The man and the work of the Sun

"Is the agricultural wealth due to the work of God as believed in feudalism or rather to

the work of man as claimed by the bourgeoisie? Here's an old debate founded on false

antinomies wich have been caused by the succession of social forms both based on

exploitation and private partition of the product. Today, the victorious bourgeoisie

doesn't actually think about theoretical problems, it only cares about accumulation. For

marxist science - although there's no rent of land witnout human exploitation,

appropriation of value, payment to the farmer from society - the agricultural product is

a fruit of nature, in the same way as the man and his work are. They really are the

product of an infinitesimal part of the energy the Sun diffuses into the space and that,

coming in contact with the Earth, gives rise to the chemistry of life. In the classless

society no one will "appropriate", no one will "pay"; once the relationship between man

and nature will be rationally resolved, the human species won't need to split the work of

the man from the work of the sun. The whole land rent theory is contained in this

comparison between today and tomorrow, and every other approach has to be

considered as pre-marxist" (cf. Prospetto introduttivo alla questione agraria, Partito

Comunista Internazionale, 1953).

The series of articles focused on the immediate program of communist revolution has the

purpose of developing the nine points outlined during the Forlì congress in 1952. None

of them was related to the fundamental problem of agriculture, although during that

period this topic wasn't put aside, since it was the core of other important texts in

progress. Confidently we add it, keeping in perspective the above texts, particularly the

collection with the title "Mai la merce sfamerà l'uomo" ("Never commodity will feed the

man") published between 1953 and 1954.

TODAY

End of natural economy

From the first forms of social organization up to feudalism, within a process that lasted

thousands years, agriculture was developed inside natural economies. These economies

they didn't require accounts in terms of value,therefore neither the use of money.

Traditionally, in the ancient Rome, the ruling class' wealth came from the land.

Descending from the rural tribes was a source of pride, as well as belonging to

generations which hadn't even out with the urban classes who were rich but no longer

had roots in the land. A land which was always pervaled by a primeval sacredness until

the fall of the empire and that was traded only occasionally and quite later; ancient

history of the large landed estate is not made of trades but of usurpations, plunderings

and killings. A large number of soldiers, who were entrusted with the land, weren't glad

to cultivate it, so they bartered it for duties in the service of the ruling classes. So the

greatness of Rome, earlier founded on the land in itself, was later based on concentration

of the land in few hands, on the extent of controlled territory, on monoculture and on the

enslaving production of a surplus for the market.

For thousands of years, in every continent, the humankind has lived off the products of

the land without making property of it. The Incas, for example first took the land away

from the defeated local communities to then relocate the whole taking into account the

wide territorial unity they had recently reached as well as the resulting social

centralization: most of it was given in direct support of the communities, while the

remaining, cultivated through a system of "corvée", was given to solar deity and for the

Sapa Inca. So the entire society was reorganized on the basis of a surplus, which was not

capitalized in any way but was intended as a social distribution controlled by a central

authority. This was not the "State" since the Inca, his entourage and the priesthood were

not a class, and not even a propertor rank.

The feudal type of exchange, including that widespreading in the late Middle Ages and

which in fact anticipated the real market, had been limited to handicrafts while

agricultural production was almost exclusively traded through a non-mercantile

relationship between classes of the time. The serf used to pay in kind the portion of the

product to the feudal lord, exactly as the tithe to the Church. The peasant life was

independent from the market: indeed he produced himself his own means of support, he

built his own house, furnitures, household utensils, he wove and packaged his own

clothes and so on. Since his existence depended on land and the whole society depended

on him, the fields had to be preserved and could not be a property as we initend it today.

Natural devastations or war plunderings appeared as short-lived disasters that the whole

society handled devoting part of the collective work; that is why the local lord had a

direct interest, not only military, in defending the feud and its inhabitants. The system

appeared as stationary. The proliferation of trades anticipating capitalism opened up to

the traffic the closed feudal islands, which were finally dissolved by production and

circulation of goods and money.

As the specific capitalist relationship of production arose, the bond between man and

land changed. Products of the land started to be traded, as they became goods, acquiring

a general market value, and the possibility to buy or sell the land itself appeared, a land

valued as any other commodity. Therefore the rise of the new economic form entailed

the birth of the industrialization process of the country, which reached its climax when

modern scientific knowledge got through techniques of cultivation. As soon as science

pervaded agriculture, more and more food was produced, population grew, exodus

towards the cities began; because of land natural limits this situation caused the price

increase of agricultural products and the consequent growing impoverishment of the

human mass.

The process was long but inexorable. Until the end of the 15th century, agriculture had

shown its limits with towards the needs of the new rising era. Columbus' voyage was one

of the many paths that explorers-merchants blazed, driven by productive and

demographic exuberance; the new findings did nothing but accelerating the cycle that

had been launched, and that, until the early seventeenth century, saw a constant increase

in prices of staple foods. During this age such increase halved the real income of wages

and salaries for a population which was meanwhile considerably increased; at the same

time - and for this reason - pastures and forests were ploughed and became profitable,

therefore more advanced techniques of cultivation, fertilization and irrigation were

introduced. Dams and canals' Dutch experts were called across Europe to plan hydraulic

structures, while in Italy the oldest Lombard's structures were developed and adapted to

the new monocultures, including rice; companies for the drain of swamps, wich were

financed by rising Dutch capital, were created in France; networks of canals for

navigation and irrigation were dug in Germany and in England.

This food and mercantile revolution was product and factor at the same time, long before

the bourgeois revolution, of a staggering increase of human population (on the basis of

that age's standards); in fact, in Europe, from the 16th to the 18th century, population

went from 60 to 140 million people. It was either the main factor of the next industrial

revolution, which subsequently prepared the current conditions. If today's duty of

communists is to see what are the present characters which are to anticipate next social

transition, this should also be done with regard to agriculture.

Capitals injections and increase in productivity

The land is a peculiar mean of production because its fertility changes from area to area

and opportunities of human intervention over it aren't unlimited. Even presuming that

the production technique is always the same, differences among soils in terms of quality

remain. If the value of industrial products is controlled by labour productivity, and a rise

of it is followed by a general reduction of prices, the opposite happens with food

production. Indeed, the worse cultivated land ever (the one really closed to justify an

abandonment) sets the price of the agricultural commodities, while there is an additional

gain for those producing in more advantageous conditions. The differential rent given by

more productive lands isn't a transitory phenomenon as the excess profit which, in

industry, is due to methods, equipment and innovations available to any capitalist; the

peculiarity of different lands makes the differential rent a stable element of capitalist

agriculture.

The increasing spread between industrial prices (which tend to lower), and agricultural

prices (which tend to rise), is due to this difference between rent and profit. While the

former are closely connected to the pressure coming from the development of the social

productive force, the latter tend to increase because of the limited available land

compared to the increase of all the other social parameters: population, production,

consumption, productivity and so on.

Historically even agricultural productivity has known several leaps forward: within one

century world population has increased fourfold, although on average it feeds better than

in the past on food coming from an agricultural surface which has poorly increased,

since farming new arable lands in recent developing countries goes hand in hand with a

loss due to urbanization and abandonment of barren soil in the old capitalist countries. In

Italy, for instance, 5.000 hectares (ca 12.500 acres) of agricultural land has been lost

from the end of the Second World War until today (2001), only because of urbanisation

and infrastructures; as if every year a city of about 100.000 inhabitants appeared

(Barrass reports an increase of the Italian population as big as the city of Turin every 4

years). Moreover there has been a loss of almost all the lowland rich soil. In UK from

1919 to 2000, urbanisation has extended over 1.667.000 hectares (ca 4.120.000 acres) of

agricultural soil (16% of the territory composed by England and Wales, excluding

Scotland) because of the lower building density in the cities.

The fertile soil is limited and this factor in agriculture is decisive to the race for technical

reorganization of the companies and for the expulsion of labour force. The available soil

is just the one formed within million years and its deficiency already forces men to

cultivate within greenhouses without soil, to breed within farms without pastures and

forage. Unlike industry where production has no theoretical limits. The rise of

productivity of modern agricultural company is due to the introduction of "improved"

species, of forced fertilizing and feeding cycles, of automatic devices and

pharmacological cycles, all within environments with controlled parameters, more and

more similar to industry.

All this has been realized through a very hard division of labour and gigantic capital

investments, so that the difference between the entire agricultural system and the

industrial one is less and less visible. Producing the raw material and semi finished

products within a wider production cycle, agriculture leaves to industry the monopoly of

their subsequent processing and at the same time it becomes itself part of the industry. It

acquires some much industrial features, including high specialization, that wide areas of

the planet are reserved to monoculture of wheat, corn, rice, coffee, cotton, soya, peanut,

cocoa, sugar cane, tea etc. This phenomenon is generated by capitals injection and needs

even more capitals in order to consolidate and develop into improved forms: a real

vicious circle.

The tendency to intensive monoculture breaks the traditional crop rotation and leaves to

the past the set-aside of the exploited land. Thus the biological re-cycling of soil is so

spoiled that the addition of natural and chemical fertilizers becomes essential, as well as

additional water and work by means of improved machines, hybrid seeds, now

genetically modified. So, the rise of foodstuff production is inevitably closely related to

an increased energy waste, which means more capital credit, higher costs, and also

selection among farmers. In the US, within thirty years, the output per hectare of corn

has tripled, but the costant capital necessary for its cultivation has increased fourfold;

this situation allows only the bigger agricultural holdings to obviate the fall of profit

margin through the bulk of production. In every ecological model, either natural or

artificial, greater food availability generates greater population. In 2006 world cereals

production will be 12% greater than today and will exceed 2 billion tonnes, but

population will increase as much and food demand even more, especially in the most

populated countries; because of this OCSE foreseen a price rise of 26% for the grain.

The massive utilization of chemistry has been devastating the natural fertility of soil,

even if in principle it was to supply to the soil the elements for a plant growth. A lack of

biological equilibrium has occured, an equilibrium which not only allows the soil to

keep fertile, but also to form along entire geological eras, or to regenerate after

disruptive natural events, such as run-off rain water or erosive action of wind.

