Round Up
The End of Abundance Edition
I have chosen to organize the following round-up around the European energy apocalypse and the proclamation by the French President of the End of Abundance.
We Need to Talk About Growth… And Our Ruling Class Needs to Stop Obsessing Over It
Aris Roussinos authored a surprisingly good essay in Unherd on the fall of the gastly Liz Truss. Instead of another nauseating psychological essay about weak figures like Truss, Roussinos puts the onus on what truly matters, her insane wild goose chase of GDP growth.
On the substance, I disagree quite fundamentally with Roussinos’ productivist worldview and the idea that we can have something like a sustainable low growth capitalism. But Roussinos does a good job in articulating that Truss’ disgrace had little to do with her capabilities and everything with a long-awaited reckoning of a deeply flawed growth-economy:
[I]n the current international climate, steady and boring would look like an almost unattainable win. In general terms, despite every desperate attempt for a quick fix, the global economy has never recovered the sustained growth rates of the post-war era, and probably never will. Battered by the Seventies’ oil crisis, the global financial crash of 2008, the response to Covid and now by the war in Ukraine, the world economy still has the effects of the looming conflict between the US and China to prepare for, along with the increasingly tangible consequences of climate change.
It is just as possible, indeed probably more likely, that we have entered an age of growing, compound crisis. Almost a decade ago, the authors of Does Capitalism Have a Future? warned that “something big looms on the horizon: a structural crisis much bigger than the recent Great Recession”. As we await the blackouts and disorder of the coming winter, and try not to think about the prospects of nuclear war, it would be reasonable to act on the assumption this crisis has already begun[…]
In planning his invasion of Ukraine, Putin evidently priced in Western sanctions and Russia’s ejection from the international banking sector, gambling that its vast mineral resources and energy resources would count for more in the world today than the economic commonsense of yesterday. As winter approaches, it is not yet clear that Putin has lost this bet: like the First World War, the conflict in Ukraine makes no conventional economic sense, but has created its own new reality. Similarly, to win a protracted Pacific war against the greatest industrial power in human history, the United States would have to reorient its entire economy around the war effort. The panicked reactions of the market to Truss’s mini-budget no more reflect the approaching colossal reordering of the global economy than Westminster lobby gossip and Downing Street psychodrama reflect the great geopolitical trends already reshaping the world around us.
There is a New Wendell Berry Book about Race Relations… and Growth!
Wendell Berry just published a new book on race relations, The Need to Be Whole, Patriotism and the History of Prejudice. I’ll write about it at much greater length, but here’s a quote from it on growth, which provides the clearest argument against what he calls the “growth-economy.”
An Amish family long dear to me bases the commercial part of its economy mainly on a herd of forty-five jersey cows, for which the family’s small farm produces the necessary feed. From the modest enterprise the family achieves a “quality of life” that is admirable. […] At the time of my last visit the farmwife and her two daughters, then seven and ten years old, were busy at the evening milking. It was a happy scene. The mother and daughters cooperated perfectly, each doing her share according to her strength. They kept steadily at work without haste or fuss. Each of the cows was known by her looks, character, and name. The family’s living was being made within a pattern of familiar relationships. The people and the cows knew, understood and respected one another, which was why the barn stayed so noticeably quiet. The physical work, to which our society has cultivated an aversion, was done with skill, with care, without lasting too long or becoming in any way a hardship, and allowing for conversation with visiting friends. This twice-a-day chore was taking place where both the people and the animals were at home, and at a scale permitting a careful line to be drawn everywhere between enough and too much. The work was limited by the size of the farm, which was limited by the practice of neighborly love that prevails among the Old Order Amish. Because of the limits of scale, nothing involved being too big or too expensive, the farm retains always a certain resilience and flexibility[…]
Now consider that this family dairy lives within a farm economy within a national economy that is, by principle, unlimited. This is a so-called growth-economy in which, supposedly in order to prosper, every enterprise must grow bigger. By the law and logic of growth, a forty-five-cow dairy expects and is expected to grow to a hundred and then to five hundred and then to a thousand cows. This is affirmed and approved by everybody, except for those of us who still ask questions. And so we ask: Who can know a thousand cows by looks, character, and name, and thus value and watch over and care for them accordingly? The question is absurd. Probably somewhere between fifty and a hundred cows, we began to leave behind the possibility of familiar relationships among the people and their animals. And somewhere between a hundred and a thousand cows, animals and people alike will begin to be accounted less as creatures and more as identical, expendable, and replaceable things.
