Lugh’s Pact: Revolutionary Agrarianism

The emergence of the State is not based on agriculture, but on the throttling of agriculture.

This essay was also published on Lughnasadh (1 August, 2023) at Another World, and is available as a downloadable .PDF at the end of the post.

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We appear to be entering an era in which Food is approaching the position that Oil holds as a prominent determinant of the geopolitical landscape.

For much of the twentieth century, wars have been waged over access to oil fields, control of shipping routes, and to establish monopolies of production, refinement, and distribution in the fossil fuels industry. In addition to being a driving force behind the emergence of industrial civilization and that of capitalism, fossil fuels are also a necessity for the manufacture of modern weapons, military equipment and technology. This has made them an indispensable ingredient in the struggle between nations to achieve imperial supremacy.

However, as the climate emergency intensifies, many of the world’s warmest countries—which are incidentally some of the biggest producers of food—are predicted to undergo mass desertification. Likewise, temperatures are increasing in cooler countries, which creates different opportunities for food production in places that were once limited by climate. This, alongside sea ice melting and thereby opening new routes for shipping, means the map of the global food system from production to distribution is being redrawn. As the map of the food system is redrawn, the map of power shifts with it.

Food security and the relationship between food and power increasingly appear as topics of discussion in the news and among social commentators. For example, Slavoj Žižek recently expressed his opinion that Russia’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine are based on controlling one of the largest grain producing territories in the world, and that Putin’s ire at Finland and Sweden attempting to join NATO is due to the Russian state’s ultimate goal of controlling the Arctic sea, which as the ice melts, will become one of the world’s primary shipping routes. By monopolizing food production and distribution, Žižek believes Putin will seek to hold the world’s food supply ransom and thereby achieve global hegemony through blackmail. Regardless of whether or not he is correct, we can recognize a clear pattern emerging in which food security appears at the centre of public discourse. [1]

This redrafting of the map of the global food system is occurring at the same time pollinators necessary for the growth of crops and setting of fruit face the threat of extinction; that water reservoirs for irrigation dry up; that the soil is becoming ever more poisoned and depleted; that farm land and infrastructure are destroyed by fires and flash floods; that fisheries dwindle; that the general populace becomes increasingly food illiterate at the behest of big agribusiness and capitalists engineering for a digital negation of society; that Peak Oil casts doubt on the ability to continue high-input farming in perpetuity; that inflation is rendering food ever more inaccessible for much of the worlds population; that the processes of privatization and enclosure accelerate exponentially; that extreme weather events, disease, and war threaten an already vulnerable supply chain.

To meet the looming threat of food insecurity, the urban liberal bourgeoisie and their tech-bro intellectual load donkeys propose ultra-processed foods, precision fermentation, robotic bees for pollination, “smart” greenhouses, machine and AI based labour inputs, and industrial insect farming. These are the attitudes that make popular classes jump onto freedom convoy bandwagons, paradoxically waving the nationalist flags of their own oppression and cheer-lead by members of Forbes lists who force workers to sleep on factory floors. [2]

None of these bourgeois “solutions” recognize the unbelievable wealth and generosity of Nature when humans form reciprocal relationships with the land and with other species. They brush over the fact that production is inefficient when organized based on the law of maximum profit, privatization, state coercion, and the extortion of human labour. They ignore the fact that food supplies are withheld to manipulate prices, and that scarcity is not a natural occurrence but fabricated. They carry the pretence that knowledge of the land, the stars, the weather, the birds, and the care of plants and animals are for “primitive” people, and that the lore of oral traditions or the lore of an almanac is redundant when there are apps. For liberals and reformists, the idea that “green” tech will save us or that it is possible to profit your way out of a climate crisis is the new opiate of the masses.

In contemporary liberal discourse, populism has taken on the meaning of right-wing movements led by figures lacking university degrees. But populism can also come from the left, and be inspired not by the survival-of-the-fittest framework but by mutual aid and solidarity among peoples, species, and the land.

The food system is ground zero. The climate emergency, as well as the inceptions of both capitalism and the state are linked to the conquest of agriculture by military elites. The time has come for a revolutionary agrarianism that is both social and anarchic. However, in this era of unprecedented crisis, revolutionary agrarianism does not emerge from an ideological fantasy or from intellectual social engineering, but as a necessary and practical response to the challenges we face.

Through the dark clouds gathering over this cracked, war-torn and asphyxiated landscape comes an emissary from the otherworld who, alongside others, can help transform our relationship with the land and to farming.