Exhaustion of organic material mineralizes and makes the soil to be tough, compact, not

able to keep humidity; thus the vicious cycle is fueled and consequently the use of more

engines, more fertilizers, more modified seeds and more pesticides becomes necessary.

Concerning the agricultural product, the loss of nutritional facts and the rise of costs go

hand in hand. Fruits and vegetables are picked when still unripe to either anticipate the

action of some kinds of parasites, which tend to attack mature fruits, or to respond to the

requirements of complex markets which often need a long term storage. Most of the time

a favourable period in fluctuation of prices is purpously awaited. Quite often fruits and

vegetables, which are kept in cold storage, suddenly "ripen" during the transportation

and are bought just in time before decaying. The refrigerated pile of fruits and

vegetables, and the ensilage of cereals into terminals, equipped for parasites control,

increase the necessity for displacement, therefore sometimes transportation by itself has

an impact up to 60% on the final price.

Process of country side mechanisation causes a huge effect of constant capital over

agricultural products and over the ultimate capitalistic conquest of land: let's say that 100

was the average world time for men and available machines to make hay out of one

hectare of wheat at the end of the Nineteenth century, well, that index went down to 63

at the beginning of the Twentieth century and to 30 between the two wars. Comparison

between man and machine is even more striking than that: it took four or five days to a

farmer to pasture one hectare of land while a harvesting machine (with horses) could

make it in four hours. A modern combine harvester makes it even more glaring since it

adds, to velocity of motorized harvesting, the advantage of furnishing an already

threshed wheat and an already compacted straw; of course the costs of fixed capital rise

more than proportionately.

At the beginning of the XX century in the United States 25.000 tractors where already at

work; 246.000 in 1920, 1.6 million in 1940, 4.7 million in 1960 (meanwhile agricultural

holdings passed from a surface of 55 to 185 ha). In Italy, in twenty years from the

beginning of the 50s, tractors passed from 60.000 to 600.000 while people working in

agricultural field had halved. From 1960 the so-called green plans, five-years plans

foreseeing economical incentives and priority agreements to purchase agricultural

engines produced by FIAT, made the number of tractors to increase: nowadays it is

stable around 1.5 million. During the last 40 years agricultural production had an

increase of 250% while farmers passed from 20% to 6% of total employment. On the

other hand, because of the inheritance right, namely the property, the extreme

fragmentation of companies has not yet reduced, in fact only 4% of them exceeds 20 ha

and 6% is under 3 ha; the increased mechanisation has just turned into an excess of

constant capital per surface unit, and not into a resulting productivity. So the value of

advanced capital for fixed investments, except the real estate, has doubled during the

period in wich the machines increase was at its high, going from 12% in 1951 to 24% in

1971 but without allowing a profit recovering.

Capitalism is now facing a contradiction wich manifests itself at the same time with the

surplus of agricultural production of some developed countries, with the reduction of

agricultural profit, and with the rise of prices, the latter caused by the recovery through

the rent of what is lost in profit. Indeed, to sum up, the agricultural company summarizes

profit capital and property capital (the rent), which means the plus value coming from

other sectors of production.

Agriculture as a "non-saleable service"

Agriculture's unique characteristics, such as the development time of the harvest, the

change of seasons, the animals life cycle and the influence of the environment, all these

prevent the agricultural system from competing with the industrial sector in terms of

efficiency and performance; factors as the introduction of technology and the increase in

productivity, regardless of what happens in the industrial sector, and beyond certain

limits, are of no use in terms of raising the level of quality. Also for this reason,

worldwide capitals have been focused on financing the investments in bio-technologies

that, by "adjusting" natural factors being under the environment influence, would allow

to simulate some of the industrial cycle's characteristics.

If there is a limit to consumption on the industrial aspect, it is even narrower regarding

agriculture: there's a limit in how much food and drink a man can swallow, and many

industrial materials coming from the ground, such as wood, wool, and other fibers for

textile industry, are now replaced by metal and plastic materials. The problem that is

nowadays plaguing the farm in developed countries is no longer low productivity, as it

was in the past, but its chronic relative overproduction. Notwithstanding, these countries

cannot rely on the laws of the world market and cannot simply import food in exchange

for industrial products: in the case of food for domestic population this does not just

occurs as an economic issue, but as a non negligible political-economic matter.

This situation forces nations to adopt more and more targeted intervention policies. From

1964, for instance, in the European Common Market the fruit-and-vegetable sector is

regulated by withdrawing the surplus of fruits and of some vegetables, whereas a system

of direct support of farmers' income is introduced for wheat and olive oil sectors.

Meanwhile in the US a similar process is activated with opened protectionist aspects and

a wise use of a strategic grain monopoly. Thus a mixed mechanism is build in the central

nerves of world's agriculture system, consisting in the destruction of some products,

incentives to the production of some others and, above all, a total closure to protect the

national food systems in imperialist countries; this mechanism has been such rapidly

generalized that it has become a global vital feature.

In 1987 the amount of cereal, milk and meat stored by the European Community reached

24,000 billions Lit. (Italian lira): to have a term of comparison, it was equal to the 60%

of the added value of the whole italian agriculture in the same year. These products were

withdrawn from the market to be further destroyed or disposed of in areas without

influence on the formation of international prices, while producers were compensated

with a "guaranteed minimum price". Obviously, disposal of Western surplus is directed

toward poor countries, while a real protectionism is applied with regards to their

products.

Thus at this stage, it is quite clear how the terms of value in modern agriculture are

somewhat altered. If we express the value of an agricultural product with the addition of

its classical components, namely constant capital, variable capital, profit, interest, and

rent, we immediately realize that the entry "profit" is insignificant compared to the rest.

The entry "surplus value + salary" (added value) in agriculture has been historically

declined because of a massive desertion by part of the labour-force. A disertion which

has absolutely no equivalent in industry where, on the contrary, the number of

proletarians has constantly increased, eventhough these increments have decreased over

time. Conversely, all the other entries have gained importance. First of all, as we have

seen, the constant capital (the capital anticipated for machinery, equipment, fuel, energy,

seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, animal fattening, feed, etc.). But also the interest and the

rent: the former being already responsible for the ruin of the indebted peasantry from the

time of ancient Rome; the latter being responsible for the diversion of surplus value

towards the farmer - based on his monopoly over the land - to compensate his loss of

profit.

So here's the rent becoming the keystone of the transformation of the whole worldwide

agriculture which - this is now a historical fact - is no longer a productive sector by

itself, however dysfunctional, but a service provided for the survival of the Capital.

Since humanity, committed to capitalist production - including the increasing mass of

relative surplus world population that doesn't produce anything at all- must still be fed,

and since most powerful countries cannot give up on their "food sovereignty" for

strategic reasons, the whole Society keeps alive the employees attached to food" as it

keeps alive firemen, Red Cross nurses, teachers, policemen, soldiers.

Kept peasantry

The budget of a modern state reveals the irreplaceable function of sharing the surplus

value within society aiming to pegging the "compulsory course" of agricolture in this

phase of high capitalistic development. The more the specific gravity of agriculture

becomes insignificant on the whole of real economy(production of value), the more the

States direct subsidies toward it. In fact, although the growth rate of fundings is much

higher than the increase of farming development; agriculture will never be left to

investment coming from a single capital and never to the market. Above all we should

keep in mind that the value of agricultural products is part of the salary value, therefore

their relinquishment to the free market system would bring a sprawling and traumatic

rebalancing between surplus value and variable capital. This is why a regulating state

intervention is also so essential.

The huge transfer of surplus value towards the service apparatus of Capital, within

modern society, specifically towards agriculture, can be proved with few data taken from

the official annual reports. In Italy, as for to the whole mass of value produced ex

novo in one year (around 2 million of billion Lit.), agriculture contributes with around

50.000 billion Lit., wich means only the 2,5%; in the United States and Japan agriculture

produces 2% of the total value; in France the 3,3%; in Germany the 1,2%; in UK the

1,7%. However, considering the fact that they do not participate to the production of new

value, the above services absorb around 250.000 billion Lit., equal to 12,5% of the

overall value. As we can see, farming is not only the smallest part of the economy, it is

also quite inexpensive since it's considered as a sort of "national food service": it

represents the 16.6% of the non-saleable services. Actually, the difference between the

value of food for the whole population and the maintenance of police and schoolteachers

is more exiguous: considering the value added by industrial food transformation, Italy

spends about 200.000 billion Lit. for food and beverage. Moreover, 50.000 billion Lit.

do not only correspond to food, but to the whole agricultural product: timber, tobacco,

flowers, farm holidays, etc.

The gross amount of farming production is a partial data. During the 1989/1991 period,

according to a report of the Italian National Institute of Agrarian Economy, agricolture

received about 17.000 billion Lit. in state support. Moreover, extra 13.500 billion Lit.

were paid indirectly by consumers through the system of reference prices established to

State discretion on some key products; in addition, other 8.120 billion have been directed

toward agriculture through tax and social security relief; in the end, up to 38.500 billion

Lit. is gone to the peasant class, equalling 88% of the total value produced during years

1989 to 1991: as if each of the 2,5 million Italian "official" peasants had put in his

pocket a 1,25 million Lit.monthly cheque .

It is not a matter of periodic oscillations within a country but an irreversible process; in

fact, in 1999 on average each of the 9 million European farmers received subsidies

equalling 38 million Lit. per year, which were obviously added to their "normal" income.

This has represented a real transfer of income from all the other classes to the peasantry:

each family of the European Union "paid" 2,75 million Lit. in food extra charge,

together with taxes for other types of services. The 65% of it was a direct payment

through State, and the 35% was indirect payment through prices manipulation. Other

capitalist countries were no less so: the average received by each farm owner of the non-

EU OECD was 25.5 million Lit., with a high peak of 75 million in Norway and

Switzerland, followed by Japan with 59, by the United States with 46, by Canada with

21, and by New Zealand with 2.

A special case is represented by Germany which receives less than what it pays

("German industry feeds the French agriculture," says the Economist). The total amount

of subsidies for the German peasants is not much(11.500 billion Lit.), but in Germany

there are in total only 429.000 farms of which less than a half operates full time. So

185.000 companies being within the parameters of the EU share the total, each of them

pocketing 62 million, a sum per capita which is much higher than the average.

