American Empire: A Global History – Book Review

February 16, 2021 Articles, Commentary, Reviews

American Empire: A Global History by A. G. Hopkins. (Photo: Book Cover)

By Jim Miles

(American Empire: A Global History.  A. G. Hopkins. Princeton University Press.  Princeton & Oxford, 2018.)

Most recent works on the United States accept that it is an empire, perhaps not in the traditional landholding sense, but in the extent of its power and control of others.  In “American Empire – Global History,” A. G. Hopkins accepts the idea of empire with several qualifications and with a precise focus on certain aspects of that empire.

His overall intention is to compare his outlook on empire with the features of other empires contemporary with the development of the US empire. His arguments are a good proof of his overall thesis that the development of the US empire while being a latecomer, had many features and parallels to the problems of other empires.

The critical time span he covers is from the Spanish War to the end of World War II. He does not ignore aspects beyond that, but the fullest development is concentrated on the U.S’ insular empire – the islands of the Spanish empire taken over after the 1898 war (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) and the Hawaiian Islands.

Native Americans Don’t Count

Hopkins accepts the warlike takeover of the US continental empire, and while not calling it an empire per se, does write, “Territorial expansion across North America was a form of settler colonialism involving conflict with indigenous societies and neighboring states, as well as discord among the settlers themselves.”  This “assertive territorial expansion” was an “imperialism of intent” arriving at the conclusion “It is hard to argue that the United States created a continental empire in the nineteenth century.”

While using descriptions that fit the bill, he also does not use the words ethnic cleansing nor genocide for the destruction of the indigenous Americans.  Racial supremacy is recognized after the Civil War and Indian Wars, but not acknowledged as being a foundational transfer of principle from the original religious settlers and the white supremacy as supported by the Papal Bulls of 1452.

His counter-arguments run from: scale (there was only a “tiny fraction” of the population as indigenous); to other states deliver the same kind of violence; and finally “imperialist expansion” does not equate with “the formation of the type of territorial expansion discussed in this study.”  These are a rather disingenuous argument as it is rather easy to argue that the US created a continental empire.  Essentially Hopkins self-defines empire for his own purposes while not successfully contradicting that there are various types of empire that are all true empires.

The ‘Real’ Empire

The above fault aside, Hopkins focus on the insular empire is detailed and instructive.  One of the facets seldom explored in this empire is the extent to which the US, while gaining rhetorical and political independence, did not gain financial independence from Britain until after World War II.  As a sidebar for today, the power of the City of London (its financial district) still holds enormous sway over financial markets through its crafting of the London Inter-bank Offered Rate (LIBOR – interest rates) and its control of two important commodities markets, silver and gold.

Empires, US or otherwise, are best described in three words:  guns, debt, and racism (white supremacy).

Frequent references are made to guns.  At inception, being the revolution, Hopkins writes, “The outcome of these concerns [land owners and finance] was the installation of elements of a military fiscal state imported from Britain.” These military endeavors “nurtured a belief in the efficacy of force that has survived to the present… Martial values became embedded in the concept of liberty in the United States to a degree that made the use of force… seem natural and therefore normal.” The use of firearms did not stand alone as it acquired colonies “by deploying the standard tools of the trade: firearms and finance.”

Finance

One aspect of the financial empire is indicated above, the US’ dependence on British financial systems and power. The other aspect is the transfer of these systems of financial power to their own empire.  The insular colonies of the US earned money by exporting cash crops:  sugar from all the islands; coffee as well from Puerto Rico; and pineapple from Hawaii.

However, the success of these early agro-industries was dependent on competition from the mainland States where sugar beets were becoming competitive and dependent on the political whims of the mainland in instituting tariffs and quotas to gain political support at home.  A rich elite system in the colonies with many living in poverty created an environment that not surprisingly made for ongoing counter imperialist strategies, including outright rebellion and strikes for field and factory workers.

The financial system was essentially the same as today’s IMF ‘structural adjustment programs’ utilized throughout the third world – mostly Africa and Latin America – in order to place the target state into debt to the financial power of the US and its western allies.   The Philippines became a financial burden that the US finally gave nominal independence to.  Cuba had a full successful insurgent revolution but was then ignored by the US for its financial needs, leading it to work with the USSR.  Puerto Rico eventually became a commonwealth – not a colony, not a state, sort of halfway between – and is still stuck in the cycles of poverty it started with as magnified by Hurricane Maria in 2020 and the later earthquake – all leading to Trump throwing out toilet paper in an ignorant display of the status quo.

Race

Much of the history of European/western empires finds its most common denominator in race relations, in white supremacy.

“Negative stereotypes of societies beyond the frontier reinforced a developing ideology of white supremacy that helped to shape national identities throughout the Anglo-world.  Supremacy and certainty produced the “civilizing mission” which was a common feature of all these frontiers.”

