Repeasantization: The Geographical Imaginary for a Post-Industrial Future
Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau
The New School for Social Research
Introduction
Statistics of hunger and poverty indicate that their impacts are primarily felt in rural
areas. This is due, in part, to a transformation of life in rural areas from largely agrarian
communities to sites of resource extraction; industrial agriculture based on technology
rather than labor has been particularly destructive. Some recent studies and reports of
current global hunger by the United Nations estimate that of the nearly 1 billion hungry
people in the world, 50% are small-scale, rural farmers, 25% are rural laborers without
land, and the last 25% are the urban poor, an increasing number of whom come from
rural areas. These numbers indicate and are explained by the intense pressure of
urbanization, which many have noted has produced new urban slums of unparalleled
scope.
In this paper, I will argue that repeasantization offers a solution to the global social and
environmental crises caused by, among others, industrial agriculture. Peasant agriculture
is a specific ordering and networking of the use of resources in a particular territory in
order to sustainably produce a variety of goods, primarily for subsistence and local
consumption. It prioritizes above all reproducing the resource base to maintain autonomy.
One of the main barriers to repeasantization is that industrial agriculture also re-orders
territory so that peasants cannot access resources in their local area. The specific reordering of the local territory by industrial agriculture, what is called Empire by Jan
Douwe van der Ploeg, connects local territory to urban areas through a networked
relation of extraction and centralizing flows of resources and goods. This larger scale 'reterritorialization' is the construction of the relation between urban and rural: under
Empire, the rural is space designated for extraction which flows centrally through
Empire's networks to the urban.
Marx called this exploitative relation of rural to urban the metabolic rift and portrayed it
as the spatial manifestation of capitalism, and seemingly its condition of possibility. For
Marx, the rural and urban are produced under capitalism and are defined by their roles as
sites of extraction, production, or consumption within it. Under Empire, rural and urban
areas are re-mapped and restructured in a further polarization of the metabolic rift.
However, it never appears to us that the distinction between town and country is
capitalism spatially manifest. One potential reason for this opacity is the mobilization of
ideology which values this spatial and geographic division. In The New Spirit of
Capitalism, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello argue that capitalism must legitimate itself
and that in its current manifestion as network or 'connexionist capitalism,' it is justified
through equating freedom with 'mobility.' By mobility, they do not only mean physical or
spatial mobility, but refer generally to the ability to make connections in a network.
Under a logic of mobility, however, urban areas are normatively prioritized and rural
areas are devalued. The critique of mobility and 'connexionist capitalism' is thus a
condition of possibility for repeasantization because it allows the peasant to be accepted
as a legitimate solution.
Peasants offer a different spatial order and an experience of geography that is not based
on exploitation of resources; these relationships have the potential to mend the metabolic
rift. The peasant mode also offers a concrete alternate understanding of freedom. By
expressing a form of autonomy that breaks with conceptions of liberation intertwined
with industrialization and urbanization, the peasant emerges as a way of life that can
transform the geographical imaginary that maintains this metabolic rift. A transformation
of the geographical imaginary in food and agriculture means not only deconstructing the
concepts of rural and urban (in both theory and in practice), but also envisioning and
creating new spaces that allow for practices and relations which do not produce hunger
and can regenerate the environment.
The Peasant Mode of Production
The peasant mode of production is defined by autonomy and a specific ordering of
territory that networks resources so as to reproduce the resource base. Besides
reproducing resources or inputs, autonomy is also created through the
“multifunctionality” of peasant production (which means that peasants can produce a
variety of goods and values). Multifunctionality is made possible by complex networks
which “re-pattern” shared resources in the process of “co-production.” That is, peasants
produce more value cooperatively, and they live more connected and creative lives
through these resource networks.
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg, a Dutch rural sociologist, provides numerous examples. A
particularly interesting one is the production of fuel through manure in The Netherlands.
Through very creative partnerships, a small community was able to take its waste and
convert it to an energy source not only to power the community but also to sell to the
power grid. Douwe van der Ploeg writes, "A key feature of such local solutions is that
they not only enlarge total value added, but place it in the locality that produces it.
Peasant innovation thus potentially contains an ordering of the world that runs
diametrically contrary to that entailed in Empire" (168-169).
Empire and Industrial Agriculture
Douwe van der Ploeg calls industrial agriculture "Empire," stressing its form and activity
as a re-territorializing network of rural resource extraction and urban consumption.
Industrial agriculture creates incredibly mobile and global networks, yet it requires
rigidity and control in a way that undermines the autonomy of the peasant network. He
further conveys Empire, not as co-productive, but as a network which does not produce,
but merely dislocates and displaces values already produced. He describes food empires
as “vampires” that “…digest, as it were, local resources until they are exhausted, and
transport the wealth obtained towards other places,” (The New Peasantries 71).