Regarding Italy, data show us some discrepancies: officially farmers should be 2,5

million, however the European statistical office (Eurostat) declares they are the 7% of

the employed persons; given that these are 23 million, then "real" farmers should be 1.6

million and the state support per capita should increase accordingly, thus their

contribution to GDP and their income. But maybe a million ghost farmers represents a

side of the Italic cunning. Since the generic global income is the sum of wages and

surplus value, it is clear that the transfer occurs by penalising these two items

representing the entire value produced within the society by proletariat. This means that

in Italy a million of idlers "peasants" beneficiaries are to be added to relative

overpopulation.

The future accession to the European Union of some countries rather backward in

agriculture, such as Poland, Romania, Turkey, in wich a considerable portion of the

population is still tied to land, will necessarily push towards a further increase in

subsidies (and speculations).

Obviously the inverse relationship between the decrease of the value in agricultural

production and the increase of state subsidies has a limit beyond which the transfer of

value in this sphere of production cannot go, because you don't want to extract to infinity

more and more surplus value from fewer and fewer workers. A historical social decay

situation arises again, which Marx already compared with the late Roman Empire:

keeping too many people instead of exploiting them always gets a class society into

trouble. The surplus value extracted from the modern proletariat allows the survival of

capitalism indeed, wich, by means of state distribution, finds a precarious equilibrium

between chaotic and violent thrusts: the whole unproductive part of society is

maintained, composed by real capitalists who survived the mutual expropriation, the half

classes, the imposing mass of the home-ministerial and military lackeys, and finally to

the equally impressive body of lumpenproletariat. Notwithstanding this perverse

mechanism is very dangerous for bourgeois society. While on one side it represents a

social safety network, on the other it produces an average between the very high

productivity of industry and the dissipation of social energy around: the result of it is an

overall disastrous output.

The final submission of land to Capital

During the postwar years, despite the rise in agricultural prices and the decrease of the

industrial ones, and despite the early state interventions, almost everywhere in Europe

general access to credit was still denied to the peasants, therefore the related necessary

modernization. It was a vicious circle, because the fragmentation of the property

generated too small farm that could not grow because of the inability to accumulate

capital and to guarantee the debts. On the other hand, subsidies alone were intended to

keep a situation, that they'd have wanted to get rid of, on going: while development of

modernized farms tended to provoke a fierce competition against those which, despite

the rising prices, could not get out of their condition. At this point the exodus from the

countryside was inevitable, mmeaning the abandonment of the land in search of best

sources of income in the city. Good lowlands, although not sold due to low prices, were

however rented out or cultivated personally by former farmers, now workers, but with a

totally marginal production. Given the increasing productivity of the best lands, many

lands of mountain, hills and arid areas were abandoned because of their low yield or

because of their inaccessibility.

The task of regulating the exodus from the countryside and the formation of more

efficient farms, through interventions on prices, was entrusted to the European

Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF), an oganization created in July 1964 in Brussels.

However the guidelines of the new agricultural capitalist model failed to materialize in

any country into a genuine agrarian reform touching the property; it only ended up

sanctioning the general adoption of 1) a limit, the "intervention price" , below which the

State guaranteed the withdrawal of the product at a given price from the market; 2) an

additional income supporting farmers incomes; 3) a "threshold price" which placed a

duty on product imported from non-EU countries in case they were too competitive.

In a short amount of time, the incorporation in all countries of a policy of artificial

control over domestic prices, including driven subsidies and trade barriers, led to the

formation of a price differential between domestic and world market, often used for

interstate competition reasons. It’s not a coincidence, though, that the area of greatest

conflicts in international economic relations is precisely agriculture. From the '60s

onwards, agriculture has always been a separate topic in the treaties of the WTO

(formerly GATT), being the object of particular negotiations and constant contrasts.

These contrasts being particularly harsh between the U.S. and the European Union

regarding the assessments regarding subsidies use, complemented by acrimonious

retaliation politics. But after all this is normal, since protectionism and trade wars are

part of interstate relations nature. Free trade never really existed, least of all in

agriculture; it was officially buried by the major capitalist countries, during the '60s,

forced to draw a real safety network around food sector, being it so crucial as to be part

of the national strategic plans, although it represents - as we pointed out - an

insignificant element from the standpoint of the general valorization of capital.

Food dependence of too many countries is becoming a global problem involving the

policy of alliances between States. Some of them, like Egypt and Korea, import almost

the wholeness of their foodstuffs, others, like Japan, are still heavily dependent on

foreign countries. Within underdeveloped world, certain outdated forms of agricultural

production stand next to the activities of big agricultural multinational companies, but it

would be wrong interpreting them as due to a delay of the local capitalist cycle. The

survival of large areas of poverty linked to a very poor agriculture is a direct

consequence of developed capitalism, in which sophisticated raw food materials, product

of agricultural science, now face too blatantly with those of the typical subsistence

agriculture. There is no way of either spontaneous local capitalist accumulation or

national land reform that can make an "emerging" country competitive with all the old

capitalist countries. Only China, which has a thousand-years--old agriculture based on

waters control, managed to free itself from dependence on food, while India, which has

to feed a human mass of the same order of magnitude, has a totally devastated

agriculture.

The process of submitting agriculture to capital has been slow and tortuous. At the

beginning of the 20th century the modern farm was still very little wide-spread across

Europe as a production model. The most important mechanical inventions in agriculture

had been applied for the first time in the United States from the second half of the 19th

century but were prevented to widespread because of their cost, apart from the all-steel

plow by John Deer. At the end of the century the McCormick reaper stood out, as well as

some gigantic steam threshers which needed 40 horses to be pulled. A real

mechanization of agriculture applied only later, especially in Europe. Until first Postwar,

there were a lot of causes for its limited diffusion: the need for massive private capitals,

that have however a preference for the industrial, banking and speculative investment;

the distance of the country from the industrial centers; the still underdeveloped road

system; the lack of fuel and electrical systems with their large distribution networks; the

lack of technical and scientific personnel. All items lacking at the time the agrarian

capitalism and that only the work of generations could have formed together with the

elimination of the problem related to the country fragmentation in many European areas.

It was industry, in most of the cases, that managed to impose its machines over the

country, even when were woefully unused. And the State, intervening on the industry’s

behalf, allowed access to capital by farmers, supplying it for free or even at negative

interest. When the industry reaches a high degree of development, agriculture also

necessarily follows and changes. Not only thanks to machines but also to the

introduction of industrial organizational forms. "Once the capitalist mode of production

is firmly established" - Engels says in the "Antidühring - "the degree to which it subdued

the conditions of production occurs in the transformation of capital into real estate. So

the capital anchor its place in the land itself. By now, the solid conditions provided by

nature to the land come from the industry alone". Urbanization, which was the cradle

and the factor of industry, now is its monstrous product, and makes its way into every

area of the globe.

Modern capitalism, once sattled in backward areas, cannot develop locally in the same

way as in the primitive accumulation, that is the expropriation of the peasants and their

transformation into workers, birth and development of manufactures, their conversion

into large-scale industry, etc.. The conditions that originally were at the base of capitalist

development occur today as a results of its own evolution. For example, farmers from

poor areas of the world have been dispossessed of land either because of the low prices

due to the agricultural policies of industrialized countries, or because of the

centralization process of local agricultural industry due to direct investments, not

because of a new "late" genesis of capitalism. In the global agriculture this reversal of

perspective is very clear: undeveloped peripheral countries are now engaged in advanced

forms of monoculture farming, no longer producing for domestic consumption but for

international export. As the very poor Bangladesh, which produces one third of the

world's jute; like Senegal, where subsistence agriculture was sacrificed for the sake of

peanut oil; such as Colombia, where the production of wheat has given way to carnations

for the U.S. market; such as Egypt, where the production of high-quality cotton for

export has supplanted food, almost all imported; as Vietnam, where traditional

agriculture is giving way to more profitable plantations of "robusta" quality coffee,

whereof it became the first producer in the world; such as Malaysia, which produces half

of the world's palm oil.

Monoculture allows the country committed to it to exchange between a product suitable

to be grown in certain conditions and the food that it replaces, but it exposes the same

country to international price fluctuations, completely outside of its control. The price of

the Vietnamese "robusta", for example, has plummeted in the last year from 1740 to 870

Lit. per kilogram provoking revolts of the peasants who, in some areas, now

economically depend for the 80% on that production.

Reversal in progress

A company can judge the market only on the basis of its own immediate interests; if it

discovers, as happened in Mexico, that it can earn twenty times more cultivating

tomatoes for Americans rather than corn for Mexicans, it will pursue its own interest and

to the detriment of the general one. While corn is scarce in Mexico, in the United States

it abounds as anywhere else in the world, and will be exported. After all, the production

and trade of dogs and cats food arouses more attention of the livelihood of millions of

people, for the simple fact that their demand comes from industrial countries and it is

solvent, while the demand of starving people of the Third World for any kind of food is

not solvent. For this reason the fishy waters of Peru, a country that traditionally likes fish

but consume only a little amount of it because of its price, provide a lot of raw material

for the meatballs for the adorable creatures of the gringos.

The specific capitalist production of commodities, seizing definetively the agrarian

sphere, subordinated the immediate personal consumption to the mass production and

sale of the land products, especially food. In the giant global supermarket there is

surplus of food, but only those who participate not only marginally in the formation of

capital are allowed to buy it in sufficient quantity and quality. The others, rolled in their

little family field, or dispossessed of their land without being able to become

proletarians, or driven to the vast slums of the new metropolis, can just be topic for

lectures on "world hunger".

There will never be a return to forms of economic liberalism in agriculture (as in all the

other sectors): the process is irreversible. Consider the failure of the Fair Act, the U.S.

Congress passed in 1995, with the aim to liberalize the domestic agricultural market: the

law sanctioned the complete freedom on agricultural production volume between 1996-

2002 and the result was catastrophic. Before the end of the experiment, the U.S.