Interestingly, Berry’s comparison between the growth-economy, which he also called a “total economy,” and a “land economy” is the perfect basis to understand the class war at the center of all our problems, between the Virtuals and the Physicals, to use NS Lyons’ categorization. Mary Harrington just summed it up wonderfully in her most recent essay on the meaning of arch-Virtual Rishi Sunak’s designation as the United Kingdom’s new Prime Minister.
Today, though, the main contest is no longer between the landed gentry and mercantile elite [as in 1815]. The goalposts have moved again, and the battleground is now between those whose power and material interests are grounded in the material world, and those whose wealth comes from the world of ideas […]
What’s key is that the moral outlook is downstream of concrete material interests. Physicals work in sectors such as farming, construction, manufacturing, haulage, mining, and so on: occupations inextricable from the material world. Virtuals, on the other hand, work at a layer of abstraction apart from the physical world: think finance, academia, education, media, tech, and so on.
And Virtuals dominate the elite. For as the West has de-industrialised, Western money and power have drained from Physical occupations toward Virtual ones such as finance and tech. And, as a consequence, Virtuals today hold a near-monopoly on institutional power. Westminster occupational data reflects this: barristers, teachers, solicitors, and journalists are well represented among MPs. Conversely, you can trace the waning power of the Physicals in the total number of MPs who were previously farmers, miners or manual workers. This total shrank by a factor of five between 1979 and 2015, from 142 to a scant 33.
This class-inflected contest between the virtual and the real economies is the core of the class and culture war now being fought across the West. It also helps to make sense of how apparently unrelated issues, such as trans rights and immigration, can become bitter battlefronts in the same war.
Further down in the essay, Mary Harrington attempts to describe the possible scenarii as to how that class war will unfold, pointing to some kind of settlement.
but before we reach that point, we can expect a great deal more mobilisation by the Physicals as a class, and a great deal more moral denunciation of that class and its interests by their Virtual class enemies. And whatever the eventual settlement is, formal democracy won’t be the vehicle for bringing it about. It’ll be the rubber-stamp for an exercise of political leverage that forces Physical political interests back onto (or definitively off) the table.
To exercise such leverage, working-class Physicals will need to find allies among dissident segments of the elite, all of whom will (like Cobden) have their own motivations for the bargain. And if this seems an ugly compromise, the alternative is a political process that continues to elect Prime Ministers who ignore their interests. Simply because they can.
There are many take-aways here. But the most essential, in my opinion, is the need for new alliance between the Physicals and the dissident segments of the elite. My guess is that, if you are reading this Substack, you are probably a Virtual with a strong proclivity to be a defector to your class. So please join me in fully assuming being a traitor to the Virtual class.
There’s No Need to Mourn Macron’s Technoabundance if We Honor Nature
About a month ago, my wife and I had the great pleasure of attending a conference on the theme of Nourishing Diets and Farms: The Key to Vibrant Health, Featuring Sally Fallon Morell and Joel Salatin, two heroes of mine. Organized by the Weston Price Foundation, the event was hosted in the idyllic setting of P.A. Bowen Farmstead, Sally’s farm in Brandywine, MD, where I process chickens every Wednesday.
This day was startlingly different from the kind of sanctimonious, newspeak laden events routinely held just a few miles away in Washington, DC, the paradoxical capital of empty talk and chaos organizing. This was something else, for it was not a day of talks, but of blessings. And blessed we were… including with delicious and nourishing food forming a perfect harmony with the place and the conversation.
It was also the perfect response to Macron’s “end of abundance speech.” Because profusion was very much on the menu, but not the same kind of gluttonous, low quality, death-sowing bounty that Macron is mourning. The kind of wealth that Sally Fallon Morell and Joel Salatin routinely celebrate is not Macron’s technoabundance, but bio-abundance.
Sally Fallon Morell spoke in the morning explaining the eleven principles of a nourishing diet, as they were articulated by Dr. Weston Price, who traveled the world comparing the healthy conditions of non-industrialized peoples compared to unhealthy neighboring industrialized communities, emphasizing the beneficial effects of traditional diets.
