Chris Marsh, 9/11/08

I consider myself a Marxist politically, but my Marxism has been modified by years of research into land use and land degradation, together with the social agencies involved, historically and worldwide; a perspective later focussed on India and the rural reconstruction projects of Rabindranath Tagore. What I retain from regular Marxism is its materialism, including the base and superstructure model, but not in the simplistic sense dismissed by some as ‘economic determinism’.

Franz Mehring’s On Historical Materialism (London: New Park, 1975) is a useful corrective to that distortion. He points out that Marx and his followers always ‘protested against every attempt to make historical materialism superficial as if there were only ever two camps, two classes in mutual conflict, homogeneous masses, the revolutionary and the reactionary mass. … Society is and will become even more, an incredibly complicated organism, with the most different classes and the most different class interests, which according to the form of things, can group themselves in the most different of parties.’ (p.17)

The booklet in which is published what was originally an appendix to a larger work by Mehring, concludes with a letter of appreciation from Engels, in which the latter says: ‘Marx and I … laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts.’ (p.57) Engels then refers to the ‘fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effectupon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction. These gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once an historic element has been brought into the world by other, ultimately economic causes, it reacts, can react on its environment and even on the causes that have given rise to it.’ (pp.58-9)

It is crucial to remember though that economics is the base, and Mehring makes this clear with a rhetorical question:

How do you know that economics is the basis of historical development, instead of philosophy? Now, we know it from this, that men must be able to eat, drink, live and must clothe themselves first before they can think and write poetry, that man only reaches consciousness through his social relations with other men, and that accordingly, his consciousness is determined through his social being, and not the reverse, his social being through his consciousness. (p.17)

In his essay, Mehring traces the pre-historic, and on to the ancient classical, path of ‘the growing power of the human mind over the dead mechanism of nature,’ in order to show the historical materialist argument that ‘the human spirit develops from, with and out of the material mode of production [such that t]he human mind is not the father of the mode of production, but the mode of production is the mother of the human mind.’ He quotes Engels saying that ‘there must be a class which does not have to toil at the production of its daily means of living, so that it has time to take care of the spiritual work of society.’ Hence, Mehring adds, ‘every ruling class [is] a fetter on the development of the productive forces – but the division of society into classes grew solely out of economic development and thus the spiritual work of no class could separate itself from the economic basis to which it owed its origins.’ (p.23)

My own ‘modified Marxism’ deviates from classical Marxism by questioning the latter’s assumption that human history has involved progress and improvement, particularly at the level of the economic base: what Mehring calls ‘the growing power of the human mind over the dead mechanism of nature.’ It is easy to see today that the post-industrial economy has devastated nature, arguably by regarding it as mere ‘dead mechanism.’ What has been ignored, and not only by Marxists, is that supposedly progressive changes in the means by which human needs have been met through the ages have involved losses as well as – in some respects, admittedly – gains.

I shall include here just three short texts illustrating loss as a result of perceived progress.

The first example is taken from an enormous tome: 1193 pages long: William L Thomas, Jr., ed., Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth: An International Symposium under the Co-chairmanship of Carl O. Sauer, Marston Bates and Lewis Mumford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956)

What follows is the start and end of a short extract taken from Carl O Sauer’s, ‘The Agency of Man on the Earth’, in his section on ‘Peasant and Pastoral Ways’.

[A swidden, conuco or milpa] plot begins by deadening tree growth, followed toward the end of a dry period by burning, the ashes serving as quick fertilizer. The cleared space then is well stocked with a diverse assemblage of useful plants grown as tiers of vegetation if moisture and fertility are adequate. In the maize-beans-squash complex the squash vines spread over the ground, the cornstalks grow tall, and the beans climb up the cornstalks. Thus the ground is well protected by plant cover, with good interception of the falling rain. In each conuco a high diversity of plants may be cared for, ranging from low herbs to shrubs, such as cotton and manioc, to trees entangled with cultivated climbers. The seeming disorder is actually a very full use of light and moisture, an admirable ecologic substitution by man, perhaps equivalent to the natural cover also in the protection given to the surface of the ground.