Congress was repeatedly called to vote urgent assistance schemes. In 1999, U.S. farmers

received record subsidies, approximately 24 billion $ (compared to 12 billion in 1998 to

7.5 billion in 1997), about 20 milions Lit. for every fixed farmer, 46 milions for farm.

The dramatic rethinking of the American bourgeoisie, which goes hand in hand with the

numerous efforts to regulate the structural imbalances of agriculture, shows that it is no

longer possible to leave the agricultural production to the anarchy of market and that

capitalism, in this sector more than in others, would need to produce according to a

global plan. The capitalist within individual factory succeeds very well in the application

of a production plan, but capitalism is very unsuccessfull when applying it across the

international market, where private properties collide at the highest level of competition

and where national interests may block the development of common executive

structures. The spasmodic attempts of all the world organizations to achieve an overall

control of the economy are an implicit recognition of the social character of productive

forces at global scale, a true capitulation of this society to marxism.

State intervention over agriculture within each single country is already a general food

plan removed from the market. It has no economic purpose in the strict sense, it does not

fall within the Keynesian policies, namely the complex of measures to expand

consumption and investment with an anti-crisis function. For example, in the "Protocol

for production support" of July 1993 agriculture was not even mentioned. Significantly,

in Germany, after the wave of BSE ("mad cow disease") and foot-and-mouth disease, the

problem of agriculture has been addressed from the perspective of the whole

consumption system and not from an economic standpoint. The Economist 1 February

2001 points out: "...Ever adept at making a virtue of necessity, Chancellor Gerhard

Schröder has pounced on the crisis to announce a complete reshaping of Germany's

farm policies—and so to boost his image as a reformer. From now on, consumers'

interests, not farmers', he says, are to be put first...","...a revamped ministry responsible

for consumer protection, food and agriculture, in that order. Intensive farming is out;

environment-friendly and organic farming in. The yearly DM11 billion ($5 billion) of

subsidies dished out to Germany's farmers are to be redirected accordingly. The "howls

of protest" the chancellor predicts from the powerful farm lobby are, he says, to be

strictly ignored.".

Obviously it is not so easy to ignore the one who feeds the population, as a moustached

French peasant passing off as a revolutionary with dummies teaches, but bourgeoisie is

really plagued by the problem. Beyond the fact that consumers of goods only count as

such, while their health doesn’t matter at all, if reforming the agricultural policies of any

country according to the priorities listed by the German Chancellor would be possible,

this would precisely mean to sanction the denial of agriculture as a sphere of profit

production, to sanction its official changeover to non-salable services.

Therefore, we are in the presence of something far different from the Keynesian attempts

to support production; it's something structural, a more powerful and decisive push for

change. It doesn't matter if some individual agro-food industries, perhaps multinational,

accumulate huge profits; as a matter of fact the State, instrument of the global

anonymous Capital, cannot allow the feeding of society to be left in the hands of the

peasants, and worse than ever in the hands of the international monopolies thirsty for

rent. It would mean giving up the entire society to a specific class, albeit modern and

corporatized. It would be the end of the bourgeoisie itself as a class.

If it is true, and it is, that agriculture has lost worldwide its autonomy and is directly

controlled by the greatest imperialist states through massive transfers of surplus value,

then there is no longer a "peasant question" in the manner of the Third International, not

even in the countries where farmers still constitute most part of the population. The

structure of the food chain is completely subordinate to the State, industry, finance, and

from now on also to the monopoly of the industrial production of seeds (constant capital)

obtained through biotechnology. From the Marxist point of view the agrarian question,

which in 1917 in Russia, was rightly also the peasant question, can now be

approached especially through the parameters of the future society.

Today, in no country all over the world, a situation of dual revolution like the one

forcing Lenin to give a dual solution to the problem of the relations between classes

exist: "The proletariat must carry the democratic revolution to completion, allying to

itself the mass of the peasantry in order to crush the resistance of the autocracy by force

and to paralyze the instability of the bourgeoisie. The proletariat must accomplish the

socialist revolution, allying to itself the mass of semiproletarian elements in the

population so as to crush by force the bourgeoisie’s resistance and to paralyze the

instability of the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie" (from Two tactics).

Today nothing remains from the first part of that quotation: the bourgeois democratic

revolution is historically accomplished, the feudal autocracy no longer exists and the

bourgeoisie no longer oscillates helplessly between different modes of production but is

firmly in power. Either the second part no longer describes the present situation: the

bourgeoisie has already neutralized the importance of the peasantry. What remains is the

proletarian integral revolution, which, according to its immediate program, will not give

the land back to the peasants, instead the land will become a collective good, as Marx

has always made clear. The real problem of the backwardness of large areas, and the

economic oppression of the weak countries made by the strong ones led often to identify

the tasks of communist revolution with a vague "anti-imperialism" too, linked to the age-

old "national question". Again we have the very clear explanation of Lenin: the criterion

to identify bourgeois revolutionary conditions is not the economic dependence, but

rather the political one, which denies national freedom (A caricature of Marxism).

There are still many farmers, carriers of " old stigmata", real modern barbarians although

they are up to their necks inside civilization, forced to live together with the

expropriation forms, murderer of their uniqueness and often of their very existence. Only

in the "pure" revolutionary perspective, nevermore "double" - now we can finally say it

for sure - "even these barbarians could become, against this civilization, one of the

bullets of the revolution that will overflow it" (from Racial pressure of the peasantry,

pressure class of colored people).

TOMORROW

Redistribution of income or denial of the Capital?

From a general point of view agriculture will take its great historical revenge through

capitalism, rather it is already taking it. As soon as "virgin land" has been receiving

attention by the "faun Capital" - Mai la merce etc. / Never commodities will feed man -

and so has been fertilized with science and technology, the production "quantitativ-ism",

connected as it is to profit, clashes with the human requirement of eating decently. The

natural cycle itself, including man, has got rejecting reactions. A German chancellor will

never be able to revolutionising agriculture by law, neither will he be willing to clash

with the interests of the agro-industrial capital. The entire German economic system, not

only agriculture, leads him to these types of assertion. Thus in the rest of Europe, as in

America, as in any other ultra-developed countries. The entire system accentuates the

obvious fact that we die of capitalism. More and more watchwords of past revolutions

fall giving the way, ever clear and shabby, the fundamental question: do you really want

capitalism? This is it, it can't be something different. Though capitalism itself shows that

a new society is ready to go, a society which only needs to get free of this rotten

involucre.

As the increase of the productive social power is connected to the period in which

humanity was divided into classes, a bridge between primitive and developed

communism, similarly our species had to close the gap between food harvest and its

conscious production, according to a project which could allow man to be a harmonious

part of nature without plundering it. The bridge of development is no longer ahead, we

already got to the other side. The kingdom of necessity is far behind. Today the

productive social power is yet ready to jump into the kingdom of freedom; but still the

zombie-class in power has to be knocked down. Similarly we’ve gone down the bridge

to the agricultural development: humanity already has the potential solution to feeding,

we should just get rid of economy, which means getting rid of accounting following

value signs which tends to take into consideration the average value between those who

have nothing to eat and those who die obeses, full of cholesterol and slimming drugs.

Capitalism, doped and kept alive by the continuous social repartition of surplus value

and its agricultural modern politics, gives us an additional proof that the future society is

within reach. Indeed, we are within the same condition of some still communist ancient

societies - of course with the mediation of the property development and of the

productive social power - where agriculture provided food to the entire society by

allocating the product through centralized community structures. That condition is

nowadays upset since this value-based society has destroyed the first organic productive

forms - not yet forms of classes - where everybody's energy was for collectivity and

where, unlike today, you couldn’t even imagine that land could be possessed or

exchanged, not to mention property or commerce. Notwithstanding, if a mechanical

comparison is historically arbitrary, on the other hand it is quite appropriate to reckon

that modern society is going ahead toward to the destruction of specific forms of value,

the same which are essentials for its existence: for instance adopting common forms of

food distribution or forcing price at a world scale.

It is not about the return to ancient forms; however it is true that outcome of social work

is distributed as it was at that time, or even more. Agriculture certainly cannot be defined

as a "productive sector" if in its favour, within two areas (Europe and United States), a

bunch of value equal to the gross product of hundreds of minor countries is

systematically allocated by authority among classes.

This is not the only form of allocation ad hoc, besides the fixed ones of the current social

expenditure. The internal energetic assessment presented by the new American

administration foreseen an even larger expenditure. The whole economic operational

actions adopted for the adjustment of Italy to the parameters of Maastricht has shifted a

value equal to ten timesthe entire national agriculture production. The keynesian

degenerated phenomenon of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno (Funds for South) has

transferred during half a century huge amounts of value from the whole economy to

peculiar public and private interests, for sure avoiding the collapse of the South of Italy,

but also stopping its autonomous development. The great industry itself was eligible for

the enormous transfer of value which have stimulated its growth and at the same time

has polluted its capacity of international competition.

This asphyctic capitalism is now based – talk about liberalism - on authoritarian

intervention of the State over the use of social surplus value coming from productive

sectors. But if we look beyond that sort of relentless treatment, we can see a material

drive to the need of a general project for the spieces' life, a drive to a real outright

attempt to praxis overturning. Though capitalism transforms it in a rough and barbaric

conservation of its own existence. Inside this authoritarian intervention, agriculture has

already shown, in practice that, if there was no property, problems of nutrition could be

solved through very mild interventions compared to the complex set of economic

manoeuvres now on. But social forms cannot be re-formed, they have to be destroyed in

order to see the rise of totally new others.

The development of the social productive power finally got to questioning the modern

production of value in agriculture. However, at the same time, the persisting of property

magnifies the effects of land monopoly; the whole society is obliged to pay a bribe to the

peasantry, if it wants to feed itself. By doing this, the value courseis diverted and jumps

from set of productions toward agriculture. So the farm pockets other people value. It

would be rational to eliminate it, but within the social form based on property this is not

possible. "Land to peasants"? Forget it: land should be gotten out of their clutches for

ever.