Anglo-Saxonism “was the most commanding of the pan-national racial theories.”  Regardless of the arguments used by its proponents – all of which are incorrect – the US fully adopted its attributes to the extent of “exceptionalism” and superiority over all other people and nations in the world.  As others are deemed inferior, arguments then allow for violence within the “civilizing mission” in order to bring the “savages” at least up to a level where they might be able to be independent i.e. live and work by our “exceptional” rules.

In his summary, Hopkins writes, “Policy in all the Western empires drew on shared intellectual foundations of racial superiority.  American rule was distinctive to the extent that it was particularly marked by the influence of segregation on colonial policy.” Comparisons – mostly similarities – are made with the other Anglo-Saxon elements of the empire –  Canada, South Africa, and Australia – where indigenous populations were/are highly segregated from society.

Another Faultline

There is another element of Hopkin’s thesis which is arguable but fortunately does not detract from his overall presentation, more of a semantic argument that does not contradict the factual information.

In broadest terms, he outlines the development of the US empire as being at the start a “military-fiscal” arrangement, leading then to the status of a “nation-state” empire, and then finally into being an “aspiring hegemon.” The military-fiscal state disappears under the influences of the nation-state – the empire of the nation-state then becomes the aspiring hegemon, with the implication that it is not truly an empire ( and certainly not within the limited definitions provided as above).

It is hard to argue – well, sorry no it is not, that the US, since even before its official inception was a military-fiscal arrangement borrowed from their Anglo-Saxon roots.   Since Eisenhower’s time, the phrase “military-industrial complex” has been widely used, with some more recent modifications and variations.   It is easy to argue that “military-fiscal” describes the US (and other empires) much more broadly and accurately than military-industrial.

The word fiscal covers immense territory, from our consumer lifestyle, the debt creations of large corporations, the huge profits harvested by the FANG companies (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), the widespread debt instruments placed on the citizen from education to mortgages and on into health care, the large corporations harvesting wealth from al citizens as they produce the materials to support the militarized state (G.E., Raytheon, Boeing et al).  It fits beautifully within previous empires and certainly within today’s US empire.

Modern Empire – the Military-fiscal State

This history of empire more or less ends with the transformations of the insular empire into the units described above.  An attempt is made to outline events post World War II, and succeeds within a very narrow scope.  The United States today still remains very much a military-fiscal state even though the author turns to fiction (Captain America and The Avengers) to posit his concluding question:  “Will Captain America persist with military force to advance freedom and democracy or will he adopt a form of smart diplomacy…?”

From Hopkins’ own arguments in  “American Empire – A Global History” and current events within the US and its current attitudes globally, the answer is easy:  he will persist with military force to advance freedom and democracy, a statement that is self-contradictory as freedom and democracy do not come from the barrel of a gun as indicated by the US’ many failed wars around the globe.

One of the problems sometimes when writing history is knowing when to quit.  By trying to be fully up to date, Hopkins misses too many points about empire:  China and Russia acting in tandem are not noted; the huge debt-based society, now surviving on enormous quantities of money printing by the Federal Reserve in order to sustain the military and maybe the collapsing society in general; the large problems of environmental pollution and climate change;  and finally the always immediate threat of nuclear war.

Not quite so final.  When examining empire, race, debt, and white supremacy, Israel, as a large component of the current US empire (consisting of many sycophantic allies and over 800 military bases in over 135 countries) is not mentioned.  This is possibly the author’s attempt to avoid the now racially-biased charges of anti-semitism which might sink the book before publication, but it could also be another ingrained denial of the state of the US empire and its military-fiscal association with Israel and all the tensions created in the Middle East.  You will not find it in the index nor anywhere else passim in the text.

Sum

“American Empire – A Global History” is an enormous academic undertaking, and conforms to all the requirements of academia.  It has numerous citations/references for anyone wanting to search out the sources of information.  It is written in classic academic style: intro chapter with a preview of the main thesis and chapter contents, each chapter with its own introduction and summary sandwiching the overall arguments, and a conclusion/summary outlining again the main thesis.

In that regard, it is an exceptional read, and a lazy reader could understand the whole book by reading the first and last chapter, and the first and last section of each chapter.

However, it is not a book that will be a bestseller on its own merits as it is complex, detailed, and requires the reader to have a bit more than a basic understanding of the flow of modern history in order to follow the arguments.  It is a history, but it is not strictly linear, and it bounces back and forth with its different concepts from different places and different times.  Without some global background knowledge, the work remains too esoteric for general consumption.

– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles.  His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/american-empire-a-global-history-book-review/ 

Starters or Main Course

ISRAEL SHAMIR • MARCH 21, 2021 

The pandemic was sent to us, by grace of Masters of Covid, in their great mercy, instead of a ‘real’ nuclear war. It was sent in order to dump old government debts and issue new debt; to restart the dollar; to raise the demand for credit, and correspondingly, the interest rate. At the same time it was sent to preserve certain lives and assets from otherwise inevitable destruction. That is what I thought and wrote. However, now I have doubts. Perhaps, the pandemic isn’t an alternative course but is just “for starters”, and the main nuclear course is still to come.

