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The agricultural revolution is a metaphor for capitalism

Date published: 11/20/2008

IN A BOOK on vegetable gardening that I read a few months ago, I came across my No. 1 favorite analogy for capitalism.

Vegetables, the author said, are much weaker organisms than their wild-plant counterparts. The process of agriculture has made them turn soft--because there's a human caretaker hovering above the plants, they always have water, sun and soil, and don't need to develop adaptations to deal with a lack of them. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all. Plants with little sun and little rain become tough in the process, and learn tricks to overcome competitors. Their hardship is the source of their power.

We may be tempted to feel warm and fuzzy about the symbiotic relationship between humans and the vegetables they farm. It seems very maternal, doesn't it? We nourish the plant, it nourishes us. Maybe.

But the devastating toll agriculture has taken on all ecosystems that it has been introduced to (as well as human life itself) is understood in 10 minutes of anthropology. Read Jared Diamond's "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" for a good introduction.

The symbiosis is ultimately a destructive one--more Bonnie and Clyde than Snow White and Prince Charming.

The bourgeoisie of upper-middle-class America are like these vegetables. The frenzied resource-consumption of our culture and the luck of our economic backgrounds turn us soft, fleshy and nutritious. We are not as hard and weathered (hence, not as adaptive) as people from the Third World, or even from our own ghettoes.

Who farms us, benefiting from this softness? Big business and the production of capital. We feed them very filling meals with our currency, and they keep us weak and dependent on them in order to extract the most nutrients from us.

By continuing to tell us how we are lacking (ultimately, commercials always tell you there is something you need that you do not have), they keep us working for them. Dissatisfaction is their fertilizer. And by keeping us in air-conditioned homes, with entertainment galore, a panorama of foods and conveniences leaping out for our consumption, they keep us securely in a position to feed them.

When agriculture overcame hunting and gathering as the main mode of human sustenance, the natural diversity of wildlife got "upgraded" to a homogenous string of plants, leaving the soil feeling cheated and oversimplified, and the humans with too much time on their hands (hence, class divisions, etc.). Likewise, when capitalism has made one's culture its food source, the people buying into it get the short end of the stick. Much of the Third World outsources its own resources to the First one.

What is there to do about this? We are learning permaculture techniques to farm sustainably--what perma-capitalism methods are there to be discovered?

Joe Holmes is a student at the University of Mary Washington. Reach him at jholmes3@umw.edu.

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Date published: 11/20/2008

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