So while the huge future production and distribution power directly affects the present,

bourgeois society retreats into defense using precisely this power. In fact if we consider

capitalism as a global system and not as a sum of the actions of single capitals (rightly

less and less significant) it is of no importance how we get to new value, the crucial

thing is its existence. With the final development of the "real submission of work to the

Capital", the director and the cleaning man of the same factory participate to the final

production even not being directly productive; as partial workers, they are part of an

ensemble that Marx defines as the "total worker" (VI chapter of the Capital,

unpublished, page 74). As this total worker is productive, so the system is, which allows

capitalism to survive, even though, within it, there are some particular sectors which are

mild productive such as agriculture, or some others which are not productive at all such

as public school, police, etc.

Energy balance of food production

Indeed the law of value can't be invalidated by all this: it is simply proved that it works

ever more in general and ever less in particular. This could be somehow useful for the

circulation of our work, as Marx and Engels wrote when some significant contradictions

came out. So, within this society as is, the law of value shows us the positive critic of the

capitalistic mode of production, or, in other words, it presents, well formed, the

prerequisites of the future society. Anyone who doesn't go weak in the head under the

influence of the bourgeois propaganda easily understands that, in general, production is

not scarce but abundant and that even the existing agriculture could solve any world

food problem by now. Therefore, what we're trying to do here doesn't consists in

repeating the powerful criticism over the capitalistic rent that marxism has already

claimed; we have the aim to resume its thread and to demonstrate that, even in this case,

in the immediate program of the next revolution there will be no need of resorting

"constructive" measures, and that we will only have to rationally use the historical result

and move forward.

The future society will no longer need to increase the agricultural production at the

furious average rate of 2% per year for sixty years, as the United States has done since

1940, for a total increase of 328%. Humanity will no longer need to produce, still on the

example of the USA, 13 quintals of grain per inhabitant of the world. It will distribute

the production avoiding the senseless exploitation of men and soil. Nor it will need to

demonstrate that agricultural productivity has portentously risen, with 1,750 quintals of

grain per year for each farmer, 75,000 chickens for each poultry breeder and 5,000 cattle

for each cattle breeder; it will take it easy, mainly preventing the rubbish part required

by the cycle of an exasperated productivity. It won't say that industrial agriculture has

got an extraordinary yield, a real bourgeois lie and swindle; it will work to really get that

efficiency through a science not corrupted by profit.

The future society will not extend the current beastly, sorry, civil, methods throughout

the Earth. It will bring food science to very different goals than the mere productivity.

Because productivity, it's even a sad commonplace, is dizzying for each company, but is

disastrous for the mass of men: 100 millions of people die every year from malnutrition,

340 millions are chronically sick for the same reason, 730 millions do not have enough

money to eat with the essential calories to sustain any kind of job.

The paradox is situated in the pretended high performance of modern agriculture, but a

different social organization may expose the lie. We call efficiency of a system the

difference between the energy input and the energy coming out, in another form, from

the same system. The efficiency, by a physical principle, is always less than 100%. A

common car has an apparent efficiency of about 28%. This means that if we put into the

tank energy for 100 units, we use 28, and we dissipate 72 units. A well designed and

constructed electric motor has an apparent efficiency up to 98%. But why do we say

"apparent"?

Considering the whole system, the car is produced with a series of operations ranging

from the excavation in a mine to the sales talk; it needs all the services when travelling

and even when standing still, made up of sales networks, fuel distributors, repair shops,

highways, garages, insurance companies, scrapyards, etc.. Therefore its real efficiency is

much probably around 2 or 3%, much less than 28%. An electric motor has a high

efficiency, but only if we start from the plug, avoiding to calculate the energy that it

contains. Electricity flows through cables that have a resistance and therefore dissipate

energy; almost everything is produced using fuels of different nature that set in motion

machines which, in turn, are subject to dissipation; it needs as well a logistics network

and various materials for its use, even though it's not comparable with the car needs;

hence after all also the real efficiency of our hypothetical electric motor comes down

quite a lot, let's say down to 20%.

The human machine, made of muscles, nerves and brain which have been improved

through million years of evolution, is awfully more efficient. With the calories of one

portion of well-seasoned spaghetti, a normal adult can do about 60 km by foot. If this

individual was a farmer and worked the land with hand tools, in a temperate climate

(considering also the modern raw materials), he would produce 10 calories of food,

dissipating only 1 calorie with his work. The average American farmer produces 6.000

calories, dissipating only 1, but his apparent thermal efficiency ends like the car's one. If

we calculate the total energy lost during the production of the 6000 calories, the balance

is completely negative. In order to produce 1 kg of corn, the farmer of the American

"Corn belt" (where the highest productivity of the world is) dissipates the equivalent

energy of 10 kg of corn.

I consume ten in order to produce one: what's the catch? The problem is to be found in

the differential between the calories contained in the raw materials for fertilizer industry,

fuel industry and so on, and the caloric content of corn (of course the confrontation is

made in terms of value, which means dollars/calories); the value of energy contained

into the industrial products is inferior than the value of energy contained into nutrients.

The balance must be made considering the plundered environment. In addition,

agriculture is a sphere of production with high dissipation of energy: in the United States

the 12% of total energy is dissipated by agriculture, which produces, as we said, only the

2% of Gross Domestic Product. A society based on a general plan of production of use

values couldn't ever dissipate, i.e. throw away, such an enormous amount of energy.

Energy is also wasted downstream of food processing. In fact the system of distribution,

storage and industrial processing also leads to enormous waste also of the product

already collected from the fields, and the yield falls further. Nevertheless, the agriculture

of a country like France produces a sufficient amount of calories for 250 million of

Chinese today (2,000 calories daily averages each).

Adding other developed countries to France and making the proportion with the current

parameters, what we find is that in a future society, neither involved with the law of

value, nor with the problem of a purely quantitative yield, 18 million farmers with

Western productivity level would be able to produce as 1 and a half billion of today

farmers do, and they would be able to provide decent food for the entire population on

earth while working one-tenth of the agricultural soil. Additionally, this would occur

using a very small amount of social energy, distributed across the whole world however

barely equivalent to what is nowaday taken away by society and given back to

agriculture as value. Obviously, a world plan for the optimization of agricultural

resources could easily be launched right now, if the capitalism was not standing in the

way.

We have talked about efficiency in relation to energy. Now, to show the full benefits of

the elimination of the property, we need to talk about it in other terms, on the basis of the

relationship between sowed and harvest that we will call yield per hectare of a certain

product. These two approaches are not comparable from the standpoint of the value, but

this second way of approaching this matter leads us directly to agriculture in the new

society. Let's remind that, from the capitalistic point of view, high yield and low

productivity can occur at the same time. It is a paradox solely due to the property which

distinguishes between best and worst lands. Within a "non-proprietary" society, where

precisely the property and therefore the law of rent are deleted, there would only be a

single global average yield and a single social productivity.

To some extent, by applying labor and capital, it is possible to obtain an equal yield

through soils with different natural fertility as well as differentiated yields on land

having equal fertility. But talking about productivity, it is clearly strongly influenced by

the boundaries of the company, therefore by the property. Suppose that a typical Italian

company of 10 hectares produces 400 tons of wheat with a full-time working farmer: the

necessary equipment and the same farmer could comfortably cultivate double amount of

soil getting a double productivity, but the limits of property doesn't allow it. Another

farmer having a plot with the 3/4 fertility of the first one but with a double-wide land

would have a productivity of 600 tons, which would mean one and a half more. Since it

is hard to force the profit over 40 quintals per hectare, then the surface becomes essential

to increase productivity. This example is applicable in general, especially for individual

properties and for companies of all sizes, but it also occur in connection with single

States. In the Netherlands, for example, from the sixteenth century the yield per hectare

is one of the world's highest for any crop suiting with that particular climate, but the

concentration of population and the scarcity of available land prevents productivity - the

only valid criterion from the capitalist point of view - rising above the reached limit.

Whether the small farmer and the small Country facing all this do not die is merely due

to their finding value through other sources.

The concentration of fixed capital per hectare is another index of productivity. Assuming

an equivalent rate of mechanization per farm within the various countries, in relation to

the land the utilization of equipments varies a lot: in the Netherlands each tractor is used

to cultivate 5 hectares, in Germany 5.8, in the United States 43, in Canada 67, in the old

USSR 110. Only the rate of mechanization regarding USSR could be considered

incomparable, but we are still in the same order of size of other countries.

In countries like the United States and Canada, where the amount of available land is not

a problem and also private property is also very extensive, a high productivity has been

establishing itself historically. For instance wheat productivity represents four times the

European average, although the yield is less than half compared to that obtained on

French, British and German lands: 21 quintals per hectare compared to an average of 43.

In Russia, where the average size of farms was of 4,200 hectares before the collapse of

USSR, the yield is very low; compared to when Ukraine was included and its black

lands raised the average up to 18 quintals per hectare, today, making the proportion with

the remaining surfaces, yield should be around 10 tons. The collective farms (Colcos)

had a higher yields than average but a very low productivity, being composed of a

plethora of slightly mechanized farmers. The state farms (Sovcos), although they were

supplied with the worst land with very low yield, especially in Siberia, offered a better

productivity because of the high mechanization and shortage of labor; they were also

better organized and managed to deliver directly to the surrounding towns and to avoid

the immense Russian waste due to transportation and storage.

No capitalistic reform will ever eliminate the contradiction between yield and

productivity. A high yield can be achieved only over the best lands and through a large

down-payment of capital, but across the globe good lands are a only small percentage of

the existing. High productivity can be obtained over not very fertile lands, which are the

most part, by extending the culture, introducing new hybrids, mechanizing to the

maximum allowed, etc.. However we know that high quantity also means high

productivity, which leads extensive cultivation to a fierce competition against - as well-

high yield lands, but having a smaller surface. A competition which is mainly due to the

falling rate of profit in smaller companies, where the organic composition of capital is

high in relation to the product and where, moreover, over-sized machinery, kept unused

for most of the year, bring down the use of fixed capital.