This uncomfortable thought came to me while listening to Joe Biden talking about “soulless killer” Vladimir Putin. Smaller insults have sparked off wars. The “Footless, yellow earth-worm” slur moved Kaa the Rock Python to devour Bandar Log. Luckily, easy-going Putin replied with a smile. He said that in his childhood, kids responded with “I am rubber, you are glue; bounces off me and sticks to you”; he only wished good health for the American president and proposed to debate him online, so that Americans and Russians, as well as the whole world, could form their own opinion. Biden evaded the challenge. It’s not clear he remembered who Putin is. An empty suit with a teleprompter, called him Donald Trump Jr. Biden said Putin meddled in the US elections and he will pay a price for it. Alas, Putin couldn’t influence the US dead, and they swung the elections as they voted for Biden by whole cemeteries. Yes, Biden is a senile dummy that couldn’t even board Air Force One without stumbling thrice the next day, but there is somebody who operates the teleprompter, and that is the problem.

The Russians were visibly furious. When US leaders drop such invective, it’s like pirates passing a ‘black spot’ in Treasure Island. It’s a signal that the foreign leader has to be deposed or killed outright. That’s how they spoke of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gadhafi; both were killed and their ‘rogue states’ devastated. It was clearly a show of hostile intentions, not just from Biden but also from the US establishment speaking like ventriloquist through the current White House tenant.

It is bad enough to make a quarrel with Russia, but Biden regime didn’t stop at that. Next day there was a nasty quarrel with China, at the Alaska talks. Secretary of State Blinken began negotiations by accusing China of genocide in Sinkiang, of depriving Hong Kong denizens of their rights, of buying fewer Australian products, and he said that they would negotiate “from a position of strength”.

“The United States relationship with China will be competitive where it should be, collaborative where it can be, adversarial where it must be.” This unprovoked attack annoyed the Chinese representative and he replied:

Do you want to speak to China in a condescending way from a position of strength? So was this carefully all planned and was it carefully orchestrated with all the preparations in place? Is that the way that you had hoped to conduct this dialogue? The United States does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The U.S. does not represent the world. It only represents the Government of the United States. I don’t think the overwhelming majority of countries in the world would recognize that the universal values advocated by the United States or that the opinion of the United States could represent international public opinion, and those countries would not recognize that the rules made by a small number of people would serve as the basis for the international order.”

This two-pronged attack on Russia AND on China is not a coincidence. The Biden regime prepares for war. A new Raider Bomber B-21 is in preparation, it is reported:

The strategic stealth bomber will be able to deliver conventional and thermonuclear weapons to enemy targets anywhere and anytime in the world. It will be able to destroy any target, anywhere. The B-21 was conceived to overcome all the deficiencies of the current heavy bomber fleet, which consists of 157 ageing Cold War aircraft. In particular, it will have the range, payload, strike features, and survivability to address every category of potential target—including deeply buried or time-sensitive mobile targets inside China. The basic logic of the design is that if the B-21 is to be an effective deterrent to all forms of aggression, then it must be able to put at risk every asset valued by any adversary, no matter how well concealed or protected such assets may be. The Raider will replace the B-2 bomber, which means it will be wired from day one to carry the B-61 variable-yield nuclear gravity bomb and the Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) nuclear cruise missile. (Facebook does not allow the posting of a link to this article).

There are thousands of new missiles, aircraft, ships and bombs to be produced and deployed by Biden regime – and its allies. The British poodle decided to increase its nuclear weapon arsenal by 40 per cent. It mainly consists of those Trident nuclear warheads that Jeremy Corbyn pledged to eliminate altogether, until he was stopped in his tracks by the antisemitism smear. Perhaps his wish to disarm was the main reason why this gentle man was dumped, and Jews were, as always, ready to provide an excuse. There is no mystery for whom the nukes are prepared: Moscow remains “the most acute threat” to British security, said Boris Johnson. Russia is the enemy No One.

Afghanistan is a great base from which to invade Central Asia and threaten Russia from the south. The country has been occupied by the US for 20 years, and Trump was determined to pull out the troops. Biden has already hinted that the US will renege on its agreement with the Taliban to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. The withdrawal was supposed to be completed by May 2021; it will be “tough” for the United States to withdraw forces from Afghanistan in six weeks, he said. Biden has also scrapped Trump’s plan to withdraw forces from Germany, and with good reason. His administration wants Germans to drop the Nord Stream II project, and it is easier to convince a country if you have forty military bases there.

Fighting against Iran never stopped. When the US isn’t doing it her best friend Israel is acting. It has emerged that during the last two years, Israeli frogmen sabotaged 12 Iranian tankers, reported the Wall Street Journal. But it all backfired. On February 16, the entire Mediterranean coast of Israel was covered with sticky black mess.