Author of several excellent books, including the best-selling Nourishing Traditions, The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, Sally Fallon Morell is an indefatigable defender of biodiversity, in its whole dimension. Whole, because the biodiversity she protects involves more than the cows, calves, pigs and chickens she and her staff take great care of. It also involves the imperceptible abundant biodiversity of microbial life, which is so indispensable for our health and the health of all our natural world. Oddly, the creatures she calls the Diet Dictocrats (the doctors, researchers, spokesmen and experts for various governmental and quasi-government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, the National Institute of Health, etc.) are principally committed to sever us from that beneficial microbial life and hell-bent on making us unhealthy, when they are not busying themselves with engineering man-made, very harmful microbial life in their P4 laboratories. Here’s how Sally puts it in her own words in a beautiful lecture she gave at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics:
The irony is that in recent years a few scientists have made discoveries that completely discredit the germ paradigm. Unfortunately, our public policy is the product of biologists and microbiologists who went to school 30 years ago. They would not be learning the germ theory in school today, at least not this version of it. We now know that we live in symbiotic relationship with microscopic organisms on our skin, in our bowels, and throughout the entire gastrointestinal tract. Without the six pounds of bacteria lining the gastrointestinal tract—and by the way these bacteria number more than all the cells in our bodies—we could not digest our food or absorb the nutrients it contains. They provide our number one protection against toxins in our food. If the bacteria in your intestinal tract are numerous and healthy, they keep out mercury, pesticides, and all sorts of toxins. Eighty-five percent of our immune system consists of wonderful bacteria in the gut, which produce a range of nutrients and even chemicals that make you feel good. Without germs we are dead. And what is more, germs are now being harnessed for soil remediation and environmental clean-up. There are even wild theories that oil is a renewable resource produced by micro-organisms inside the earth and that life forms can transmute one element into another by enzymatic action.
Even the so-called pathogenic organisms have been found to play a beneficial role in the human ecology. What germs do, even the pathogens, is scavenge dead tissue, which our bodies give off when they’re malnourished or poisoned. Dr. Weston Price put it very well when he said, “We do not die of disease; we get disease because we are dying.” According to this view, germs are just the clean-up crew, yet they get the blame when disease strikes.
The favored means of the Diet Dictocrats to sever us from beneficial animal and microbial life is through engineering waves of panic about natural products (raw milk from grass-fed cows, animal fat from well raised animals, unwashed eggs etc.) grown by small, independent producers while precipitating us into the arms of powerful and highly profitable grain cartels, vegetable oil producers and the food-processing industry. Ironically, as Sally put it eloquently in her talk last month, puritanical diets praised by the Diet Dictocrats are the surest path to industrial pornographic food.
After a succulent lunch made with meat and dairy produces from Sally’s farm, we were blessed with a fatherly, and loving address from Joel Salatin about what is a nourishing farm. For those of you who don’t know him, here’s how he introduces himself:
Joel Salatin, 64, calls himself a Christian libertarian environmentalist capitalist lunatic farmer. Others who like him call him the most famous farmer in the world, the high priest of the pasture, and the most eclectic thinker from Virginia since Thomas Jefferson. Those who don’t like him call him a bio-terrorist, Typhoid Mary, charlatan, and starvation advocate.
To be in the business of operating a nourishing farm, ie. a farming activity honoring our natural world as a benevolent lover, and not as an extractive resource, is to view the art of farming as the building of cathedrals. Farming is about building good soil, which Salatin compares to an “underground cathedral.” And how you build such a cathedral is essentially by raising animals who feed on a poly-culture of perennial plants, contributing to “pulse the pasture” by the organic matter they produce, which helps the soil retain water and injects carbon into it. A farm organized around such an objective is also a farm light on infrastructure that favors the production of the kind of equity, in the form of skills, knowledge and labor, that bankers cannot foreclose on.
A nourishing farm, Salatin further added, is also a farm that values the species, or as Salatin put it, a farm that “honors the pigness of the pig,” by making the animals and all the microbial life, that is so essential to our health, the coworkers of the humans.
Pursuing on the image of the nourishing farmer as a cathedral builder, Salatin emphasized the soul dimension of operating the kind of farms that he and Sally own. Farming is building in sacredness. In our damaged natural world, it is engaging in building a “healing prototype for our planet.”
And last but not least, nourishing farming is the surest way to establish a continuity between the generations. Here’s how Salatin put it in his own words:
My position is that a farm is actually not sustainable until it generates two different salaries from two different generations. If this is just a one person show, what happens if that person breaks a leg, gets sick, has to go away, burns out? The people who say, well he wants his big farms, I say there’s a lot of latitude between a three-person income and an empire.