…

Some of the faults charged against the system derive from the late impact from our own culture, such as providing axes and machetes by which sprouts and brush may be kept whacked out instead of letting the land rest under regrowth, the replacement of subsistence crops by money crops, the worldwide spurt in population, and the demand for manufactured goods which is designated as rising standard of living. Nor do I claim that under this primitive planting man could go on forever growing his necessities without depleting the soil; but rather that, in its basic procedure and crop assemblages, this system has been most conservative of fertility at high levels of yield; that, being protective and intensive, we might consider it as being fully suited to the physical and cultural conditions of the areas where it exists. Our Western know-how is directed to land use over a short run of years and is not the [end p.57] wisdom of the primitive peasant rooted to his ancestral lands. (Sauer, pp.57-8)

My own researches have shown that humankind needs systems like this if we are to live truly sustainably on the planet, but those kinds of practices, once widespread in a host of local variations, have largely died out. There are groups of people today working on resurrecting, and often unintentionally re-inventing, agricultural ecosystems which are diverse and permanent, as an alternative to the prevailing monocultural, ‘perpetual pioneer’ model, which requires mechanisation, irrigation and expensive chemical inputs, and inevitably destroys soils.

My second example is more local, and is taken from H. J. Massingham, ‘Our Inheritance from the Past’, in Britain and the Beast, ed. by Clough Williams-Ellis (London: Readers’ Union, 1938), pp.8-31, and an illustrative paragraph is the following:

The astounding longevity of the village community seems to me one of the most, if not the most, memorable thing in the history and pre-history of England. An antiquity so vast covers all argument and does in a way silence all criticism. But that it virtually had no history is yet more extraordinary . It existed as a self-governing organism that functioned by internal custom and tradition, and was largely independent not only of external law but of foreign invasion, political change, and national progress. We do not normally associate vitality with an extreme conservatism, but here the one was the condition of the other. It is obvious that there must have been a considerable elasticity within the mechanism and a constant readiness to modify and adapt it to changing conditions. A structure too rigid would have cracked under so heavy a pressure of time. Practical experience was constantly at hand to overhaul the mechanism, and it is noteworthy that the communal village did produce many reformers, the spiritual force of the Lollard movement, and a bounty of rich idiom and folk-poetry quite apart from its handicrafts, [end p.29] its local architecture, and the highly individual quality of its produce. Such elements do not spell stagnation. Still less do we associate conservatism with social equality and the co-operative spirit, but here they were one. To reach such a conclusion I have been forced to make a very dull and prosaic retrospect. But surely the end has justified the means when a fact so wonderful emerges. It is so wonderful that there appears to be only one explanation for it. The village community articulated the natural state and the instinctive disposition of man as a social unit passing through a civilized and alien environment which failed, except quite incidentally, to influence it. The true environment of this community was nature herself, its own little patch of nature.

Massingham begins his essay with doubts about whether ‘Preservation Societies’, or ‘Communism’ might be able to remedy the loss of traditional England, in the latter case saying:

Since our present economic system is bleeding the moribund, would national revolution, by way whether of Communism or of some form of State Socialism, loose the paralysis that lies upon the patient? I doubt it, and for the good reason that such a convulsion or transition, should it occur, is bound to be urban and national. What does the nation or the city know about the countryside which they have robbed first of its solvency, its industries, its civilization, and its men, and, in latter days, of its beauty and tranquillity? Is Piccadilly, where the best country produce finds its home, to legislate for Little-Sopley-on-the-Wold which lives on canned goods from foreign parts? We live in an age when the city, having sucked the country dry, disgorges its surplus population upon the victim of its economic lust. Is the man in the motor [p.8] car, the new townsman in the old manor house, or the owner of the red-brick villa with deal boards nailed on to its gables to rescue it ? Is a standardized and mechanized society, under whatever complexion of government and however well intentioned, to resurrect the life of which it knows nothing beyond glimpses of its more graphic outward spectacle ? The reason why no national nor urban direction from without can resolve the bitter perplexity of how to salvage rather than to save our countryside is that the problem is ultimately local, a question of the relative and the particular, not of general rule or law. Locally considered, the diversity of rural England is such that generalization cannot be applied to it.

My third example of the loss and damage wreaked by supposed ‘improvement’ comes from eighteenth century India. I’ll begin with a paragraph from a writer of the Subaltern group of Historians, Ranajit Guha, in his Dominance without Hegemony:

The idea of Improvement made its debut in India with the administration of Lord Cornwallis. The verb “improve” and adjectival and noun phrases based on it occurred frequently in his correspondence and official pronouncements—something like nineteen times in his two famous minutes of 18 September 1789 and 3 February 1790 written in defence of his plan for an immediate introduction of Permanent Settlement. The plan, an echo, fifteen years later, of Philip Francis’s physiocratic doctrines, was intended to bestow permanent proprietary rights in land on the zamindars of Bengal in order to convert them into “economical landlords and prudent trustees of public interest” who would transform agriculture by bringing wastelands into cultivation, building irrigation works, and generally enhancing the value of landed property to an extent “hitherto unknown in Hindoostan.” (Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997), p.32)