The blow to Israel was terrible – animals, plants and fish died; for a long time it will be impossible to swim and sunbathe on the oily shores. Only now the sad truth has begun to leak out: ‘the worst pollution of the century’ had been done by Israelis. The first to speak about the source of the pollution was Israeli Minister of the Environment Gila Gamliel. She said the oil was released by the Iranian tanker Emerald carrying a cargo of US-sanctioned oil products to Syria. This is Iranian eco-terrorism, she said. But Gila was quickly gagged – the Israeli military censorship forbade discussion of this topic, except in the most general terms. It appears Gila Gamliel was right – up to a point. The Israeli dissident Richard Silverstein wrote about it:

It was a deliberate attack by Israel on the Iranian vessel. Israel’s naval commando unit, Flotilla 13 covertly attached a mine to the Emerald. The intent was to cause minor damage that would send a message to Iran that its own attacks on Gulf shipping would bring a cost. This Times of London report written by Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeiffer confirms my source. However, the commandos didn’t realize that the Emerald was a rusty old hulk in desperately ill-repair. The Israeli mine, which was supposed to cause minor damage, actually ripped a hole so big that much of the contents of the ship’s hold leaked into the Mediterranean. This is what caused the Israeli environmental disaster: Israel itself.

This incident reminds us that war has unpredictable consequences, especially world wars. Such desire for war is a clear sign of an unhappy nation. The combination of covid and war is even less predictable. The US, and its European allies are frustrated. Joe Biden came to the White House as the man of the Masters of Covid, with a mask on his face; he does not take it off, nor do his senior officials. Texas and South Dakota freed themselves; so did Florida, but the rest of the US is still restricted. Despite millions of vaccine shots, the corona pandemic is still the reason for lockdowns and travel limitations. Brits are not allowed to leave their country. In the US, a woman, Dr Micheline Epstein, delivered her daughter to a school, and she was (oh horror!) bare-faced. The schoolteachers contacted the police; the six-year-old daughter has been taken away from her mother indefinitely, for breach of the mask regime. She is still not allowed to reunite with her daughter, it was reported.

People are all too vulnerable in the Righteous Empire. The enforcers of right attitudes can do with you anything, anything at all. A scientist who kept quiet when he heard the word n<…> being uttered, has lost his job. A man, Robert Hoogland, has been sent to jail for calling his 14-year-old daughter, “daughter”, and publicly referring to her with the pronouns “she” and “her”, while the girl still isn’t allowed yet to buy beer insists she will be a man. Add to that the misery created by lockdowns, and you will understand why thousands of Russian émigrés rush back into Mother Russia.

Since 1980s, Russians considered themselves lucky if they could escape their frosty homeland and move westward. The children of Stalin and Khrushchev, top government figures of Yeltsin days, artists and scientists, moved to Florida or Paris. They were always ready to condemn Putin the brutal dictator. A popular film actor Mr Alexei Serebryakov had left Russia for Canada, angrily slamming the door, condemning the “bloody regime” and Russia’s “mix of strength, arrogance and rudeness”. And suddenly – the wind had changed, and the reverse drift has begun. Serebryakov returned from Canada, though many Russians aren’t welcoming his move back at all. A science journalist Asya Kazantseva returned to Moscow from Tel Aviv and Bristol, UK and wrote:

An unexpected collateral effect of the pandemic is that all the friends who immigrated to Europe a long time ago flocked home to spend the winter here in Moscow, where vaccines are free and available, and there is no lockdown. Social life here is twice as active as it was in peacetime. I will never be lonely again! [A popular Jewish blogger] Alina Farkash recently wrote that in Moscow, you are a beloved child in a large family, while emigration [in her case to Israel] is like being sent to an orphanage. That’s all true. I really hope that I will never go anywhere else, that I will always be here, and that I will firmly remember what an endless happiness it is just to be here.”

Indeed, Russia is not a wonderland; it has many faults and problems. Its oligarchs are too rich, its people are rather poor; taxes are too low; the social gap is greater than in the US or China, as you can read in this text (in Russian). However, Russia is free. You can say and write whatever you wish. There are no lockdowns. Schools operate as usual; distance learning is rare. Churches are open. Theatres, ditto. There are no obligatory masks; where they are obligatory, the Russians still ignore them.

Putin answered Biden at a concert in a Moscow stadium full to capacity. Among 80 thousand attendees, just a few cautious people wore masks. Vaccines are free and available, the excellent old-fashioned Russian vaccines that have no known ill side effects. There is a choice of three Russian vaccines, with the first one, Sputnik V, authorised the world over, and bought in Europe and elsewhere. Anxious people exposed to Western discourse do vaccinate, others feel no pressure to do it. Russia is the most relaxed place re corona you can find now. Even Putin haters, plentiful among Moscow middle classes, have changed their tune. They were calling him a coward who hides in a shelter out of fear of virus; now they say he just pretended, and he knew all the way along that the virus is not all that dangerous, so he is now just a cheat. He can’t win them all.

