“Civilization,” the demonization of small scale subsistence agriculture, and White Supremacy
A few weeks ago, the Internet Outrage Machine caught me in its gears. Someone smugly posted about how Cool and Great mankind (i.e., Western Civilization) is, and of course, I have Opinions.
I came across it a few weeks ago, and it’s been annoying me ever since.
Check it out:
Transcript:
on the one hand, small-scale subsistence farming is such a uniquely miserable lifestyle that escaping from it has been one of the primary goals of mankind over the last 10,000 years
But on the other hand, homesteading does look very cute on Instagram
(1:34pm 2022–09–04 Twitter for iPhone)
OK, so why did this salt my melons so badly?
Well.
Let’s break the first part of that statement down: “small-scale subsistence farming is a lifestyle that is uniquely miserable.”
Where the did this assumption come from?
First, let’s look at the concept of small-scale subsistence farming.
So what is it?
According to Britannica.com, subsistence farming is a…
form of farming in which nearly all of the crops or livestock raised are used to maintain the farmer and the farmer’s family, leaving little, if any, surplus for sale or trade. Preindustrial agricultural peoples throughout the world have traditionally practiced subsistence farming.
[…]
As urban centres grew, agricultural production became more specialized and commercial farming developed, with farmers producing a sizable surplus of certain crops, which they traded for manufactured goods or sold for cash.
Subsistence farming persists today on a relatively wide scale in various areas of the world, including large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Subsistence farms usually consist of no more than a few acres, and farm technology tends to be primitive and of low yield.
Britannica, as a well-respected peddler of colonial justifications masquerading as knowledge, is in fine form with this statement.
Underneath its dry matter-of-factness is the assumption that humanity’s cultural development has an evolutionary dimension that progressively leads to a civilizational pinnacle that emerged out of the European Enlightenment and its accompanying colonial initiatives.
We can see this in how the quote above describes urban growth as accompanied by shifts in agricultural and economic behavior that imply increasing superiority in contrast to farm technology that is “primitive and of low yield.” We can see it in how it emphasized that subsistence farming — implying that it is the “backwards and inferior” form of economic activity- mostly endures (as if it needs to be stamped out because it so endures) in “backwards and inferior” places (places thoroughly disenfranchised and excised from their rich and vibrant histories by the ongoing colonial project of resource extraction and human labor exploitation) like Sub-Saharan Africa.
And what are “backwards and inferior” places but uniquely miserable ones? Ones that, and I cannot stress this enough, have been and continue to be disenfranchised and alienated from their histories, cultures, peoples and ecosystems by ongoing colonialism through corporate capture of local and international public policy, among others? (See the example of the archaeological record of Banda, Ghana as described here)
Already, we’re seeing how deep the roots of our friend’s statement in the above screenshot go.
It becomes even more telling when they say, “escaping from it [small scale subsistence farming] has been one of the primary goals of mankind over the last 10,000 years.”
Let’s break that down:
- The vision of an oversimplified human evolution with Whiteness at its pinnacle (a premise held by many forms of White Supremacy and Eurocentrism) underpins the idea that anything other than present modes of being — capitalist, scientific, “objective,” “rational”- is regressive and therefore “inferior.”
- (Indo-European) Human history, as reckoned in civilizations marked by the state-making enterprise, is only 10,000 years old (note that as far as we presently know, H. sapiens sapiens is about 200,000 years old, so that’s a fraction of our species’ history), and started with the Neolithic Revolution (something that has been subject to a fair amount of debate in archaeological circles), and has continued apace in an inevitable and step-wise fashion towards today’s triumphant conquest of the natural world.
- Thus, anything other than a factory farm that is perhaps run by robots with UV lamps and AI irrigation systems (or run by big agricultural corporations that “maximize yield” using petrochemicals) is regressive, because it detracts from the “onward and upward” evolutionary triumphalism of the utopian techno-rationalist White Supremacist vision.
- Because we’ve been trying to escape being hunter-gatherers (what with that “natural state of mankind” before the creation of a central government being so “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” as renowned racist Thomas Hobbes of Leviathan fame so vociferously asserts) so desperately that we, as a species, “leapt forward” (with some sad and pathetic hold-outs whom we had to conquer and colonize so they could “catch up”) into sedentary agriculture, which, while better than the “natural state” of “warre of every many against every man,” still wasn’t good enough and, according to our friend in the screenshot, warranted a need to escape that as well.
- So we consolidated and consolidated and centralized, and now we’ve got drones spraying Roundup over hectares of land planted to one hyperefficiently engineered crop while the rest of us work on further streamlining our technological, legal, and economic systems so that we can HUMAN THE BEST THAT WE CAN AND SUMMIT STILL LOFTIER HEIGHTS OF ACHIEVEMENT AND AMBITION (never mind the ones who are working multiple jobs at below already-tiny mandated minimum wages to put the food on our tables, keep our children cared for, and keep our goods and services flowing- they’re Poor and they don’t count).
