Exeter Socialists discussion meeting, 1 May 2008, introductory paper by Chris Marsh, and summary of discussion.

I’m going to concentrate on the ideology (also attitudes and unconscious assumptions) concerned with food and how we get it, and we can then discuss the political implications. There are four parts to food ideology, and one needs to have all of these in mind.

The dictionary definition of ‘ideology’:

1. the system of ideas at the basis of an economic or political theory.
2. the manner of thinking characteristic of a class or individual.
3. visionary speculation.
4. archaic the science of ideas.

Marx famously said:

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. … (Karl Marx, from The German Ideology, in David McLellan, ed., Karl Marx Selected Writings, p.176)

Marx goes on to suggest that these ruling ideas are conscious thoughts on the part of the ruling class, and consciously imposed on the working class. There is an underlying assumption in the passage that sets of ideas – ideology – ‘belong’ to the stage of economic development – or ‘epoch’ – which is current. But capitalism was a long time coming, and developing and expanding to the thing we are faced with today. Both ‘stage’ and ‘epoch’ suggest stability and uniformity over time, and that’s not right – except, oddly enough, where food is concerned. I believe that in the case of the ideology of food production, our ideas were put through a mental mincing machine at a very early stage of the rise of capitalism, and were crucial to capitalism happening at all, which may be why the attitudes we currently hold about food are quite wrong, and curiously topsy-turvy.

The current ideology around food production includes the following:

1. we have a right to choose what to buy to eat;
2. there is a global food production system and foods are commodities;
3. other people, working for businesses such as farmers and growers, food manufacturers, supermarkets, produce and distribute our food for us to buy;
4. the government has a duty to safeguard the security of food supplies, and ensure that food sold is fresh and healthy;
5. some food is produced locally, but much cannot be and is imported from abroad;
6. we have a right to choose what to buy to eat!

A subset of food ideology includes:

1. people in poor countries suffer food crises;
2. we – or ‘they’ – should help the poor, hungry people.

We (most of us) believe that people’s role in relation to food is to earn money to buy it, either as cheaply as possible, or paying extra for better quality and/or to support fair trade and/or to reduce ‘food miles’ and/or to support local farmers, growers and producers. Producing our own food is either a hobby, or it is demeaning, an activity for those who are desperate and under-developed, and belongs to an earlier age we would not wish to return to, an age of poor life expectation, insecurity, a cruel hard grind and exploitative.

This ideology blinds us to issues such as:

1. food growing has caused ruinous land degradation worldwide over millennia and is a major contributor to climate change;
2. unnecessary ‘food’ (popular stimulants: stuff we eat or drink or smoke) has wasted good land and provided a major driver for imperialism;
3. Britain can and should feed itself;
4. ‘organic’ is not the answer;
5. there are no easy answers or ‘fixes’ – food could be / must be the key to revolutionary change.

At this point, we have moved from a dictionary definition of ideology in general, and a classic quote from Marx, to a set of personal ideas: ideology in the sense of ‘the manner of thinking characteristic of a[n] … individual’, the result of some twenty years of studying the subject, not so much of food, but of where food comes from, that is how land has been used and abused over thousands of years to produce food staples, mainly grains, and also stimulants: tea and coffee, sugar, tobacco. The conclusions are somewhat counter-cultural, and not even anti-capitalist in a way that socialists would recognise. The most difficult part of the communication problem I encounter is that even socialists – perhaps particularly socialists – fail to see the importance of engaging in a transition to producing food quite differently, taking responsibility for food production, not just our food choices as consumers, but growing at least some of our own food, and engaging in local community growing – providing for our basic needs locally, re-engaging with the land as well as with the people we share it with.

Looking again at Marx on ideology: ‘the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance,’ what are ‘the dominant material relationships’, never mind the social relationships, or class makeup of capitalism?

The most dominant material relationship is ‘we have a right to choose what to buy to eat’. That is a relationship between the capitalist class, who own and control the means of food production, and the working class, from whose labour food comes, but by very convoluted routes involving mechanisation, agrichemicals and transportation, so that our experience of food production is limited to participating in the market, spending our wages for food to live, kidding ourselves we have power as consumers.