Still, Russia does not deny the virus. It would be silly, for the Russian vaccines bring in heaps of dollars to the state coffers. The Deputy Director of the State Influenza Institute Dr Daria Danilenko wryly commented: “For the first time in the history of scientific observation, the world faced an epidemic season without influenza”.

The Masters of Covid are too powerful to be challenged openly. This week, they disposed of the Tanzanian President, John Magufuli. A cheeky man, he tested papaya, goat and engine oil for covid using WHO-supplied tests, and they all turned out to be positive. He rejected testing and declared Tanzania free of covid. Then, the London Guardian newspaper (in a section funded by Bill Gates) called for him to be removed.

The US Council on Foreign Relations, FCR, seconded the call, and presto! he is dead. He was the second African ruler who did not succumb to covid obsession, and found his untimely death. The first one was the President of Burundi, Pierre Nkurunziza, who did not allow WHO envoys into his country and refused to lock down and succumb to mass testing. He promptly died of a heart attack, or, according to other sources, from covid, just like Magufuli. The man who took his place immediately invited the WHO into the country and followed their instructions.

President Lukashenko also refused the WHO diktat, and was almost deposed, but he fought back – after all, Belarus is not in Africa. The Swedes, as you know, also gave ground under pressure. Perhaps President Putin acted wisely when he did not contradict the Masters of Covid. They are, apparently, an irresistible force in the current world. They removed Trump, they locked Europe down. Putin would also have been destroyed – and Russians would end in an endless lockdown, like Israel or France.

I cannot answer the question of how the Masters of Covid were able to do it. Neither Schwab, a second-rate professor in Zurich, nor Gates, the owner of a large data company – could have achieved such a result by any known means. Will we ever know who is behind them? Or is that very question to be condemned as a conspiracy theory?

By the way, Magufuli, the late president of Tanzania, was an outstanding personality. A Russian newspaper wrote:

Magufuli looked everywhere to cut unnecessary expenses, and the saved money was used for the construction of roads and for free education (with him, not only primary, but secondary schools became free, as well). He reduced the cabinet from 30 to 19 people, and fired about 150 high-ranking officials as unnecessary or corrupt. An audit revealed that 10,000 salaried civil servants existed on paper only. Magufuli cancelled two deals with China, which had already been signed by his predecessor, President Kikwete: the construction of the country’s first electrified railway and the largest port in East Africa in Bagamoyo. Only a madman could agree to the conditions proposed by the Chinese. Magufuli was indignant. The railway was eventually built by a Turkish company; the Tanzanian authorities still cannot agree on the port with Chinese investors. Magufuli believed that the scale of the pandemic is greatly exaggerated and some forces use it to sabotage the economy, wrote Associated Press. He did not want to introduce quarantine fearing that the level of poverty would rise.

In short, a wonderful person! But he undertook to chop down a tree that was beyond his strength.

The Masters of Covid played on our fear of death. I wonder how they will overcome it while instigating a world war? Perhaps they will do it by trying to make our life so miserable that we will accept mass annihilation, if not gladly, at least placidly.

Israel Shamir can be reached at adam@israelshamir.net

This article was first published at The Unz Review.

https://www.unz.com/ishamir/starters-or-main-course/

Rethinking Food and Agriculture: New Ways Forward

 

BY KOLLIBRI TERRE SONNENBLUME

Agriculture is at the root of multiple crises facing humanity today. Environmentally, it is responsible for habitat destruction, topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, pesticide and fertilizer pollution, ocean dead zones, dubious genetic experimentation, and a tremendous amount of green house gas emissions. Socially, its practice depends on a permanent underclass of slave-like labor controlled by monopolistic corporate forces with pernicious political influence. Philosophically, it reduces non-human life—plants, animals, fungus, etc.—to objects to be controlled and manipulated rather than relations with whom to live in reciprocity; this “dominionism” (as enshrined by the Abrahamic religious tradition) is the toxic foundation of contemporary capitalism (and which, I must add, is too often ignored by socialist theory).

We have to eat, of course, so what are we to do?

“Rethinking Food & Agriculture: New Ways Forward,” an anthology edited by Amir Kassam and Laila Kassam, takes a deep dive into these ecological and cultural concerns, from the Neolithic Revolution to the present day, and explores sustainable solutions.

Over the course of twenty copiously referenced essays and 400+ pages, this substantial tome delivers an exhaustive examination of contemporary farming and food systems. A reader with no familiarity with the subject matter will receive a detailed education and an over-arching perspective. For me, a former organic farmer who has studied these topics for nearly two decades, there were many facts that were new to me, and many ideas that were newly connected or contextualized. In terms of style and reading level, this is a scholarly collection, so it requires attention, but each author begins with the basics of their chosen topic.