Empire is able to profit without producing value by “re-patterning” resources into new
networks, both at the local and global levels. Globally, “Empire is reshuffling the social
geography. New modes of assembly, governed by Empire, not only link poor places of
production to rich places of consumption but, such places, and their dissimilarities are
increasingly produced (and reproduced) by, and through, Empire” (Douwe van der Ploeg,
“Empire and the Peasant Principle”). “Industrialization represents a definitive
disconnection of the production and consumption of food from the particularities (and
boundaries) of time and space. Spaces of production and consumption (understood as
specific localities) no longer matter. Nor do the interrelations between the two. In this
respect food empires may be said to create ‘non-places’” (The New Peasantries 6).
He gives an example of the Peruvian agricultural community of Catacaos, in which
industrial agriculture was able to develop desert land, a “non-place,” due to its ability to
mobilize numerous resources that were not otherwise linked territorially, such as water,
electricity, seeds, cheap labor, machinery, and so on, in ways which peasants couldn’t
because they lacked, among other things, capital. Instead of an autonomous local network
that could reproduce itself, this corporation produced asparagus which was shipped to
Poland in order to make frozen pizzas ultimately destined for consumption in Western
Europe (The New Peasantries 76).
Douwe van der Ploeg writes that Empire “…constitutes a complex techno-institutional
network that is not designed to coordinate ongoing activities and processes; instead, it
imposes its own order” (77), which is “a pattern that allows for control and for
extraction” (76). In the Catacaos example, Empire’s ability to re-network resources
precludes the peasants from using those resources in their own networks; their local
geography is reconfigured by Empire.
Not only does Empire transform the local geography (the spatial relation of the
community to itself), but it also remaps the relation of the community to other
communities by turning rural geography into a site of extraction for consumption in
cities. Empire thus remaps the overall relation of rural to urban (because ultimately these
pizzas are being eaten in cities); and it restructures urban space into sites of processing or
consumption (think of how the Polish processing plant reconfigured itself to deal with
Peruvian asparagus and how cities in Western Europe “pattern” eating around shopping
for frozen pizzas). Empire transforms the meanings of “rural” and “urban,” reducing
them to mere sites or “localizations” of different aspects of economy rather than different
modes or aspects of life. However, Marx argues that the very distinction between urban
and rural is already a result of the exploitation of resources in capitalism.
Metabolic Rift, the Production of the Rural and Urban, and Urban Agriculture
Marx and Engels theorized the metabolic rift as a disruption in the “social metabolism” as
a way to explain “declining agricultural soil fertility, rising levels of urban pollution, and
the squalor of the worker in the 19th century” (McClintock 4).
The social metabolism is the term used to describe the mediation of society's interaction
with nature through labor. Ideally, social labor is organized in such a way that it
reproduces itself, that is, it is able to return to nature what it will need to extract later
from it, so that it is sustainable. For Marx and Engels, capitalism disrupted a reproducible
and sustainable social metabolism, principally through the geographical distinction of the
urban and rural. Resource extraction is located in rural areas (characterized by natural
environments and small populations) and factory labor and consumption are located in
cities (characterized by steel, glass, concrete, and population density). Rural workers also
migrate to cities to join the industrial labor force, or proletariat (McClintock 15). The
force of industrial production thus warps social geography like a black hole, pulling
resources and people into urban areas, similar to Douwe van der Ploeg’s understanding of
Empire (though on the surface there are distinctions and maybe we can get to them in the
questions).
Nathan McClintock, of the Geography Department at UC Berkeley, in his article “Why
Farm the City? Theorizing Urban Agriculture Through a Lens of Metabolic Rift,”
suggests that urban agriculture can mend ecological and social rifts through rebalancing
nutrient cycles through composting and by de-commodifying food through returning the
means of production to people. Though certainly an example of repeasantization on a
surprisingly large scale, (800 million people globally are involved in urban food
production, according to the UNDP, and according to Canada's International
Development Research Centre (IDRC), “25% of the entire global food output is grown in
cities") I would argue that this tactic alone isn’t sufficient. Ultimately urban agriculture
will not address the extractive nature of rural space and only addresses the rift at one end,
through a “re-patterning” of urban space. One reason for this partial solution is found in
Marx’s suggestion that the metabolic rift also “reifies” (that is, treats as a mere fact rather
than a human process) the distinction between urban and rural (McClintock 4). The
prioritization of urban agriculture seems to be a result of the reification of the
geographical imaginary, the ability to envision reconfigured social practices in space
since only urban space seems open to new ordering.