This initiative was woefully unsuccessful, as Karunamoy Mukerji explains in his article: ‘Progress of Land Reforms in West Bengal’, Rabindrabharati Journal, Vol.I (July 1968), pp.58-76

Introduction: Some of the evils of the Permanent Settlement introduced by Lord Cornwallis in 1793 in Bengal, that is, the system of land revenue fixed in perpetuity with the then zamindars (landlords) at the rate of 11/12ths share of collections for the State, meaning the British East India Company, may be briefly recapitulated here and summarised, broadly, under the following heads: (1) The original owner-cultivators (Khud Kasht raiyats) lost their proprietary rights to this new class of overlords, now declared as proprietor-zamindars. (2) Unreasonable, extortionate and illegal demands of the newly-created class of landlords and intermediaries enormously increased the incidence of land rents on the tenants. (3) The loss of revenue to the government was felt more and more as the zamindars’ total rent collections increased over time. (4) The society as a whole was denied the benefits arising from the subsequent increment in land values and differential rents. (5) Sub-infeudation below the proprietors and a long chain of middlemen coming in between the proprietors and the actual cultivators became wide- spread and gave rise to a leisured class of intermediary landowners and rent- receivers. (6) The rack-renting, absenteeism, and mismanagement of estates by unsympathetic and greedy agents of the landlords, led to the reckless exploitation, both social and economic, of the peasants (now tenant cultivators). (7) The partition of estates and holdings and fragmentation of lands became frequent. (8) Unhappy and bitter relations were engendered between landlord and tenants. (9) The neglect of former irrigation works by the new class of zamindars, and the decline in productivity of land through lack of investment and good husbandry led to the rapid stagnation of agriculture and decline in welfare and standard of community life. As a whole, the Permanent Settle[p.58]ment resulted in dissipating the responsibility for the best use of the land in the national interest among a host of rent receivers, all of whom had to be supported by the labour of the cultivator, and none of whom had either the incentive or the power to exercise any control over the use of the land.” It has aptly been remarked that “The extent of sub-infeudation has become an incubus on the working agricultural population, which finds no justification in the performance of any material service so far as agricultural improvements are concerned, and fails to provide any effective means for the development of the resources of the land.” (Mukerji, pp.57-8)

I have given just three, I think very powerful, examples of the downside of progress in human history. These three are relatively recent, in that the pieces of writing date from the last century, and in that the losses written about occurred during the past three centuries, roughly the European ‘modern period’. But the first book which alerted me to the problems of land degradation, and the devastating effects on everyone who depends on the land – which means all of us – was called Topsoil and Civilization (Vernon Gill Carter & Tom Dale (University of Oklahoma Press, 1974, f.p. 1955)). This book surveys the general problem of land degradation from all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia, through all the comings and goings of civilisations, to the American Dust Bowl. What Carter and Dale tell us is that the cause of the damage and the loss is not so much progress, which happens to be a characteristic of our civilisation, but civilisation itself, which brings us back to Engels saying that ‘there must be a class which does not have to toil at the production of its daily means of living, so that it has time to take care of the spiritual work of society.’ However, the toilers have to support not only the ‘spiritual’ work of society, but its philosophy, its science, its literature and its culture generally, together with all the forces of coercion and control which sustain this topsy-turvy form of human society. Civilisation generally, including our own, is ‘topsy-turvy’ in that the most important people, those who work to provide for everyone’s needs, are perceived – even by themselves – as the lowliest and least class of society. And I do not believe in or foresee any ‘progress’ instituted by those with power and influence, or even through the collective struggle of the downtrodden, which will put society the right way up, the way up the societies were who practised swidden agriculture, ran their village democracies, and managed their land collectively. I pin my hopes on those few people who are experimenting with alternative forms of land use, even if they do not consider what they are doing as radical or subversive, and would reject any suggestion that they are Marxists, of however modified a kind. Politically, the change that is beginning to happen, in a very fragmented way, is called ‘re-localisation’. One manifestation of that politics is the Transition Towns movement, however ‘reformist’ traditional Marxist socialists would see the changes which those involved are engaged in. The transition towns idea came out of the permaculture movement, which was originally conceived as an alternative land use system (permanent agriculture), which used some of the approaches characteristic of swidden cultivation. Now permaculture is being applied more generally, to what I see in ‘modified Marxist’ terms as ‘the systematic study of how to turn our individual, community and global perspectives on the world upside down, in recognition of the long forgotten fact that it is from below that sustenance comes.’

top