The volume does not shrink from controversial subjects and wades right in with its opening article, “Setting innovation free in agriculture,” in which biologist Rupert Sheldrake critiques materialism, “the scientific priesthood,” and biotechnology, and calls for a re-emphasis on traditional agricultural practices. Traditional practices include intercropping, the use of night soil, and small-scale holdings. Science has demonstrated that these techniques are all beneficial, but research usually does not focus on them. Sheldrake calls for scientific research to reorient to cover the practical questions of farmers and gardeners rather than technological projects such as gene-editing and agrochemical development, which are pursued for their profit potential, not successful food production per se.

Sheldrake writes: “Science and economics are not theory-neutral. They are expressions of worldviews, and we need to be aware of the prevailing worldview, or else we will follow it through blind faith.” This is not to throw science out the window; it is just to dispense with the notion that science is—or even can be—approached without drawing on cultural values. Such values affect what is studied, who funds it, and which results are reported widely, and which are suppressed. Thus, the dialogue around any issue—including agriculture—is invisibly circumscribed by notions of what’s considered appropriate; what’s “fit to print,” as the NY Times puts it. A conversation without such limits, and that was truly free of preconceptions, would not shrink away from the marginal or lionize the popular, as is currently the case, but would cover the whole story.

It’s appropriate that the book opens with these concepts, as it clearly intends to tell a wider narrative with fewer of the usual constrictions. As Laila Kassam put it in our discussion:

“I really wanted to be able to uncover some of these beliefs that we have internalized without knowing it… our society is set up to keep us in this state of being unconscious of all of these things. I myself have gone through a journey that is never-ending, trying to unlearn so much of this stuff. To me, this is our unconsciousness around how we view our relationship to other animals… [which] seems to me to be one of the root causes of so many of the issues we are facing today.”

In “Agriculture planted the seeds of alienation from nature,” Jim Mason & Laila Kassam delve into the history of the Agricultural Revolution, with a focus on how human relationships to animals were altered to the detriment of both animals and humans. Mason & Kassam address well-established facts of the transition to agriculture—such as the overall decline in human health, the increase in labor as a proportion of time spent, and the escalation in social inequality—and also point out how much we gave up in terms of our metaphysical connections to the world, something that has only worsened over time. As we integrated the abuse of animals into our means of survival, we deadened ourselves and our sensitivity to the natural world, with the result that our species now stands at the precipice of extinction and seems reluctant to step back.

The thesis of “agriculture as wrong turn” is not new, but Mason & Kassam’s attention to the animal aspect is less common. They describe the central role of animal exploitation in enabling and promoting widespread violence, war, and colonialism and also make explicit the link between animal oppression and the development of capitalism.

The widespread cruelty of the contemporary animal agriculture industry is a theme running throughout the volume and is touched upon by several of the authors. Robert C. Jones writes about the intersection of foodieism and meat and describes the contradictions involved with “locavore” animal consumption and slaughter.

“An increased awareness of the destructive nature of industrialized animal agriculture and fishing, including environmental degradation, individual and public health threats, and the atrocious conditions under which animals are raised, has led to a shift in attitudes toward meat and meat production. This acknowledgment, coupled with a sentimental nostalgia for a time when a majority of Europeans and Americans were farmers and craftspersons, has led to a booming alternative food movement… Yet, despite this supposed concern for the animals’ lives and deaths, relatively little public attention has been paid to the experiences of their short lives or the brutality of their slaughter.

“In truth, an overwhelming majority of animals raised on “local” farms are sent to industrial slaughterhouses, butchered alongside their kin raised in factory farms. Animals raised in “humane” conditions routinely suffer branding, dehorning, forced impregnation, tail docking (without anesthesia), overcrowding, beak trimming, castration, tooth filing, ear notching, and nose ring piercing.”

Currently, about three quarters of agricultural resources worldwide are devoted to raising animals or food for animals, for both meat and dairy production, so the topic is vitally important but is generally ignored, at least in conventional discussions. Even in environmental or politically leftist circles, there is at least a hesitancy and often a hostility to discussing the ecological effects of animal agriculture. This is a societal phenomena, reinforced not just by media, but by religion and other cultural factors. “Rethinking Food & Agriculture” takes the subject head on, returning to it repeatedly throughout. This might be distasteful or uncomfortable for some readers, but the planetary issues of animal agriculture are real in a material environmental sense—setting aside ethical considerations—so we’ve really got to move past the insolent and ultimately juvenile conversation stopper, “But I like bacon.”

