Clarke/Goff: "The Politics of Food is Politics"

[zazen]

<http://www.counterpunch.org/goff04242008.html>

excerpt . .

"The job of Americans is to work with other Americans; and the more locally, the better. This is where we know each other culturally. This is the belly of the beast. This is where we can make some facts-on-the-ground; where we can break out of the impasse created by these agribusiness behemoths and create practical alternatives... first cell-divisions of new social forms in the interstices of a decaying system. Practical alternatives, skill sets and designs -- not alternative abstract ideologies -- can give us the wherewithal to resist control when the ruling class tries to bully and bluff its way out of the crisis unfolding aroung us. Moreover, the fact of food independence is something tangible that people can --- and will -- defend.

Food dependency has always been the most essential weapon of the oppressor. That applies to the abused wife who will be cast into penury if she leaves her abuser (we ask, "How will she eat?"); and it applies to the alienated suburban technodrone, who knows -- deep down -- that he doesn't know how he would eat without money. It applies to the indigenous population forbidden to grow their traditional crops by colonial masters; kicked off the best arable land by colonial masters; made dependent on second-rate food exports from the colonising nation; etc. It applies to the yeoman farmer deprived of common land and forced into the pool of desperate, hungry, deracinated wage-slaves who staffed the first industrial factories. It applies to citizens of Zimbabwe forbidden by President Mugabe and his political clique to keep vegetable gardens in the yards of their urban and suburban homes.

"Self-determination," that shopworn phrase used by right and left alike, is not practicaly feasible -- in any guise whatsoever -- without food independence. If someone else controls your access to food then you have, by definition, no self-determination. You can't hold a strike without a strike fund. Why do you need a strike fund? So you can eat. Food independence -- food autarky -- is not possible without greater separation of food from the monetized economy: (money is a weapon of control, an entitlement against others).

There is quite simply no independence, and little hope of a sustained resistance, without food security. Nor is there any way to get there (to a state of food democracy or food security) without relocalization as our most fundamental precondition."

[noamnety]

1. k & r

I tried posting this yesterday but it sank. :(

[Karenina]

2. Almost missed this one too!

:-( Anyway, :kick: