{"id":3513511,"date":"2025-06-06T09:20:42","date_gmt":"2025-06-06T09:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3513511"},"modified":"2025-06-06T09:20:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-06T09:20:42","slug":"root-and-branch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-06-06\/root-and-branch\/","title":{"rendered":"Root and branch"},"content":{"rendered":"

I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective \u2013 described\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes.<\/p>\n

Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I\u2019ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag.<\/p>\n

Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words \u2018critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory\u2019). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips with how we\u2019ve got into the present mess. But less than before, and less as a means for getting out of it. So it interests me to place my waning commitment to such frameworks against a statement of their value.<\/p>\n

My primary influences for navigating out of the present mess these days are distributism, civic republicanism, agrarian populism and Thomism, or maybe immanentism \u2026 which not a lot of people have heard of. One reason not a lot of people have heard of them is that we\u2019re so caught up in mainstream modernist politics like neoliberalism and socialism that they get no airtime, which I think is regrettable. My forthcoming book\u00a0Finding Lights in a Dark Age\u00a0<\/em>tries to prepare some ground for these non-modernist and non-socialist but potentially somewhat leftwing-ish positions. So it\u2019s interesting to consider RBC\u2019s intervention, with its more direct modernist-socialist lineage, in that light.<\/p>\n

So \u2026 the RBC piece on Substack authored by Adam Calo and Alex Heffron begins by referring to a book called\u00a0Agrarian Dreams<\/em>\u00a0which, they say, \u201ceffectively pumped the breaks (sic) on the vision of a food system grounded in localized organic production\u201d, due to such things as exploitative labour relations and capitalist property regimes in the sector.<\/p>\n

The piece continues, \u201cOver a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism\u201d. This debate, it says, has focused on land use techniques rather than the politics of land. Then it refers to my \u2018debate\u2019 with George Monbiot (the \u2018debate\u2019 that never really was \u2026 though I\u2019m still hoping George will at least recant his erroneous energy figures someday). Calo and Heffron say Monbiot sets up a \u201cbland binary between a romantic view of inefficient niche production via localism versus the \u201cserious\u201d work of feeding the world with the best possible technologies. As if we have to choose between a world of an anachronistic peasantry scratching away in the dirt and a half-earth utopia\u201d.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s quite a lot to unpack in all this. Are Calo and Heffron saying that Monbiot and I are in dispute only over techniques? As I see it, Monbiot\u2019s position is intensely \u2013 if often rather implicitly \u2013 focused on the politics of land. His land politics are bad ones in my opinion, which is why I felt the need to challenge him. But there\u2019s no question that our \u2018debate\u2019 is about land politics. It\u2019s also not clear to me whether Calo and Heffron agree with Monbiot that localist production is \u2018inefficient\u2019 or \u2018niche\u2019. If so, that opens a huge can of worms.<\/p>\n

But leaving all that aside, the last sentence I quoted (\u2018as if we have to choose\u2026\u2019) is, implicit anti-peasantism apart, indeed pretty much what I\u2019ve been arguing for years. We don\u2019t in principle face a stark choice between the latest techno fads in corporate agriculture or miserable hand-to-mouth agrarian toil. A plethora of other options exists.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m less inclined to make this point these days, because the potentially catastrophic crises now knocking on the door threaten to make miserable agrarian toil look almost like a best-case scenario. But in principle, yes agreed, we do not face a bald dualism between \u2018inefficient niche production\u2019 and the \u2018best technologies\u2019 (not that there\u2019s anything \u2018best\u2019 or particularly good about bacterial protein powder and other such corporate wheezes).<\/p>\n

There are some further puzzles in Calo and Heffron\u2019s opening gambit. First, anyone who sets themselves up as a commercial food or fibre producer in the Global North, or indeed in much of the Global South, with any pretensions toward ecological integrity and just rewards to labour will inevitably be crushed in the capitalist maw of prices \u2013 food prices, energy prices, land and housing prices, agri-plastic and agri-chemical prices, labour prices, political patronage prices \u2013 which all conspire against them. The whole drift of agroecology is more people doing more work on the land. The whole drift of contemporary capitalism is less people doing less work on the land, with a range of unsustainable inputs substituting for their labour. The problem here is not localized organic production and the people involved in it. The problem is capitalism \u2013 and it\u2019s this structural problem which should surely be front and centre of any critical appraisal of the food system, not a critique of organic farming or agrarian localism.<\/p>\n

Most of us who\u2019ve tried our hand at local, agroecological, commercial food production give up sooner or later in the face of its desperate economics and try to decommodify our practices as far as we can \u2013 which, in a broken political economy, often isn\u2019t far. The kind of frameworks I espouse argue that collectively we need to push that decommodification much further. Generally, I find that Marxist-influenced frameworks aren\u2019t really on board with this, evincing instead a fatal attraction to wage labour and commodity production, albeit somehow shorn of their exploitive, capitalist edge. These differing emphases might be an interesting arena for debate.<\/p>\n

Another puzzle is the ambiguous language from Calo and Heffron in phrases like \u2018romanticized agrarian localism\u2019 and \u2018idealization of the bucolic farmer\u2019. I agree that romanticized agrarian localism and the idealization of the bucolic farmer are problematic. I advocate instead for non-romanticized agrarian localism and non-idealization of non-bucolic farmers. Are Calo and Heffron arguing these things aren\u2019t possible \u2013 that agrarian localism is inherently romanticised and the kind of farmers localists wish to promote are inherently idealized and bucolic? I\u2019m not sure, but if so it could be interesting to hear why.<\/p>\n

(An aside on that front: I\u2019d like to see more discussion of what people understand by the word \u2018romantic\u2019 when they use it pejoratively, and what their understanding of the Romantic intellectual tradition is. In my opinion, while it\u2019s not good to be romantic \u2013 except between consenting adults \u2013 it\u2019s not inherently bad to be Romantic).<\/p>\n

But let me move onto the core RBC principles included in Calo and Heffron\u2019s piece. I wouldn\u2019t myself opt for the kind of language the RBC uses in describing them (but, hey, they\u2019re academics, and as an ex-academic I can sympathise). Still, happily, I find myself mostly in agreement with them. Let\u2019s run through the principles briefly. (Note that for the most part I\u2019m just going to paraphrase parts of them and put my own gloss on them \u2013 if you want the full picture verbatim, you\u2019ll have to read them for yourself\u00a0here<\/a>. My paraphrases or direct quotes are in normal typeface and my commentary is in italics, by the way).<\/p>\n