Only the "non-commodity" will be the harmonic result of the land

The extinction of the property, even only occurring over a significant part of the globe,

would eliminate the contradiction between soils of different nature and extent, and

would allow to use to the best their features according to the crops which humanity will

need. When also the value accounting will disappear, the balance between consumed and

produced energy will take back a balanced organic cycle. This does not mean going back

to the hoe and give up technology and science, anything but that. Science will allow us

to have a better understanding of how immense the vicious circle of waste we will have

broken was and what horizons we will be widen.

More than all other human activities, farming has a course tied to the renewal of soil, to

geology, environment, climate, all factors which are more powerful than any agro-

industrial capitalist, and of any State. We need to subdue human activities to those

factors in order to harmonize it with the ensemble. Long term and wide-ranging projects

can only be set rationally by starting from conditions of equilibrium involving very wide

areas, but this is rather impossible to realize if men have demarcated them with private

and national boundaries. The mercantile nature of major works do not take any of the

balances mentioned above into account, as some disastrous examples clearly prove: as

the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, the vast irrigation project that is drying up the Aral Sea,

as the desertification of fertile lands in the United States, the Amazonian forest

clearance, the erosion of loess terraces turned from pasture to tillage in China, etc.. If the

states had the authority to establish coordinated farm policies over national and private

interests, they should submit to totalitarian assessment all the landowners, which would

evidently correspond more to a violent expropriation than to a reform.

As soon as the farm commodity gets into the market, it behaves as all the other goods, it

expects the buyer. But it's a quite peculiar kind of commodity. Being a natural cycle

product, it cannot be done "just in time"; being a soft good, it is not storable for a very

long time; being so often tied to specific areas and climates, it must be transported for

long distances; having quite an interaction with the human physiology, it can not be fully

industrialized, canned, dried, reduced to its essential components and reassembled into

new organoleptic quality products, dead matter. So its value is very sensitive to the

losses occurring after production. That is why capitalism strives for perverting the nature

of food to the fullest possible extent, in order to make it treatable as any other

commodity. The future society won't have such a need, and it will see the triumph of

fresh vitamin, seasonal flavoured fruit, enhanced organoleptic, the triumph of the living

over the dead.

The current tendency to extend the presence of a certain kind of food throughout the

seasons sets in motion a series of mechanisms which, in their turn, are at the basis of

industries and services producing surplus value. Firstly transports and storage, but also

preservatives, pesticides, dryers, maturers, restorers of taste and aroma, chemicals,

additives, dyes, packaging, advertising. A whole post-harvest industry that by far

produces more than agriculture. The future society will improve the energy balance also

by eliminating, in every field, that monstrous system of research regarding post-

production valorisation.

For the capitalist society, instead, the deployment of post-production energy is

increasingly necessary, leading to paradoxes that moralists love to remind: such as

containers of food for 275 million of Americans, whose industry has a turnover several

times higher than what a billion of Indians spend to eat. But the Capital can only keep its

cycle of accumulation by going through the multiplication of opportunities for

commodification. If American agriculture is the striking example, it's because the

industry got the possession of it, turning it into a mere support for its diversified

activities. the Boeing, which manufactures aircrafts, missiles, satellites, deals with

potatoes as well, but it doesn't have any sort of profit from the tuber itself, rather it gets it

since it is a usable product for the industry that fries them, wrap them in cellophane,

advertises and distributes them into supermarkets, movie theaters and stadiums, together

with gadgets and whatever serves to improve the whole. So does the ITT,

telecommunications giant, which invests on ham, the basis for nearly all the American

industrial fast foods; so the Getty oil does with salted peanuts. The American industry,

followed by industry of the rest of the world, has jumped on food but it was not about a

rural vocation or about its intrinsic value which is rather low, it is due to what is around

food, starting from its glowing packages up to the television. It therefore came to almost

the total control - to the origin - of the American production of cereals and soybean, of

51% of vegetables, 85% of citrus, 97% of poultry meat, of 40% of eggs.

All this will be swept away as soon as the profit will no longer be the driving parameter

of every human productive activity. The natural cycle will be finally respected - not

through a moral approach - but with the aim to harmonizing it with the human

metabolism which couldn't evolve so much in the last half century as to break away from

natural rhythms, since it comes out from over millions of years of adaptation.

Furthermore the eating tasteless and poisoned strawberries in winter for a pure

consumerist fancy is not an axiom. The eventual decision of the new society of

diversifying the diet despite the seasons will be taken either for utility or pleasure, not at

all for profit. So it will not shift strawberries by plane, it will not produce the scent that

cannot have, it will not drop on it pesticides and preservatives, it won't wrap in

packagings absorbing social energy for twice the content, it won't advertise them with

idiots messages and ultimately it will prevent from getting sick and from consuming

drugs as well canned, advertised, etc.. etc.. Only a foolish humanity may want to eat a

strawberry which contains - considering equivalent energy - a quantity of oil which is

thousand times superior to its nutritional qualities.

The commodifying apparatus which stratifies around each useful product, as the farming

one, will break up as soon as the mechanism of the valorization of capital will be off. Air

transport of strawberries will be banned because it is nonsense, not for costs saving or

for a going back to a basic life. Transport by rail and water will be preferred to air and

road ones, not for a sort of ecologist saving reasoning, but because the whole system will

tend to put itself in harmony with nature. So any increase of yields in energy balance

will be a natural result in the replacement of man with nature, and not a budget item

business.

In Bebel's book Woman and Socialism there is an enthusiastic and a bit naive description

of a greenhouse vineyard, with all its mechanisms to obtain the optimal microclimate

and produce wine even in the unfavorable climate of Silesia. It's about 500 square meters

of land covered by a glass structure, an insignificant experiment compared to the

computerized systems of greenhouses today, but luckily, as "a vineyard of the future", it

is only a small utopia. There is no need for artificial vines; nowadays bourgeois science

produces good wine in a very broad climatic zone and, where this is not enough, it

provides transportation of excellent wines. But precisely the wine production provides

an opportunity to highlight contradictions of capitalism and the ease with which the

future society will solve the problems it has generated through its own techniques.

Today the vine, after the spread ofperonospora and other diseases, requires massive

treatment and assiduous care, within a production process requiring a significant outlay

of capital. But the vicious circle, which in the country generally imposes the hellish

growth of treatments, can be stuck with technology. Because the cycle of certain

diseases is mainly related to moisture, insulation and temperature, a network of sensors

would be sufficient, that send data from a given production zone to a center which

processes them determining a minimal cycle of treatment. Such systems are already used

in cooperative environments and can be improved by far. So there will be no need to

have recourse to regular spraying of poisons, or worse, or following the discretion of the

farmer. On the other hand, also an improved system will be a temporary solution, to be

adopted while an investigation is achieved to reach a pre-peronospera like viticulture;

meanwhile we won’t have saved up that much, but we will have avoided an excess of

poison into the environment and into stomach.

In other types of culture, matching chemistry and biology through the intaking in the

territory of insects being enemies of parasites or of parasites turned sterile, may be a

transitional solution. Greenhouse growing, that is now the worst possible thing from an

organic point of view, can be rehabilitated with the cultivation of a greater number of

products by a non-capitalist use of technologies. Going back to strawberries, for

example, it may be that humanity decides to afford their consumption during the winter,

using only a small part of the immense amount of energy saved elsewhere. Today it is

already technically possible to grow them in large environments where natural

conditions are almost perfectly reproduced, without the need of have recourse to the

perversion of the biological-chemical cycle of current greenhouse cultivation. The

greenhouse has ancient origins and is nowadays mainly used for flowers and high added

value firstlings; but some great botanical gardens, made under huge geodesic domes,

demonstrate how it would be possible to use greenhouses to grow food instead of

attracting paying tourists. Wether it will be useful and necessary, given that all

agriculture will have to be recovered in an organic cycle and redesigned according to

various environments.

The agricultural cycle as an intermediary between Man and Nature

"Planning" is a verb this society turned into an ambiguous meaning. In some respects it

indicates the positive overturn of the praxis, the conscious intervention of man upon the

spontaneous disorder of the universe; in others, it evokes the mess of the bourgeois

society, its manipulation averse to any kind of organicism. But man is able to plan an

organic fusion with the environment, since there is no way its future will be a return to

the "lost paradise" of the Australopithecus, who day by day risked to be torn to pieces by

leopards, while eating berries and grubs. The agrarian cycle is the complete cycle of

transformation of energy coming from the sun which, through its work on the matter,

produces a series of effects not affecting man’s food alone - the only element considered

by the narrow anthropocentric point of view - but also the whole the biosphere Man is

dipped into. Oil we nowadays recklessly burn, is in fact just the result of the sun action

along the past eras.

New agriculture will be the link between man and nature, or, rather, it will be the new

fusion of man with nature he’s part of. But, in order to get there, the stage we are passing

through is necessary since, through the Capital, it enabled land, industry and science to

connect one another. In the quoted text, Bebel remembers, along with Marx, how their

age has marked the passage from empirically made agriculture to cultivation and

nutrition science. He returned to the work of Justus von Leibig who, as many other

contemporary scientists, had been one of those human instruments that productive

revolution was...producing. Leibig was the first to work on the assumption that

agricultural and food sciences are inseparable: plants are fed, as well as animals that eat

them, and man who eats both of them. He started from what he considered to be the

fundamental law of plants step up: 1) each plant owes its life to the chemical life of soil

and to the action of sun; 2) it regulates its growth upon the fewest element among those

necessary; 3) it is important to return to soil chemical elements which were withdrawn.

Under capitalism this law is used as we know, particularly in petrochemical industry, but

despite this could be seen as an almost arbitrary simplification in relation with the

complexity of the process proceeding from Sun, as a general scheme it can also stand at

the basis of an organic agriculture. Today we have further knowledge from Newton,

Darwin, Marx, Einstein and the whole bunch of scientists, real giants of the revolution

on whose shoulders the "dwarf science" is today climbing.