In “Political economy of the global food and agriculture system,” Philip McMichael draws a line from European colonialism to our current phase of “free trade” globalization. Land and labor in the global south are exploited for export crops to such a degree that local populations suffer starvation. Traditional, community-based methodologies and structures based on subsistence and local conditions are replaced by corporate powers that seek maximum production no matter the cost. The result is the loss of local sustainability for international trade, and with it, both human self-reliance and natural biodiversity. When the media talks about issues of “trade” what is actually at stake is culture and ecology, and this chapter illustrates this well. In addition to the global north extracting from the global south, the north has forced upon the south such curses as pesticide use, monocropping, and harmful diets that benefit no one but the capitalist ownership class.

Running counter to all this are peasant-led food-sovereignty movements. That such movements are sometimes connected to explicitly anti-capitalist and pro-socialist perspectives is another layer of reality that is ignored or misrepresented by the corporate media. The huge farmer-led demonstrations that recently took place in India barely made a blip in the news in the US, though they were significant both numerically and historically.

“Neocolonialism and the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition: A gendered analysis of the development consequences for Africa” by Mark Langan and Sophia Price provides details of how corporate players like Syngenta, Monsanto & Unilever are expanding their markets—and western hegemony—under the cover of “sustainable development.” The “modernization” that is supposedly being brought to Africa by NGOs and ‘philanthro-capitalist’ organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is resulting in land grabs, the replacement of local agriculture with export agriculture, and more hardship for locals, specifically women.

In “Will gene-edited and other GM crops fail sustainable food systems?,” Allison K. Wilson describes the technical aspects of genetic modification and describes what kinds of modifications have been made so far in this rapidly growing field of research and development. She answers the question posed by her title with a conditional, “yes,” given that the motives behind GM so far has been profit and market expansion, not crop varieties that are higher yielding, in spite of what is continually promised.

The most common genetic modifications to date have been for herbicide resistance and pesticide production. In the first case, a variety is manufactured that can survive applications of glyphosate; over the last two decades, these “Round-up Ready” crops have led to increasing use of the Monsanto-invented herbicide since a) the crop can tolerate it, and b) weeds are themselves becoming resistant, which then requires heavier doses of Round-up, and additionally, of other, stronger herbicides. In the second case, a plant is modified to produce its own pesticide so that an insect pest eating it is killed. Bt corn is the primary example of this, and the amount of pesticide produced by a field of such crops exceeds the amount that would have been applied otherwise. In neither case was the trait of “higher yields” sought or delivered.

Increasing agricultural pesticide use has been implicated in the sharp drop in insect populations and in various mutations in aquatic animals, among many other problems. The Monarch butterfly’s crash over the last twenty years is at least partially attributed to the fact that their host food, Milkweed, is far less common due to increased herbicide use. Yes, Monsanto is killing the Monarch.

The book focuses as much on possible solutions as it does on the problems, which is both refreshing and practical.

At the halfway point, Amir Kassam & Laila Kassam offer the chapter, “Paradigms of agriculture.” After a discussion of the so-called Green Revolution (which, despite its name, was heavily dependent on chemical inputs), they discuss the benefits and blind spots of the most common alternative paradigms to conventional agriculture. What follows is a highly abbreviated summary; there is much more to say about all of these, and indeed, the book does so. But here’s a flavor, so to speak:

* Organic Agriculture
Initially based on building soil health, organic agriculture shuns the use of chemicals and generally utilizes composts and animal manure. After over half a century as a farmer-led movement, “organic” is now legally defined by government-based certifying rules that are, like such regulations too often end up being, subject to being diluted by industry. While organic certainly produces food that is less toxic, favored methods such as tilling degrade soil over time, and other factors—like wise water use and labor conditions—do not need to be considered at all for certification. Also, the dichotomy often presented by organic proponents of chemical inputs vs. animal inputs is considered a false choice by some.

 * Regenerative Agriculture
This term has been appearing in the media more frequently lately, often in the context of “holistic grazing.” As a paradigm, it seeks to be a “holistic land management practice” that focuses on, among other things, soil building, water issues, biodiversity, and carbon capture. The last aspect, of pulling greenhouse gases (GHG) out of the atmosphere, has been especially highlighted in the press, and claims have been made that a cattle operation following its principles can go from being GHG emitting to GHG capturing. This claim is controversial and despite the strident insistence of some of its advocates, is hardly proven or a consensus. However, regenerative systems that are veganic also exist, so grazing is not a requirement of this paradigm.

 * Conservation Agriculture
This paradigm originates with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s and aims to conserve soil. Methodology includes no-tilling (or the minimum possible soil disturbance), permanent soil coverage (cover crops or crop stubble), and diversification of cropping (such as rotation and associations with annuals and perennials including legumes). Conservation Agriculture is not the same as no-till systems that can be heavily dependent on herbicides for weed suppression. The Conservation Agriculture paradigm offers many advantages including less erosion, less agrochemicals, reduced machinery, and rehabilitation of degraded lands. It is also practiced organically or with minimum inputs from agrochemicals and does not require any animal inputs such as manure. This system is based on three universal principles and can be used to describe a wide variety of annual and perennial systems around the world, despite its origination in the US.

