green Revolution. It had a short-term positive effect, as did DDT, but has now shown itself to be not only a failure in the task it was set, but in fact a damaging element in the ecological degradation of Third World soil and biomass quality. To say nothing of the economic well-being of the people it was sold to.

Lecture 5

The people, if I had my way, in small, regional, genuinely democratic fashion, where consensus and not rule by majority is the norm, a 'national' government would be responsible for co-ordination of things like transport, resource management and transfer, and perhaps inter-regional policing where necessary. Maybe tax collection and distribution, but with no say in how taxes are spent by the regions. A United Nations with teeth, like an International Peacekeeping Force with the powers to interfere in and stop any armed conflict, and an overall Environmental Protection brief, and with similar resource management and distribution capacities as the nations but on an international scale, would top it off. It is a pipe-dream, of course, but something to work toward, and in the meantime keep resisting the predations of the sharks who currently cruise the corridors of power.

And while I'm on pipe dreams, the banning of interest, stock exchanges (or, at least, speculative stock transactions), and private health care and insurance. And the experiences beginning to be noted within the Muslim banking system, where interest and speculation in futures and peripherals is already banned, suggest that the possibility is no pipe dream at all. As for health care and insurance, there's no need to legislate there, both areas are about to implode, and governments will be forced to take up the burden again, a burden they should never have put down in the first place. Health should never be about money. Nor should justice.

Communal labor, prior to the development of individualistic profit motives, kept the world going for 99% of recorded and prerecorded history. Community approval is the strongest motivation of all in peasant and subsistence economies, and always has been, one of the reasons the Grameen bank (Bangladesh) can lend money to the poorest people in the world, literally the poorest of the poor, and get 97% repayment rates by utilizing group and community approval as 'collateral'. Those who renege on their repayments (or their 'contractual' requirements for communal labor) get ostracized and /or put to the end of the queue.

Lecture 6

Economics is the most obvious demonstration of how the West sees the world (along with Techno-Religion), but it is an economics based on purely Western experience, and which claims to be objectively universal. It is far from universal: Islamic and Buddhist economics are alive and well. There are over 300 Islamic banks currently operating on a set of principles which would give Western bankers a collective heart attack. I will get round to writing about them when my research is a bit further advanced.

The Subsistence Perspective also has an economy, not dissimilar to Islamic economic principles, which is equally critical of the Western paradigm. Western economics is seen to apply a distorted view of the world, one that is rigid, partial and doctrinaire, one that lacks compassion, objectifies people and seems to symbolize the one-sidedness of the world; it sees human motivation as entirely caught up in maximizing personal welfare, and applies this description of humankind universally; it is based on accumulation, competition, and self-interest; it is based on a paradigm of continuing growth and expansion; its aim is limitless growth, or money in search of more of itself. When economic growth, as measured by the total production of material goods, becomes an objective in itself, it is increasingly accompanied by a tendency toward the subordination of all other aspects of social life; this concept of ‘progress’ tends to ignore the specificity of cultures and all qualitative features of life that cannot be expressed in economic terms.

Ecologists point out that endless quantitative growth in a finite world is impossible, and it is suicidal to attempt it, which I’m sure most members of this group would understand and agree with. In this view, sustainable development and growth (qualitative) follow different laws altogether, the laws that the Subsistence Perspective sets out to address.

If Westerners were prepared to practice their kind of economics in their own back yard, and left others in the world to continue with their reciprocal, sharing, communal economics, everything would be fine, but of course that doesn’t suit the growth fanatics who need non-Western people as slaves, sorry, workers, and additional markets. And because the West has most of the money, most of the weapons, and an overdeveloped sense of its own brilliance, it can force the rest of the world to do as it says. This has been happening since the early days of colonialism. Such power inherently creates inequalities; if one form of thought gains control in all practical issues, it generates an entire class of unjustifiably delegitimized ideas, processes, beliefs, and, most importantly, people. The power of the Western paradigm is that, for those who support it, it holds out the promise of material wealth and comfort, and a share of the power, a promise now offered to the economically educated non-Westerner. But to honor this promise requires a ‘scarcity’ approach to economic life: that is, in wealthy societies, expectations about assets, wealth, and success are based on the belief that there are insufficient resources to satisfy the needs of all humans, so all must compete for these scarce resources. This creates a psychology of win/lose, where the strong, clever, and unscrupulous accumulate wealth and power, and the weak, stupid, and honorable are the losers.

The dominant story is about winners, because the dominant paradigm is competitive; thus the losers and their concerns and history get swept under the carpet; the subsistence and post-development ideas concern the ‘losers’; but the more losers there are, and the bigger the gap between winners and losers becomes, the less possible it is to sweep them under that carpet.