Bebel knows that capitalism lays the foundation for a new society which will have

nothing else to do than take the reached the reached results to overturn them to its

advantage: "The new society finds for itself a resource in the scientific agrarian field, a

terrain which theoretically and practically better prepared than others in its activity, a

terrain on which it has only to start organizing in order to obtain better results than

those acquired until today". It’s of no importance if Liebig thought life on Earth could

be generated from other galaxies through "eternal" combination of carbon (this is why

he’s been maybe too hastily criticized by Engels, since there’s an actual persistence of

carbon organic compound on the comets); indeed he used to agree with the materialistic

conception of life as being the matter’s property, "a source principle operating within

and through physical forces" . Today, we know that, beyond a threshold of complexity

of particles and energy, matter produces self-organization, precisely from a "source

principle", and is then able to keep and replicate this information.

That's the way the whole nature "works". Being a superior level of the whole matter’s

information, also the social fact follows the same source principle: man picks

information from the environment and from the past producing new knowledge.

Although today he grossly adopts Liebig’s law, disastrously operating on the chemism of

soil and environment, he prepares a fundamental information for further utilization at a

higher and more organic level.

Liebig, who’s known by the majority as the inventor of the meat extract and of the very

coveted figurines issued from chromolithography which were offered with it, was

studied by Marx and Engels because of other results. He was one of those scientists who

directed their activity towards different fields embracing them within a universal vision.

In his works he removed barriers generated by man between chemistry of the matter and

chemistry of life, focusing on agrarian chemistry, physiological and pathological

chemistry. He described the process we nowadays call photosynthesis, understanding

that the organic balance required by soil and plant is part of a widely more complex

system than his schema, since it includes animals, men, bacteria, the whole environment.

He was also a passionate man, such a gorgeous professor who attracted students from all

over the world; he was the founder of an international school.

The agrarian revolution, as the industrial one, was standing out through scientific

universal premises, yet useful for a human species potentially emancipated from the

need; however from the very start capitalism distilled just that part that was useful to the

valorisation of the Capital and lead to extreme consequences the results of scientific

research reaching the free use of chemistry, premise for the mineralization of soil. Liebig

was himself involved in the explosion of the agrarian revolution, when the Uruguayan

manufacture, producing animal wheats upon his license, very soon (1865) introduced

them in fertilizers but also in fattening feeds. This was, despite Liebig’s awareness, the

consequence of his studies on the efficiency of animals nutrition and its consequent

capitalistic use. Ten years earlier, he warned against the overlooking of the organic

chemism of nature: "Unfortunately the true beauty of agriculture with its intellectual and

animating principles is almost unrecognized. The art of agriculture will be lost when

ignorant, unscientific and short sighted teachers persuade the farmer to put all his hopes

in universal remedies, which don't exist in nature. Following their advice, bedazzled by

an ephemeral success, the farmer will forget the soil and lose sight of his inherent values

and their influence"(1855). Later on, when he had yet elaborated the relationship

between plants growth and soil chemistry, he admitted his law stood as a mechanical

simplification when compared to the huge job God had entrusted to nature, and he

became ironic about man's pretension to replace him. He asserted that, together with the

photosynthesis and the mineral ions melted in water and absorbed by roots, there were

other material processes which weren’t to be mimicked; they were indeed to be seconded

since they required time for the generating and the regenerating of humus.

Today the bourgeois too admit with much less scruples that the agrarian capitalist cycle

is perverse and will have to be stopped. This will happen anyway: it's only about

watching that either happening by means of an environmental and social disasters within

the capitalist society, or within a conscious transformation plan inside a classless and

moneyless society. The main contradiction is precisely highlighted by Liebig’s law: it is

necessary to return to earth what is taken from it; or, which is actually the same, it is

only allowed to take from earth what it has been given to it. The enormous production

requires energy, but, as we saw, reconstitution of soil requires the intense activity of

bacteria, mildews, yeasts, enzymes, all factors which don’t produce humus by being paid

for their output at the assembly line. Time is required,and, as we know, time means

money in this society. Without the time factor registering the many passages, there is no

energy balance, there is only accountancy balance in pure market value. Nature is cast

aside for the sake of the manufacture, food ismanufactured, earth is consumed,

environment is corrupted, and the fattening Capital doesn’t care at all about the

descendants, they'll do it with it.

Figura 1

The future society will be focused into energy balance related to the production of

various agricultural products, it will not care about business balance. As we saw, this is

possibly obtained by finding the ratio between contained and dissipated energy used in

production. It is now clear that if man eats an animal which eats vegetables within a

cycle dissipating energy in all ways, that it is not a brilliant operation (see figure 1). In

the United States 70% of the whole cereals production is given to livestock, so direct

consumption of vegetables would be more rational. Despite problems raised by

ecologists and animalists about "alternative" modes of nutrition, it is certainly true that

the capitalist agrarian economy tends to relate to high energy dissipation industries. The

main reason is that in those sectors, as in others, what really counts is the final result of

economic cycle which closes off the counting of added-value; in fact it is quite obvious

even for the offsprings of political economy that the "how you get it" is of no importance

for GDP growth; it rises even more if the system heads towards maximum disorder and

waste indeed.

The future society will solve the problem of the energy balance, certainly not by going

back to past forms of production. Also time factor, which means value for capitalism,

will find its solution. Cycles of crop rotation and of earth resting, which have been

essential for millenniums, can be partly replaced by accelerating the biological formation

of humus. Man is today quite able to manage time factor and as well to know that it has

something to do with other parameters. We don’t consider here relativity physics theory

but just modest practical factors: when we say that it does or doesn’t take long to plow a

field, we must specify what we mean by "long" or "not long" time, because there’s a

difference between ox time and farm tractor time. For instance, we shouldn’t be

surprised when reading that Marx considered US uninhabited areas as having a greater

relative population density than the crowded India. This is due to the fact that from an

economic point of view communication system shortens social time. Everyone knows

that we today live in a "global village" which has a greater density than statistics

assertions tell, because communication system has reached a level of complexity and

velocity which was unimaginable before. Similarly, biological time of soil regeneration

wouldn’t be a problem once historically separated from the profit and finally managed

and accelerated by humanity. Though are we sure humanity still should step that way? It

is actually not necessary to reach the future society in order to see an acceleration of

time within the soil regeneration matter; this problem is already technically solved

within this society, but solution is not spread as it should be and is yet roughly applied.

Today what we return to earth, after having taken live matter, is only a pale minerals

surrogates. Though it is not mandatory and shouldn’t always be so. Various techniques

of composting at a large scale for the production of natural fertilizers are already being

tested with excellent results. The use of worms colonies for humus production is quite

common in lots of farms. One japanese manufacture has sold around 5.000 installations

alone which were adopted by single farms for quickly composting through auto-

fermentation. More complex and centralized industrial biological processes, based on

bacteria, are able to metabolize mixed garbage to produce fertilizers and methane. All

these processes are based on the separation between cultivation and production of the

elements involved in the process of fertility reintegration, so they hugely accelerate

natural process by reproducing it within man predisposed conditions. In parallel with

cultivation work and in a short amount of time, industrial composting plants can digest

leaves, trimming, agricultural leftovers, sawdust, organic trash, animals dejections,

slaughterhouse blood, etc.

Other more artificial composting processes could be put together with those natural and

"assisted". In France during the 50s a proteinic compound generated by the spontaneous

multiplication of bacteria was discovered inside some kerosene bins left under the rain.

The first industrial plant built up to "cultivate" the leftovers of crude oil through

microorganisms processing was built in Scotland in 1971 by the British Petroleum; at the

beginning they could extract from it 4.000 tons a year of biomass, a highly concentrated

protein compound which was used to integrate feedingstuffs. Since then, a lot of new

protein manufactures have started up in the world. There’s a plant of 20.000 tons

production close to Marseille, another one of 100.000 tons is located in Sarroch,

Sardinia. Wide experiments have been made with the production of biomass through the

cultivation of vegetable cells within artificial environment, especially with seaweeds.

Both examples, the series of natural accelerated processes and the protein manufacture,

can be unified if humanity set them as being useful. Only profit matters make artificial

protein compound to go directly into feedingstuffs; some believe they are even used for

human food. If we leave aside profit, huge amounts of biomass can be made from lots of

manufacturing leftovers which can then be "digested" by bacterial compounds or by

superior organisms as worms. Released in the soil biomass they can then be metabolized

by that big chemical natural digestore, the humus.

The future society will get rid of another negative element of the failing energy balance

of the capitalist agriculture, maybe the most important: free waste of a huge quantity of

organic substances today thrown away into sewage. The absurd replacement of the

natural chemistry and of the general biological cycle with the chemical industrial

intervention is relentlessly heading towards failure (figure 2). Without regeneration of

the soil, earth is kind of drugged by chemistry, since it requires increasingly massive

doses with more and more scarce effects.

In his book Bebel particularly insists on this topic, and today main acknowledgment

perfectly integrates his comments. After having noted that earth needs to feed itself with

organic substances, exactly as animals and men do, he notices that most of the produced

food goes in the cities, and that cities don’t allow a return of the organic matters to the

earth. Very different was the condition, at his time, in the millennium chinese cities.

Quoting Bebel who quotes Leibig: "Every coolie (in China) who carries his produce to

market in the morning, brings home two buckets full of manure ... Every substance

derived from plants or animals is carefully collected and used as manure by the

Chinese...The expense [referring to a german farmer] for this importation is slight, the

outlay secure; a savings bank is not securer, and no investment brings in a higher rate of

interest...The returns of his fields will be doubled in ten years: he will produce more

corn, more meat and more cheese without expending more time or labor, and he will not

be driven by constant anxiety to seek for new and unknown means, which do not exist, to

make his ground fertile in another manner...Old bones, soot, ashes, whether washed out

or not, and blood of animals and refuse of all kinds ought to be collected in storehouses,

and prepared for distribution...The administrative and police officials in the cities

should see to it that by an appropriate arrangement of drains and cess-pools this waste

of material is avoided" (J. Von Liebig, "Chemical letters", 1865). "New and unknown

remedies that don’t exist" [unverified translation], it would sound weird if this was said

by the inventor of chemical soil improver and by the effective spreader of socialism if

we didn’t know that the scientist and the marxist were aware about the necessity of

improving earth, against the actual deadly depredating, always and everywhere.