I’m after resilience, I’m after farms that are resilient enough to handle shocks and to build one of those resilient foundations… do you want a team or a single person?
After we heard all this and spent a lovely day in a lovely place among people who are committed to healthy lives and communities, my wife and I felt whole. Whole from the kind of abundance that is within reach and that the growth economy works hard to destroy.
Happy Collapse
The brilliant humorist Karim Duval made a hilarious video mocking collapsology entitled Happy Collapse, L’effondrement, c’est sympa (Collapse is So Fun). The play on word is very clever, because the French will pronounce words such as Happy with a silent H, making “happy collapse” sound like “apocalypse.” Alas, it is in French, but I have provided a translation of the first part below:
Hello, My name is Nicolas Brèche, Founder and CEO of Happy Collapse.
We propose happy, fun and offbeat solutions to people who are afraid of the collapse, so they stop thinking in terms of “apocalypse” and think instead in terms of “happy collapse.”
For a long time, I was myself terrified of the impending collapse. I could not manage to conceive that humanity’s effect on our environment could lead to the end of the world, of our system, of my Amazon Premium Account or my vacations in the Seychelles. One day, I even dreamed that I could not drive an SUV anymore. That was an awful dream, but that’s when I told myself: “Why don’t you see things more positively.” That’s when a whole world of business opportunities suddenly opened up for me[…] That’s when I saw the light and created Happy Collapse.
We preach a global, 360-degree approach to the collapse, focusing on the collapse as it unfolds, but also on what precedes it.
Many people think of collapse as a precise day, so we endeavor to cover the market of that D Day. To that end, we are selling baskets full of seasonal and bio-local seasonal produces, as well as survival kits, containing happy, fun and offbeat — but nevertheless useful — products: a head-lamp, a colibri whistle, a personalized change of t-shirt, the book Permaculture, What Should Have We Done? and a Kalashnikov!
These kits are currently tested in real situations in African and Asian countries which experience the collapse without knowing it. There, they call that “life.” Though these people have zero notion in the science of collapsology, they are nevertheless tremendous beta-testers.
And we improved these kits during survivalist gatherings of the GAAFAC (Garonne, Allier, Ardèche, Finistère, Aveyron, Cantal). At this stage, we have validated a proof of concept. All that is left for us do is to scale it up at the industrial level and to target the general public by playing on fear and the obsessional quest of happiness. Two business leverages that are very fun to drive!
Now, the pre-collapse is also a goldmine of opportunities. Thanks to eco-anxiety, we have sold tons of anti-depressants, thus contributing to green growth.
However, the heart of our business remains event planning. We organize team building events in which we put the players in the mental disposition of experiencing the collapse as a happy, fun and offbeat moment. Our Escape Game is doing a killing! The players are placed in collapse conditions, i.e. in a closed room saturated with exhaust gases, where the temperature reaches 115 degrees, with nothing to eat, no Instagram connection, etc. And they have 45 minutes to organize collapso meetings and try to find an exit, which leads into a community garden. Those who succeed win a butternut squash. It’s cool, playful, informal. It’s happy, fun and offbeat.
One day, when I was little, I hit a post while I was sledding… The shock was frontal. Yet, I remember smiling during the entire downhill, as the post was getting closer. This is precisely the kind of enchantment that I would like to recreate for the customers of Happy Collapse. I want them to experience the collapse as a reunion with the child they were once.
Sadness
Although it happened in early 2021, I just learned of the passing of Joseph Ponthus from cancer, at the age of 42. One of the rare writers, along with Simone Weil, to have written first-hand about the experience of factory work. Ponthus authored a little masterpiece entitled On the Line, Notes from the Factory. The book is entirely written without punctuation, each line symbolizing the rhythm of the assembly line. Your voice will be missed Joseph. May God bless your soul.
Here’s a poignant extract talking, too, about cathedral builders.
