If agriculture, when it is associated with private property and the market, of
whatever size, seems incompatible with an egalitarian society, communalistpractices persist throughout the world, for lack of generalization. Theseagricultures, which are not exclusively productivist, often show themselves to beextremely attentive to natural processes and the dynamics of life. Since Darwinand Kropotkin, many thinkers and scholars have been interested in cooperation ofall kinds, in nature. ---- Since the appearance of human beings, without howeveridealizing prehistoric or primitive societies in their relationship to theliving, respectful and cooperative relationships have always existed, until theappearance and expansion of an extractivist agriculture, which began with theenclosure of the commons and the proletarianization of peasants stripped of theirfood self-sufficiency by indebtedness and forced into a forced exodus to citiesand factories. Some ecological currents remain attentive to economic concerns bydeveloping discourses that place human beings back in nature, from whichprogressive traditions had extracted them, defend symbiotic relationships withtheir environment and other living beings, and propose an alliance against acommon enemy. And the most recent scientific literature takes up these eminentlypolitical questions to offer particularly insightful analyzes and deeplyinspiring lines of thought or action.In Reviver les embers du vivant, Baptiste Morizot shows how peasant agriculturestrives to feed humans while invigorating the environment. He explains that noneand no peasant produces wheat or meat but preserves, favors certain spontaneousproposals of the living. It strives to reverse a number of paradigms imposed byextractivist agriculture. Thus, for example, the so-called "pests" are in factresponsible for the nutritional quality of crops, in the sense that untreatedfruits and vegetables, because they first had to defend themselves, are more richin antioxidants, molecules that fight in our bodies against oxidative stressresponsible for cell aging. It also offers the empirical example of a territoryreturned to free evolution, as a powerful "lever for ecological action", to putan end to our feeling of helplessness.The landscaper Gilles Clément, for his part, denounces the stigmatizationinflicted on so-called "invasives", denounced as "plant pests" and compares thisconcern with that often expressed against "the invasion of beings fromelsewhere". . Each time a plant establishes itself somewhere, it would be aquestion, instead of trying to eradicate it, of finding a use for it, of "dealingwith it", of instructing "a method to allow the environment to gradually recoverthe characteristics on the basis of which diversity is defined". Apart from hispersonal and experimental "garden-house" in Creuse, Gilles Clément has theorizedand put into practice in numerous projects, his concepts of "garden in motion","planetary garden" and "third landscape".Refuse to put nature to workIn We Are Not Alone. Politics of land uprisings, Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopottake cooperation a little further by calling for a refusal to put nature and mento work in the service of "the devastating ecology of capital", "driving thegeological disruption of planet", inviting the emergence of a new political campbetween the heirs of a social and humanist tradition, and the defenders of arelationship to the living where the human being is no longer at the center, byforging alliances between species, a coalition of human and non-human livingupheavals that inflict damage on the return on investment of capitalists. Theypropose to challenge the strategies of radical simplifications of capitalism byencouraging the "internal indiscipline of work environments", to create "amovement of popular ecological autonomy" based on an "interspecies communism".Nature and agriculture sometimes suffer from a lack of attention in certainanti-capitalist struggles. Often reduced to the negative image of landowners,peasants are nevertheless above all responsible for food, an essential source ofpossible autonomy. Also the technological choices that govern their practices arethe markers of decisive, incompatible and irreconcilable political divisions.We could schematize this confrontation by the opposition between the polycultureof the garden and the monoculture of the cereal field, between agroecology andpermaculture respectful of life, and industrial crops with a lot of fertilizersand insecticides that are above all beneficial. performance and profits.A recent scientific literature, of which we have just proposed some strikingreferences, could contribute to nourishing an imagination to allow to fullyinvest these territories of struggle which in History, from the Spain ofcollectivization to the Ukraine of Mahkno, and even today with the most vividrevolutionary experiences, from Chiapas to Rojava, have demonstrated how decisivethey could be.It is not a question here of affirming that everyone (or almost) is inspired by alibertarian thought without knowing it, but of showing that there is a realpolitical and philosophical continuity since L'Entraide by Pierre Kropotkine,through Murray Bookchin, on these issues.Very concretely, it seems urgent to dive into these practices, knowing that withthe retirement of their operators, 50% of agricultural land will be called intoplay in the years to come. Are we going to leave them to industrial agriculture,while the brands of large retailers and agrifood on the lookout are rushing toacquire them? It is first a question of "taking back the land from the machines",to use the title of the manifesto of L'Atelier paysan, of making it a common goodby collective land acquisition for example, then of investing it trulysustainable projects, respectful of the living, economically fair, carried by areal intention of solidarity food autonomy.Ernest London (UCL Le Puy)Indicative readings:Baptiste Morizot, Reviving the embers of the living. A common front, co-editionWildproject/Actes Sud, 2020, 210 pages.Gilles Clément, Praise of vagabonds. Herbs, trees and flowers to conquer theworld, Robert Laffont, 2012, 218 pages.Léna Balaud and Antoine Chopot, We are not alone. Politics of land uprisings,Seuil, 2021, 436 pages.L'Atelier Paysan, Taking back the earth from the machines. Manifesto for peasantand food autonomy, Seuil, 290 pages. (review in Alternative libertarian ofNovember 2021).Lucile Leclaire, Hold-up on land, Seuil, Reporterre collection, 104 pages.https://www.unioncommunistelibertaire.org/?Se-mettre-au-vert-Jardins-en-liberte_________________________________________A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C EBy, For, and About AnarchistsSend news reports to A-infos-en mailing listA-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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