- And OMG now we’re here and we’re so cool because we have THE INTERNET and Elon and Jeff went to SPACE using the bootstraps they’ve pulled themselves up by, and that means we’ve WON. WE’VE WON GUYS! WE’RE THE BEST!
This last statement is essentially what the premise beneath the statement in the screenshot implies. That, at this point in history, we’ve won at Human.
If we’re to take that as Truth however, why do people still engage in small-scale and subsistence farming?
Is it just because of income inequality?
Is it because of some peoples’ innate “inability to catch up?”
Or … heaven forefend, do some folks actually reject the simplistic, anthrocentric, patriarchal, and White Supremacist premise of inevitable societal evolution towards techno-superiority and just want to farm and/or forage and/or hunt and/or herd in the ways they want???
As a brown person who studies anthropology and specializes in food systems and civilizational collapse, I firmly stand behind that third assertion: that people want to be left alone.
Or, to be more precise, people who have been repeatedly marginalized by a global system of markets, enclosures, and alienation are not interested in being part of that system.
Most would rather interface with it at their own pace, on their own terms, instead of having it violently forced down their throats.
Initiatives of development aggression that include the creation of Special Economic Zones, mining, logging, and marine enclosures for commercial fisheries, plantations and ranches, and tourism, all contribute to the involuntary incorporation and subsequent marginalization of these groups in our present world system, and many more initiatives exacerbate this.
To take a relatively historically specific example, let’s take where I’m from — the Philippines. It’s an archipelago of over seven thousand islands, with well over eighty distinct ethnolinguistic groups. It was colonized in the Fifteen Hundreds, and to facilitate that colonization, the Philippines’ diverse and scattered lowland peoples (who already had vibrant cultures and rich trade with other parts of Southeast Asia and beyond) were forced by Spanish colonial authorities to live bajo la campana, underneath (within earshot of) the cathedral bell. That is, they were forced to become sedentary and settle where they could be easily managed by the colonial government and its agents, so they could be more easily coerced to attend holy masses, pay taxes, participate in Corvée labor (polo y servicios), and be good and proper husbandfolk who lived and worked in a “civilized” way that was pleasing (manageable) for both Church and Crown.
Some balked at this and ran away to the mountains. There, many created their own communities or integrated with unconquered folk to farm, hunt, and live out their traditions in ways that did not involve submitting to an uncaring and arbitrary authority that intended only to inflate itself and consolidate.
And now, as the technology moves apace and consolidation under capitalism deepens, these free peoples are in the process of being forcibly assimilated themselves: robbed of their homes, forced to depend on money to survive, and discriminated against by an indoctrinated lowland population that stereotypes them as “having tails” and “not wearing clothes.” (Really. This is what people say about our Indigenous folk. They’re treated like naughty children or criminals when they aren’t being genocided for access to their “natural resources.”)
And for those of us who are already deep in the system, well… if the numerous “mental health” epidemics (and viral pandemics) and “diseases of progress” are any indication, we “civilized” folk aren’t doing so hot either.
Hell, when our friend in the screenshot up there pulls out the punchline, “homesteading does look very cute on Instagram,” they are pointing towards a discomfort with the deep alienation created by the current world system.
In particular, they conflate the online interest in content related to “homesteading,” that colonial project to occupy Indigenous territory, with a yearning to return to a “simpler time,” with less of the rush and non sequitur of urban life in the Global North. A desire to go back and reconnect with blood and soil, if you will.
In snidely pointing out how hard “humanity” has worked to “escape” “primitive” modes of livelihood like small-scale subsistence farming and then implying that people interested in the homesteading #aesthetic (and associated hashtags such as #cottagecore #tradwife #selfsufficient, etc.) are hypocrites who deny that history and are regressive and inferior themselves, our screenshot friend also succeeds in revealing the fissures in the very ideals they purport to uphold.
Yes, they are also very much wholesale denying the complex histories of colonialism, chattel slavery, and genocide of peoples not considered “fully human” for their cultural and phenotypic differences by one set of squabbling assholes in some cold clump of rocks in the Northeast Atlantic, but they are also very much telling on themself.
Indeed, of all the responses to this take I’d seen on my dash, this one amused me the most:
Transcript:
tell me you’re a white coloniser without telling me you’re a white coloniser ::snort::
So.
Don’t be like this person. Avoid making the mistake of outing yourself as a white colonizer.
Learn your history. Study global systems. Trace the streams of finance, goods, and services and learn how they affect vulnerable populations.
Stand with the Global South. Stand with the marginalized communities in your own home communities. Listen to folk when they say they’re being oppressed, and how they want things to change.
Fake it if you have to, but keep learning and questioning anyway.