* Agroecology
Developed first in Latin America, this so far loosely defined approach goes beyond organic in its effort to produce “sustainable agro-ecosystems.” Though it utilizes many of the same methods, such as such intensive tillage, cover cropping, intercropping, companion planting and mulching, it goes further and “seeks to challenge the power of the corporate food regime.” The ultimate goal of Agroecology is “to build a new global food system, based on equity, participation, democracy, and justice, which is not only sustainable but helps restore and protects Earth’s life support systems.”

Crucially, write Kassam & Kassam:

“Agroecology is the only paradigm that actively seeks to challenge the structural root causes of the environmental and social crisis of industrial agriculture, i.e., capitalism. It does this by questioning capitalist relations of production and allying itself with agrarian peasant social movements, which are resisting the advancement of the corporate food system, industrial agriculture, and neoliberal policies. This political dimension of Agroecology is slowing its spread in the industrialized world… Insofar as paradigms such as Organic, Regenerative, and Conservation Agriculture are based on practices that increase the efficiency of input use or substitute organic inputs for agrochemicals, but that do not challenge monoculture and reliance on external inputs or address the sociopolitical dimensions and context, they cannot transform the food and agricultural system at the local and global levels.”

These paradigms can overlap, and indeed, given varying circumstances around the world, such as climate, soil type, local history, cultural considerations and availability of resources, a sustainable system in a given location could practically combine factors from each. When it comes to what physically happens on the ground, there is no “one size fits all” model that can be applied.

That being said, there are dangers that are universal. Kassam & Kassam warn:

“In a neoliberal capitalist economic system, any paradigm that does not work to explicitly challenge the power relations within the food and agriculture system and actively reject the corporate influence and control of the food system is vulnerable to co-option by vested interests, be they corporate, international organization or philanthropic actors.”

That is, in discussing our agricultural systems and deciding how to move forward into a more sustainable future, we cannot afford to limit our scope to merely considering different farming methods—till or no-till, mulch or no mulch, animal-based or veganic, etc.—but we must also completely overhaul the entire food production and distribution system as it currently exists under capitalism. As long as corporate profit is the driving motivation and top-down control is the dominant model, we are on the wrong path: one that leads to planetary disaster. We need new systems based on addressing needs—both human and ecological—that are locally-based and community-organized. Fortunately, people are already working on these, and the book offers many examples.

In the final chapter, “Toward inclusive responsibility,” Kassam & Kassam attempt to pull together all the threads. They present six key themes, unranked, that they hope will offer “guidance, hope, and inspiration” to those working toward the transformation of farming. These themes (which Laila & I discussed one-by-one on my podcast) are:

* Toward holistic paradigms

* Toward a narrative of abundance

* Toward ecological and multifunctional paradigms of agriculture

* Toward decentralizing power in the food and economic systems

* Toward diets that promote human and planetary health

* Toward powerful social movements and civil society

These six themes inform what the editors call an ‘inclusively responsible’ paradigm of food and agriculture which is truly sustainable and just.

Note that these themes go way beyond mere technique. The project of “rethinking food and agriculture” goes to the root of civilization itself. Which is to say, we need “radical” change in a very literal sense; the word “radical” comes from the Latin, “radix,” which means “root”—and from which we also get “radish!”

In the book’s penultimate chapter, Vandana Shiva, writes:

What we eat, how we grow the food we eat, how we distribute it, will determine whether humanity survives or pushes itself and other species to extinction.

A paradigm and worldview based on recognition that we are part of the Earth and members of the Earth family leads to cocreativity. It allows us to provide healthy food for all humans while protecting the diversity of species that weave the food web as the web of life.

A paradigm based on war creates instruments of war, exterminating species, and threatening the lives of human beings through hunger and life-threatening chronic diseases.

If we continue on the destructive path laid by the Poison Cartel, we close our future.

When we farm with real knowledge of how to care for the Earth and her biodiversity, when we eat real food that nourishes the biodiversity of the Earth, of our cultures, in our gut microbiome, when we participate in living economies that regenerate the well-being of all, we sow the seeds of our future.

“Rethinking Food & Agriculture: New Ways Forward” is published by the academic press, Elsevier, and so it has an excessive price tag. Aware that this puts it out of the reach of most people, but wanting to disseminate their message anyway, the editors put together an accompanying website that presents much of the information and many of the ideas. Found at inclusiveresponsibility.earth, the site features excerpts from each chapter and presents the key themes of the book.

My podcast interview with Laila Kassam about “Rethinking Food & Agriculture: New Ways Forward” is available here.

Kollibri terre Sonnenblume is a writer living on the West Coast of the U.S.A. More of Kollibri’s writing and photos can be found at Macska Moksha Press. 

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/03/26/rethinking-food-agriculture-new-ways-forward/