Entering the factory Of course I was ready for The stench The cold The shifting of heavy loads The harshness of it all The conditions The production line The modern slavery I wasn’t there to report on it Nor was I readying myself for the revolution No The factory means I get to earn a buck Put food on the table As the saying goes Because my wife is sick of seeing me lounge around on the couch waiting for a job in my field So it’s The agro-industrial plant for me Food processing The agro industry As they say A factory in Brittany Handling processing cooking and all things fish and prawns I’m not there to write I’m there for the money At the temp agency they ask me when I can start I pull out the Victor Hugo My usual literary go-to Tried and tested ‘Tomorrow at dawn when the countryside pales I guess’ They take me at my word and the next day I clock on at six in the morning As the hours and days go by the need to write embeds itself like a bone in my throat I can’t dislodge But not of the grimness of the factory Rather its paradoxical beauty On my production line I often find myself thinking of a parable One of Claudel’s I’m pretty sure A man makes a pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres and comes across a fellow busy breaking stones What are you doing My job Breaking these shitty rocks My back’s done in It’s a dog’s job Shouldn’t be allowed Would sooner die Some kilometres further on a second fellow’s busy doing the same job Same question I’m working I’ve got a family to feed It’s a bit tough That’s just how it is and at least I’ve got a job That’s the main thing Further on still Outside Chartres A third man His face radiant What are you doing I’m building a cathedral May the prawns and fish be my stones At first the smell of the factory irritated my nostrils Now I no longer notice it The cold is bearable with a big jumper a hoodie two decent pairs of socks and leggings under my pants Shifting the heavy loads I’m finding muscles I didn’t know existed I am willing in my servitude Happy almost The factory has taken me I refer to it now only as My factory As if I had some form of ownership of the machines or proprietary interest in the processing of the prawns and fish Small-time casual worker that I am One among so many others Soon We’ll be processing shellfish too Crabs lobsters spider crabs and crayfish That’s a revolution I’m hoping to see Hoping to bag some claws even if I already know it won’t be possible It’s bad enough trying to filch just a single prawn You’ve really got to hide if you want to eat a few I’m still too obvious my co-worker Brigitte an older woman has said to me ‘I didn’t see anything but watch it if the bosses catch you’ So now I sneak them out under my apron with my hands triple gloved to keep out the moisture the cold and everything else so I can peel and eat what I consider at the very least to be some form of payment in kind I’m getting ahead of myself Back to the writing ‘I write as I speak when the fiery angel of conversation takes hold of me like a prophet’ wrote Barbey d’Aurevilly or something along those lines somewhere I’m not quite sure where I write like I think when I’m on my production line Mind wandering alone determined I write like I work On the production line Return New line Ponthus, Joseph. On the Line. Head of Zeus (2021), Stephanie Smee, Transl.
Strike and Protest Update
Fall in France is the period of the rentrée. It’s a very ritualistic season full of events such as literary prize ceremonies, sun-tanned politicians announcing bold government policies (such as pension reforms that will be dead by Christmas), equally sun-tanned TV hosts taking their positions at the helm of sanctimonious new programs, etc.
But more than anything, it’s strike season, and I must say that 2022 is a particularly promising cru with strikes in pretty much every sector, including nuclear plant employees, teachers and school personnel, bus drivers, truck drivers, rail operators, nursing home staff, Total refinery employees, medical residents, local government employees etc.
Most extraordinary this year are the protests calling for an exit from NATO. Not surprisingly, they have been completely ignored by the oligarch-controlled media. My guess is that these people are not thinking of themselves as wallowing in abundance, as Macron and his oligarchic backers would like us to believe.
These protests are echoed in the European parliament by voices such as the Irish Euro MP Mick Wallace, who explains with great clarity what NATO actually is.
Farmers Market Abundance… Not "Growth”
To wrap up, here’s the perfect illustration of what a society of abundance could look like outside of the economic growth paradigm. Farmers markets, such as the one below in Villefranche de Rouergue, in Aveyron, are a display of the kind of abundance that is simply unimaginable in the supermarkets and the shopping malls of the growth-economy. One of the largest farmers markets of Occitania, the market of Villefranche de Rouergue features on average two hundred producers every week, with close to four hundred registered with the city. A festival for the senses, it is the perfect opposite of the sensual impoverishment of the growth-economy as encouraged by Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret in The Great Reset:
The pandemic will certainly heighten our focus on hygiene. A new obsession with cleanliness will particularly entail the creation of new forms of packaging. We will be encouraged not to touch the products we buy. Simple pleasures like smelling a melon or squeezing a fruit will be frowned upon and may even become a thing of the past.
Maybe our rallying cry should be “Reclaim our Senses!”
Very insightful discussion that amazingly skirts degrowth. This will take a couple of re-reads. Well done.
brilliant, brillante, génial