Figura 2

Bebel mentions 48.8 kg of solid dejection and 438 of liquid dejection per year per each

german adult with a total of 486.6 kg. Today average evacuation per westerner is a little

higher, 54 and 470, total 524 kg; obviously high productivity of modern viscera are the

result of either a higher quantity of swallowed food, including beverage, and a scarce

assimilation due to a minor output of working energy, which also means less

perspiration. Since infants are part of that statistics and since we just need an indication,

we can take for grant Bebel’s data. Breeding animals produce metabolic refuses too and

we have an interesting data for United States where breeding industry produces 130

times the slurry produced by men.

Reckoning, we get 275 millions of americans producing 133.8 millions of tons of

organic slurry which, multiplied by 130 in order to includes breeding animals, gives 17.5

billions of tons. Now, we can read on manual that in a biological agro-industry integral

collection of human and barn slurry is equal to 0.6% of the nitrogen weight, to the 0.4%

of phosphorus and to the 0,3% of potassium. Then for each ton of organic slurry we have

6 kg of nitrogen, 4 kg of phosphorus and 3 kg of potassium. In short: in a country like

United States organic slurry per year, the most of which is thrown away, have 105

millions of tons of nitrogen, 70 millions of phosphorus, 52,5 millions of potassium,

which takes us to a total amount of 227,5 millions of tons. Although we didn’t consider

other organic refuses for this calculation as well as the potential kickback of other type

of refuses and materials, as the already mentioned ones, comparison with the chemical

industrial cycle is shocking: in 1196 US produced 32 millions of tons of fertilizers, of

which 19 millions were nitrogenous. World production of fertilizers is 150 millions of

tons, of which 90 are nitrogenous. Taken alone, the dejections wasted by americans

could be enough to fertilize all the cultivated lands together for a year and a half.

Extinction of the peasant

Of course our calculations are totally approximate. The future society won’t dream of

eating in the way we do today, moreover it will not rear in such a broad area as the

United States the 430 million of poultries and 220 million of cattles, sheeps, goats and

horses which are now raised by the Americans (1996). It won’t therefore need the huge

amounts of fertilizers which are to grow crops as food for food animals. Above all it will

give another meaning to the concept of time and will avoid like the plague the current

frenzy of production, due to the cycle of replenishing the Capital in its accumulation. All

the existing capital is past work, dead work. It is good reason for the cycle of

consumption and obsolescence of fixed assets to be called amortization, from the Italian

"ammortare" that means "to kill". In the future society, as mentioned in one of our texts,

the regeneration of production factors should rather be called revitalization (from italian

"vitalizzare", "to give life" in english) , in harmony with the new way of being of the

social production and reproduction.

In general, the indiscriminate use of industry products, chemical and mechanical,

saturating large areas with buildings of all types, not only involves a pervert energy

balance, not only the environmental disruption and the consequent disappearance of a

living organic entirety, but also the regression of ecological equilibria, typical of systems

consolidated through the millenniums and based on a complexity which is sufficient to

the self-organization of answers to destabilizing events. These systems, like the virgin

rainforest, but also like the European countryside being "landscaped" by human hands

for thousands years until capitalism, are composed of intricate networks of relationships,

where one determination has multiple effects, and where multiple determinations

contribute to the same effect: all relations tending to maintain the harmony of the system

itself (homeostasis). Instead, the regression according to instability, as if a system was

still in formation, leads to situations of linear accumulation of contradictory causes with

positive feedback, as the very term "accumulation" tells. Here we are facing exponential

dynamics, that is systems tending toward a point of arrival at an increasing speed. The

fact is that the point of arrival is always a catastrophe, because in their immaturity, they

do not have the ability of self-organizing, they don’t know the project, they split and

patch brutally, with no consciousness of the becoming. In short, they don’t know relative

time, they live a linear time contracting in a constant spasm.

As we know, time runs short by adopting certain benchmarks, but adopting others it is

possible to expand it. Cultivation time within capitalism is certainly not what will be the

typical one of the future society. The elimination of the property will lead to the

rationalization of the available space and humanity will be able to establish, without

being compelled by hunger or profit, in which spaces to live in and which ones to

intensively or extensively cultivate, with classical rotations or with the total reintegration

of humus, without suffering thestress of time-money. Calmly and deliberately it will

even decide wether it is useful to leave alone a part of it as it is and which one: with

deserts, forests, savannas, in the ecological natural balance with all animal life that

inhabits them. It is the bourgeois individual that has no time; the social man is nothing

more than a cell of a more complex organism, the species, which is there from millions

years ago and there will be there for others millions years. The species has all the time it

wants. It's got even the time to design a natural balance, as the rural landscape had been

stabilized in equilibrium along the millennia, until capitalism.

Ecological models made by computers show, for example, that the rational use of semi-

wild animal meat would be possible. In the steppes of Asia, because of indiscriminate

hunting, was drastically reduced the number of saigas, an ox like antelope; today a

minimum of control brought back the number of flocks to 3 million units, of which

300,000 each year are chosen and hunted quite rationally. On the prairies of the United

States, it is estimated there were from 30 million to 100 million bison, a huge mass of

protein that allowed an abundance of food and skins for indigenous peoples; today,

despite the near-extinction caused by man and the subtraction of suitable spaces, the

bisons are reproducing themselves fast and are about 200,000, half of which in large

breeding in the wild. Both the American bison and the European buffalo have a rustic

and high efficiency digestive system, able to digest very poor forages and to grow in a

semi-wild way more than other animals, though more slowly. Their meat is similar to the

one you could find at butcheries in the country when work cattle were butchered.

Amongst other things Liebig used, for his extract and for the bone meal used as

fertilizer, precisely the cattle that in Argentina had fled from the herds and had

reproduced in the wild. These animals were captured and sold cheaply. The same thing

still happened in the U.S. until the 1930's with the mustangs, feral horses. Even in Italy,

a country with no large available space, there are fairly large territories, now abandoned,

where the breeding in the wild would be possible if the property boundaries didn’t lay

down certain limits. In the small Corsica the breeding in the wild is practiced, even if

marginally. Men will surely not return to the hunt as their prehistoric ancestors, but the

examples can demonstrate that if they will monitor the energy balance and will decide to

maintain an omnivorous diet, they’ll be able to leave a space for grazing animals for a

rational use of proteins. This will finally allow them to eliminate, amongst other things,

that infamous institution which is the battery farming.

The destruction of the boundaries between private lands will allow the reshaping of the

country land rationally alternating arboreal crops and arable land and grazing, in order to

prevent erosion and retain soil moisture. The downsizing of the cities, with the

elimination of thousands of unnecessary rooms for bureaucratic and representative

activities, will weaken the boundary between town and countryside, with vast areas of

mutual penetration with no danger of poisoning by industrial and urban pollution. The

old separation between citizens and peasants will thoroughly disappear, since the

disappearance of the social division of labor will give way to the free expression of

individual differences directed, as different cells of a living organism, towards the best

result of the whole.

Let’s suppose to have produced, Marx says (Excerpts from Mills), as men for other men

not being in conflict with each other as wage slaves, peasants, capitalists into a market

from which everyone is estranged. Each one produces for the other what he needs, using

his individual capacity at best, in a reciprocal relationship which realizes the humanity of

production and not its alienation. The diversity of one is complementary to the diversity

of the other, the idiot democracy is overcome factually, the man who produces apples

connects with the man who produces computers on the basis of the actual quality of

products and not in relation with an indistinct value. You cannot even talk about

exchange or barter, but only about the production of objects or activities which are

useful to life, entering in connection not with the market, money, prices, property, but

with men whose needs are every other man matter. So it is not true that there is a

bilateral universal law according to which I can only exchange objects with the same

value, because even the maths shows that you cannot make transactions between apples

and computers. So it is not true that everything is based on the alleged eternal do ut des:

the mutual activities can be unmeasured, and men can also switch from one activity to

another if it is useful to the mutual satisfaction. And satisfaction is not receiving

anything in return, but it is the membership to the common social reality, for which the

mere fact of producing individually is already satisfying, and is unilateral, does not claim

anything as a duty, neither as a right.

This is the only way you can understand the nature of the new society moving forward;

the one that too many "rough communists" still imagine as springing from a People's

Commissars' office issuing decrees such as: "From now on money is abolished,

tomorrow the division between town and country will be abolished, and the day after the

peasants' ". Signed: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Data sources not expressly mentioned in the text: Istat, Italian Minister of the Treasury,

FAO, USDA, OECD, Eurostat, De Agostini Geographic Institute, European Garzanti

Encyclopedia, The Economist, Barrass, Rifkin.

RECOMMENDED READINGS

The points of the "Immediate revolutionary program" were treated during a meeting in

Forlì in 1953. Our previous articles, which develop and deepen them, were published in

the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3 and 4 of the review.

Partito Comunista Internazionale, Mai la merce sfamerà l'uomo, (Never commodity will

feed Man - in italian only), texts on the agrarian question, Quaderni Internazionalisti.

Partito Comunista Internazionale, Il programma rivoluzionario della società comunista

elimina ogni forma di proprietà del suolo, degli impianti di produzione e dei prodotti del

lavoro (The revolutionary program of the communist society eliminates any form of

property of the land, of the production plants and of the products of work - in italian

only), now in Proprietà e Capitale, Quaderni Internazionalisti

Partito Comunista Internazionale, La questione agraria, (The agrarian question - in

italian only), collection of articles, Quaderni Internazionalisti.

Partito Comunista Internazionale, Pressione razziale del contadiname, pressione

classista dei popoli colorati (Racial pressure of the peasantry, pressure class of colored

people - in italian only), now in Fattori di razza e nazione, Quaderni Internazionalisti.

Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, Collected Works -

volume 3, available online

Karl Marx, The Capital: unpublished Chapter 6 , published in italian by La Nuova Italia

August Bebel, Woman Under Socialism, available online

Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, Collected

Works - volume 9, available online

Lenin, A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, Collected works - volume

23, available online

Karl Kautsky, On The Agrarian Question, Unwin Hyman Ltd.

Robert Barrass, Biology, food and people: the economic importance of biology, Hodder

and Stoughton Ltd.

Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn

of the Post-Market Era, Putnam Publishing Group