If ‘scarcity’ is used in subsistence thought, it is to describe the situation in cases of natural disasters, droughts, floods, etc. which, in pre-modern times or in Third World situations, affect almost everybody, not just the poor. Destitution is the absolute poverty of the refugee, or of the masses of starving Africans we see so often in Western television documentaries, from the comfort of our carpeted lounge rooms - development pornography, as I noted on another thread - and the facts of the matter are that it is our Western demands that these countries do as we tell them that causes this destitution. ‘Poverty’ is a cultural conception. Western culture defines wealth in terms of relative affluence, of relative ability to maintain the levels of accumulation and consumption of goods and services which are required for the social statuses which people have attained. In such a view, mere subsistence, or self-provisioning, is seen as poverty, or deprivation, but this is based on a view of wealth which is itself embedded in an ideology of accumulation and consumption. In non-Western thought systems, self-provisioning which satisfies basic needs is not poor in the sense of deprivation or destitution; people living in this manner have a reasonably secure food supply, adequate shelter, plenty of time for leisure (contrary to perceptions that their lives are a constant battle for survival), and are generally content with what they have unless seduced by Western consumerism. The primary difference is not one between poverty and wealth; it is a difference in expectations, lifestyles, and standards of living.

Westerners used to their high standard of living quite understandably find the concept of subsistence living, with its much lower standard of living, as absurd and unnecessary. But the Western standards are certainly going to have to be modified drastically in the not too distant future if the world’s biosphere and human life is to survive in any reasonable sense, a point even the World Bank has publicly recognized. What many critics of the development ideology believe is that the stated ambition of development, that is, to bring the underdeveloped world up to the standards of the developed world, is sheer insanity. Many sets of figures are quoted dealing with the massive over-use of resources found in the West, with America, as the biggest culprit, usually being the benchmark. Post 38 gives one of the figures, and it will do well enough to illustrate my point. The Subsistence Perspective suggests that in light of the environmental imperatives this imbalance is causing, subsistence living may well be forced back onto the entire world through the collapse of industrial society brought about by environmental change and/or the internal contradictions of global capitalism, and/or the mass resistance of the underprivileged. Terrorism, misguided and unforgivable as its methods are, is an example. The proponderers of the Subsistence Perspective suggest that it would be wiser to voluntarily make a start now by modifying the development ideology, and allowing those who choose to opt out of the global market to do so. Stop being the bloody missionaries, when we’ve got most of it wrong.

Lecture 7

Just as anyone who criticizes science/technology in the Western world of homo scientificus, I have been accused of Luddite tendencies - of wanting the world to go back to mud huts. This is a criticism often aimed at the Subsistence Perspective. But Luddism is, and always has been misunderstood, sometimes deliberately, but more often through ignorance of what Luddism is.

In brief, and very simplified terms, Luddism arose in Britain in the 18th century as a rational response to precisely the sort of economic/political takeover by the ruling and wealthy elites as we are seeing today in the globalization movement. After enclosure, which was designed to remove the peasants from the land because they were content to work only as long as it took to satisfy their simple survival needs plus a little comfort, the urban populations in Britain exploded, providing a starving and helpless pool of low-income, unskilled workers to feed the rapidly expanding industrial needs of the steel and fabric mills. Part of the process was the introduction of steam-powered, mass production (in relative terms) machinery, which put significant numbers of workers out of a job and into the starvation situation.

The government was blatantly owned by the rich, and no political recourse was open to these starving, dispossessed masses. Luddism, named after the mythical Nedd Ludd, a symbolic leader of the resistance to this forced unemployment, was a small-scale, localized guerilla resistance, which primarily targeted businessmen who took to the new labor-saving technology too quickly and without consideration for the former workers. The Luddites were fighting not the machines themselves, which were little more than a useful focus, but against the ways in which they were being forced to give way to forces beyond their control, beyond their power to even influence much, that were taking away their livelihoods and transforming their lives.

As I pointed out in an earlier post in this subject, it was not all machinery that the Luddites opposed, but ‘all Machinery hurtful to Commonality’, as a March 1812 letter stated it, machinery to which their commonality did not give approval, over which it had no control, and the use of which was detrimental to its interests, considered either as a body of workers or a body of families and neighbors and citizens. It was machinery, in other words, that was produced with only economic consequences in mind, and those of benefit only to a few, while the myriad social and environmental and cultural ones were deemed irrelevant.

This is the entire point of the Subsistence Perspective's resistance to the Americanization of the Third World. Even the Luddites accepted machinery that reduced drudgery and made their work easier; it was machinery that replaced them that was the target of their wrath. The focus of the previous paragraph is an attack on the capitalist growth paradigm itself, which is why so much energy has been spent, then and now, to propagandize the Luddites and neo-Luddites as ignorant, reactionary, and anti-technology. Let me emphasize: It was machinery, in other words, that was produced with only economic consequences in mind, and those of benefit only to a few, while the myriad social and environmental and cultural ones were deemed irrelevant. It is in the nature of the industrial ethos to value growth and production, speed and novelty, power and manipulation, all of which are bound to cause continuing, rapid, and disruptive changes at all levels of society, and with some regularity, whatever benefits they may bring to a few. And because its criteria are essentially economic rather than, say, social or civic, those changes come about without much regard for any but purely materialistic consequences and primarily for the aggrandizement of those few.