Freedom and the Normative Dimension of Geography
As I mentioned earlier, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello in their book The New Spirit of
Capitalism claim that currently capitalism justifies itself by the mobility that it can offer
to workers. The ideology or “spirit” that takes mobility for freedom also contributes to
the reification of the urban and rural and does not see that they are produced. The
freedom which network or ‘connexionist’ capitalism can provide is based upon the notion
that “capitalism supposedly offers the possibility of deracination (Boltanski and
Chiapello 426), which is a condition of the “expanding of the formal possibilities of
choosing one’s mode of social affiliation, essentially redefined by reference to place of
residence and occupation as opposed to being fixed by birth to a village and a station in
life…” (425). Thus, mobility is tied on some level to exactly the kind of “centralizing
flow” “out of” particular spaces, which we have said describes the rural under Empire.
This ideology of mobility, then, only makes sense with the differentiation of urban and
rural.
Mobility for them does not simply mean physical mobility, though physical or spatial
mobility can be an aspect of it. Rather, mobility seems to be the ability not to be
constrained by space (perhaps like food Empire’s use of non-spaces in order to control
territory). Understood in network terms, to be mobile is to have access to many nodes in a
network and thus to be able to make many connections. The valorization of mobility
covers over the new form of capitalist exploitation which functions along an axis of
mobility. They write,
“Thus there appear to be innumerable relations of exploitation based on mobility
differentials: financial markets versus countries; financial markets versus firms;
multinationals versus countries; large principal versus small sub-contractor; world expert
versus firm; firm versus casual workforce; consumer versus firm” (371).
I would add, urban versus. rural; industrial versus peasant agriculture. Paradoxically,
exploitation often takes the form of an the imposition of mobility upon those who cannot
afford to be mobile, as in flex-time pay for workers with limited skills, and for our
purposes, the adaptation of agricultural production to global food chains, and the
transition of small-scale farmers to migrant farmworkers (369). Ironically, it is industrial
agriculture which can claim to bring mobility to rural areas through its globally
connected chains.
Boltanski and Chiapello believe that a critique of capitalism will develop once people
realize that being “mobile” and “connected” does not really bring the freedom desired
and that one person’s mobility requires another person’s immobility. For our purposes,
this realization would be that industrial agriculture does not produce the best food
(though convenient), damages the environment, and requires significant suffering from
workers, farmers, and consumers. This critique is already occurring within food and
agriculture on many levels (the local food movement, the slow food movement, the food
sovereignty movement, the food justice movement, Michael Pollan, etc.), but I will
conclude by arguing it will not succeed or be fully coherent unless the autonomy
contained within peasant agriculture is understood and valued instead of the ideological
form of freedom contained in the concept of “mobility” and tied to the metabolic rift.
Autonomy won’t be valued unless we can then think and imagine geography differently
so that what we value about human life is not automatically localized in either “rural” or
“urban” spaces.
Repeasantization, Autonomy, and the Geographical Imaginary
Without economic, spatial, or normative forces separating rural from urban, elements of
life valued in urban areas (like difference, connectedness, and so on) could be found in
rural areas and vice versa. In fact, difference would presumably abound, since we do not
desire spatial uniformity but rather a negation of the spatial distinction imposed by
exploitative material processes, and other social factors would create spatial distinctions.
Repeasantized space exists as the between of “urban” and “rural”, though what these
terms could mean without something like the metabolic rift is unclear (though
repeasantization concerned primarily with food would not affect many of the other flows
to cities like minerals and energy which would maintain the rift). The experience of this
space, however, allows for spaces of autonomy in which real solutions to our crises can
be created and expanded.
Repeasantization cannot happen in the United States without an expansion of a critique of
mobility and network capitalism. The critique of mobility is possible, however, not
through the realization that mobility and freedom can occur in "rural" areas (as shown in
peasant networks); but through the realization that the "mobility" of the network (which
is territorialized by the urban) is not actually freeing. Once the critique is made, it is
possible to desire and envision the autonomy of peasants. This possibility of critique,
however, is foreclosed if the urban is prioritized ideologically. Thus, somewhat of a
paradox emerges, where the possibility that could motivate a critique is only disclosed by
the critique.
Luckily, there are some concrete examples of projects in my home state of Maine that can
disclose this possibility, like the community of Unity, Maine and the organization Unity
Barn Raisers, who have used agricultural production, a small college, a beautiful
environment, and engaged people to not only provide meaningful work, but also to
provide meaningful education as well as recreation (Unity hosts the annual Common
Ground Fair, which annually draws tens of thousands of people). (In the NYTimes, there
was also a photo piece about people from cities moving back to rural areas and farming,
bringing with them urban style and culture).
In New York City, community gardeners in Brooklyn and the Bronx provide a wildly
different spatial experience of an urban environment, especially in the context of the
intensive urbanizing process of gentrification. In my work, we have brought rural peasant
leaders from Latin America to visit these community gardens and their leaders, and the
discovery of common interests and shared experiences in struggle is shocking and
powerful. The existence of community gardens in our city is incredibly important,
especially as Wal-mart seeks to enter the city, which is perhaps the epitome of Empire’s
re-territorialization and centralizing of flows.