Root and branch

I mentioned the new Root and Branch Collective – described here and here – in my last post and said I planned to write something about it. So here goes.

Why write about it? Well, partly because the group (henceforth I’ll call it RBC) has a lot to say about agrarian localism, which is kinda my bag.

Also because RBC invokes influence from various Marxist and post-Marxist frameworks (in their words ‘critical agrarian studies, legal geography, anti-colonial Marxism, postcolonial studies and world systems theory’). These frameworks have also influenced me, and still do, particularly in trying to get to grips with how we’ve got into the present mess. But less than before, and less as a means for getting out of it. So it interests me to place my waning commitment to such frameworks against a statement of their value.

My primary influences for navigating out of the present mess these days are distributism, civic republicanism, agrarian populism and Thomism, or maybe immanentism … which not a lot of people have heard of. One reason not a lot of people have heard of them is that we’re so caught up in mainstream modernist politics like neoliberalism and socialism that they get no airtime, which I think is regrettable. My forthcoming book Finding Lights in a Dark Age tries to prepare some ground for these non-modernist and non-socialist but potentially somewhat leftwing-ish positions. So it’s interesting to consider RBC’s intervention, with its more direct modernist-socialist lineage, in that light.

So … the RBC piece on Substack authored by Adam Calo and Alex Heffron begins by referring to a book called Agrarian Dreams which, they say, “effectively pumped the breaks (sic) on the vision of a food system grounded in localized organic production”, due to such things as exploitative labour relations and capitalist property regimes in the sector.

The piece continues, “Over a decade later, the popular debate about sustainable food has stubbornly refused to advance beyond a reductionist framing of artisanal localism versus techno-utopian productivism”. This debate, it says, has focused on land use techniques rather than the politics of land. Then it refers to my ‘debate’ with George Monbiot (the ‘debate’ that never really was … though I’m still hoping George will at least recant his erroneous energy figures someday). Calo and Heffron say Monbiot sets up a “bland binary between a romantic view of inefficient niche production via localism ...