What point is a growth and 'development' ideology that benefits only the few at the expense of the many? How can any person of any intelligence accept the hypocritical statements by the few that such selfish and limited 'growth' and 'development' are for the good of the community? How many generations are expected to swallow the 'trickle-down' theory, that is, that such growth will unfortunately cause temporary (so far sixty years and three generations) hardship for some (read 'most'), but that eventually the benefits will trickle down to even the poorest? It's a ludicrous and transparent hypocrisy.

This time around the technology is even more complex and extensive, and its impact even more pervasive and dislocating, touching greater populations with greater speed and at greater scales. No-one voted for this technology or any of the various machines and processes that make it up; no-one explained or even thought much about what the consequences of any of them would be, singly or synergistically, on individual, society, or environment; and no-one took responsibility for the transformations they have wrought, except insofar as governments were ultimately asked to care for the most ruinous results (poverty, pollution, unemployment). It just ‘happened’, in an onrush of industrial creation, swiftly and powerfully and inescapably. But the effects are profound, maybe more profound than we know.

Lecture 8

Enclosure itself is an interesting topic. The laws of private property which arose during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries simultaneously eroded people’s common right to the use of forests and pastures, while creating the social conditions for capital accumulation through industrialization. The new laws of private property were aimed at protecting individual rights to property as a commodity, while destroying collective rights to commons as a basis of sustenance. 'Progress' became the catch-cry of the educated elite in Britain as the Industrial Revolution began, and part of this progress, as they saw it, was the principle of constant growth, as I said in my last post. But the common people, the proletariat as Marx called them, was perfectly satisfied, as are the subsistence peasants I have written about throughout this thread, with simple subsistence needs: a roof over their heads, food on their table, clothes on their back, and a community of friends and relations to fall back on in time of scarcity. This did not suit their 'masters', and so the Enclosure Laws were created to force them from their land.

Enclosures were rationally an improvement on agricultural land, as employment remained constant and food supply increased markedly. When it was turned into pastoral land, however, as it did for reasons of wool growing for the weaving mills particularly, the entire aspect of the land and its usage changed, with unemployment becoming rife and food supply rapidly diminishing. This resulted in the labor force crowding together in ‘places of desolation’, the new industrial slum cities built around the very mills that had demanded the wool which encouraged the enclosures which had in turn driven the population out of the rural setting into the slums. A vicious circle with no escape. This is precisely parallel to the enforced cash cropping and consequent urbanization of the Third World under the globalization imperative.

Enclosure destroyed the 'commons', the rights to public grazing, to firewood, the herbal and other products of the forests, in precisely the same way globalization forces the destruction of the commons in the Third World. Commons and users’ rights have been transformed into private property, and individual self-interest as a motive is considered supreme. This has not only changed the ethics of the community but also destroyed the community as such. It has also allowed the destruction of the environment. Wherever commons have existed over time they were protected, cared for, used, regulated by a distinct local community of people for whom these commons constituted the basis of their livelihood. The forces today who pretend to be the guardians of the global commons of the ‘common good of mankind’ are by no means a community but are torn apart by antagonistic interests. They do not depend on a concrete territory or region for their livelihood but on the global market. Their aim is private profit and accumulation. This economic rationality that drives globalization and the entire Western community is morally bankrupt, as well as being destructive to the earth. In a commons regime, production and consumption are not two separate economic spheres but are linked to each other. Production processes will be oriented towards the satisfaction of needs of concrete local or regional communities and not towards the artificially created demand of an anonymous world market. It is we Westerners, with out morally bankrupt economic motivation, not these 'poverty-stricken' peasants, who are the primitives of this world.

Conclusion

The subsistence perspective can be summed up thus: ‘Within a limited planet, there can be no escape from necessity. To find freedom does not involve subjugation or transcending the ‘realm of necessity’, but rather focusing on developing a vision of freedom, happiness, the ‘good life’ within the limits of necessity, of nature’ [Mies & Shiva 1993]. To survive, we must nurture Nature’s subsistence potential. Freedom from necessity is the privilege of the very few, and only at the expense of other’s freedom. But contrary to the perception of those privileged few, the affluent West, subsistence living is not poverty in the sense of deprivation and real material poverty. To call it so is a Western cultural perception only. Basic needs are provided through self-provisioning, and social needs through community. But self-provisioning is only a small part of the perspective: ‘Subsistence’ encompasses concepts like ‘moral economy’, a new way of life in all its dimensions: economy, culture, society, politics, language etcetera, dimensions which can no longer be separated from each other.

It is not anti technology, but technology must be redirected to serve new values, including human growth (rather than economic profit), conservatism, decentralization, self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and caring. Nor is it anti-capitalism, where capitalism is seen in its original, market-based but not particularly competitive sense, but it is anti-Industrial Capitalism, or 'market fundamentalism' as it is now termed.