The history of how we became divorced from food production goes back centuries. There are two basic social arrangements for producing food, and they have existed in parallel – not in succession as the simplistic materialist conception of history suggests. We can call them ‘urban’ and ‘rural’. ‘Urban’ means food is made available via retail outlets; a few of us are involved in getting food to those outlets, all of us earn money and buy food. (And note that in Britain we are all urban now in that sense, even those of us who live in ‘villages’ in the countryside.) ‘Rural’ means being close to where food comes from and being involved with its production, to eat, also to exchange. There was a time when all trade and other exchanges: service, tithes etc. took place in kind. Numbers came into it, but not money and not documentation. Gradually, over a millennium, transactions in kind were commuted to transactions in money. It was not capitalism which drove that; it happened by a process of evolution, which capitalism took advantage of, without which it could not have happened. It is also worth noting that the changes did not mean wholesale replacement, as in revolution. Earlier ways survived in parallel with newer ones. Newer ways were resisted, often fiercely and determinedly. There still survive in the world all the earlier stages which socialists think of as existing prior to capitalism: there are still – just about – indigenous people, and village people, hanging on to and capable of living in community with each other and with shared land, knowledge and customs; and there is still chattel slavery.

References

On land degradation

Vernon Gill Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization (Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974)

Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the AustralasianLand and People (Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1997)

Johan Goudsblom, Fire and Civilisation (London: Penguin, 1994)

Andrew Goudie, The Human Impact on the Natural Environment: Third Edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990)

Piers Blaikie and Harold Brookfield, Land Degradation and Society (London: Methuen, 1987)

Piers Blaikie, The Political Economy of Soil Erosion in Developing Countries (Harlow, Essex: Longman Scientific and Technical, 1987)

John A. Dixon, David E. James and Paul B. Sherman, The Economics of Dryland Management (London: Earthscan, 1989)

I G, Simmons, Changing the Face of the Earth, ( Oxford:Blackwell, 1989

Susan George, Ill Fares the Land: Essays on Food, Hunger and Power (London: Penguin, 1990)

On Food Production and Land Use in Britain

J.L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Village Labourer, 1760-1882: A Study in the Government of England Before the Reform Bill (London: Longmans, 1911)

Kenneth Mellanby, Can Britain Feed Itself? (London: Merlin, 1975)

Andrew O’Hagan, The End of British Farming ( London: Profile, 2001)

Ken Fern, Plants For A Future: Edible and Useful Plants for a Healthier World (Clanfield, Hampshire: Permanent Publications, 1997)

Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1971 (1965))

Frederick Seebohm, The EnglishVillage Community Examined in its Relations to the Manorial and Tribal Systems and to the Common or Open Field System of Husbandry: An Essay in Economic History, Third Edition (London: Longmans, 1884)
Warren O. Ault, Open-Field Farming in Medieval England (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972)
Eric J. Evans, Tithes and the Tithe Commutation Act 1836 (London: Bedford Square, 1978)

Discussion

Notes were not taken of this discussion and so what follows is the gist of what was said, the main themes.

Unsurprisingly, given that we are a group of socialists, there was much discussion of the challenge in the introduction to the materialist conception of history, and to the idea that in future society needs to revert to earlier modes of social organisation and production of food in particular: a move ‘back’ from ‘urban’ to ‘rural’, cities to self-reliant village communities.

One particular aspect of this which engaged one of us was ‘has there been ‘progress’’, given that people enjoy a huge variety of manufactured goods now. There was also interest in the driver for change being some people in the past seeing opportunities for exploiting others and getting material advantage from that. Isn’t that human nature? Wouldn’t it repeat itself if we were to go back to local community living?

Linked to those political/ideological thoughts was the assumption that feudalism was deeply exploitative. Such a view could be convenient propaganda, originating perhaps in 19th C, when there were still people living a rural life and getting in the way of the agrarian revolution, farming as a business and to feed growing urban working class.

The latest ‘In Our Time’ programme on Radio 4 was mentioned. This was on the 18th C Enclosures, and the guest experts seemed to agree that Marx was wrong to put too much emphasis on that period, taking it to be a transition or revolution from feudalism to capitalism, when the capitalist class forced the peasants and serfs off the land to become the proletariat. Marx may have been misled by working in the British Library on old documents, such as the proceedings of the manor courts. Warren Oult’s book suggests that there were free villages in England, not just those serving the manorial system and the Church, but their proceedings were based on tradition and live discussion and records were not kept or have been lost as they were not thought important.

The ethics of food production was another theme, and how this is tied up with the practical economics in the sense of the amount of land which is needed to provide animal foods: meat and dairy products, compared to a purely vegetable diet. One of us is a ‘political vegan’ on that basis, rather than someone concerned mainly about abuse of livestock. He believes that people need to make food produced vegan-organically (stock free) a higher proportion of their intake, even if they continue to eat some animal products. Another of us observed that – curiously for a socialist – he began to be vegetarian on compassionate grounds and moved on to the economic arguments.

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