Something like ten years ago I started growing plants in my room. It started with a devil's ivy clipping from my aunt and became a room full of tropical plants complete with a vaporizor machine (for humidity), hanging lights, a fan, and a tub of 108 gold fish (one for each name of Shiva). Eventually my family built a small house and I got a yard. I quickly went to work planting a small orchard and a vegetable garden. I tried to grow some grains, but it didn't work out.
I never felt so good as I did when I was working that garden. It was hard work, but it was also calming. Not only that, I was continuously amazed by the things I saw in my own backyard. The white snails with their enormous shells, the flambouyant red fungi that exploded in the nooks of trenches, even the hedgehog that always ate my blackberries the day before I planned to pick them. I didn't know it then, but something in me germinated during those early times of gardening: a desire for a less urban life.
But it was difficult to know this, since many of us city folks are raised without a concept of anything but an urban life. No one encourages us to grow up and move into the country. Of course, the big reason for this is economic. There is little money invested in non-urban areas. Jobs are scarce, infrastructure (water, electricity, paved roads) is often shitty , and poverty is much more common. Folks have become urban because that's what most people have had to do in order to survive.
What has forced this migration? The mechanization of agriculture, the concentration of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands, corporate monopolies over agricultural products, and the sheer brutality and violence used to enforce the 'order' of rural social hierarchies (e.g. slavery, latifundas, sharecropping, debt peonage, para/military terror, etc). At the same time cities have become places where more and more capital has been invested, generating jobs.
Thus, 2008 is the year when, for the first time, more than half of the world's population is living in urban areas. This is a huge change from the beginning of the 20th century (the 1900's) when only about 14% lived in cities.
Why, then, am I talking about life after ubanism if now is the most urban period in human history? The first and most obvious reason is that such cancerous urbanism is unsustainable. On a basic level the growth of cities, which has been mostly in the global South, has meant the growth of slums with little access to basic services and needs like jobs, water, housing, and safety. Ecologically as well cities on the scale that we are seeing them today are not practical. They simply suck up too much energy and belch out too much pollution.
If that isn't enough then consider the fact that even though the main motivation for moving from the rural to the urban areas is economic, urban areas are not structured to provide all these folks with employment. Rural to urban migration has always been something that urban industrial capitalists have encouraged because it put more people in competition for the same jobs, thus lowering wages. Landlords and real estate capitalists have also profited from the shifts in the uses of urban land, whether by building labor camp housing (i.e. slums, projects, etc) or luxury, leisure and business properties. Meanwhile the rural land owners, from families to megacorporations, have snatched up more and more land for themselves.
One of the greatests losses that many of us urban folks have endured is the fading away of our rurally based cultural heritages. Often that has meant losing our autonomy--our capacity to do things for ourselves--as well as our ability to form healthy communities. Land is the basis for community and for autonomy. Forced into becoming renters and wage-slaves we have lost many of the skills, knowledge, and cultural folkways that grew from sharing land.
I moved to NC to reconnect to my rural heritage. (The South not only has the largest concentration of Black folks in the u.s., it also has the most rural folks of all the u.s. regions). Up North Black culture is an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. No doubt we have developed strong and powerful traditions, but we have lost a part of ourselves. The South is also increasingly urban, but there still exists a rural tradition amongst Black folks and other folks too. This is what I'm immersing myself in. Learning about raising animals and also killing them. Learning about fixing things and making them. Learning about families and geneaologies and the overlapping histories of Black folks and white folks and indigenous peoples and brown folks of all kinds.
The other day I went out to a dairy farm and listened to a man talk about cows. I saw the calves and pondered over the fact that conception rates for cattle have gone from 80% to 40% in the last 50 years. Why? How? We don't know yet, he says. I rode out and sat with a six-year-old girl named Eden and watched the bald eagles circle their nest in the pine tree over the corn field. The corn field where the corn is a foot shorter than it should be because we are still in a drought. And I thought how much work has to be done in our generation. How many questions of an urgent nature, such as "What's happening to the life-systems that are the foundation of our foodways?", that need to be addressed.
A few weeks ago my brother's girlfriend came to visit from Baltimore. That city that so many know through The Wire HBO show. A city of poverty, drug dependence, violence, and desperate hope (often called despair). She stayed for a few days on the farm where my brother works and by the end she was agreeing with my brother and I that our people need to get beyond urbanism because that culture, that way of just-barely-living (i.e. hustling) is killing us.
But I am not advocating simple flight from the cities. We can't run from the city looking for a utopia in the rural areas. It didn't work when we came to the cities, so why would it work in reverse? The problem isn't the idea of living it cities by itself. The problem is that the cities that now exist are capitalist cities. They are cities where all the contradictions and hierarchies of the system are concentrated into a tiny area. If we learn anything from our combined rural and urban experiences of migration, wage-slavery, debt peonage, gentrification, and ecological disaster, it should be that what we need is comprehensive land reform.
By comprehensive I mean land reform that restructures both urban and rural ways of dealing with land. These days there is exciting work being done on the "right to the city" fights against gentrification. But there are also rural or non-metropolitan struggles going on outside cities by small towns and rural areas against hog farming that poisons the water and the air; against resorts and tourist industries that monopolize, exclusivize, and destroy beaches and other ecological areas; against highways and wal-marts. We need to connect these struggles.
But we need to go further. We need to begin envisioning and fighting for a world beyond urbanism. That means a world where resources are invested outside the big cities as well as inside them. The right to the city is important but we also need a right to the country. Our people need to have access to land to grow food, raise animals, care for the earth that is the basis for the communities and life-ways of both cities and non-urban areas. According to the Right to the City Alliance, 85% of people in the u.s. live in urban areas and these areas account for 85% of jobs. But then, who owns and controls the use of the vast majority of non-metropolitan land in the u.s.? And how does that effect those in the city, who are dependent upon their jobs (for which there is increasing competition and decreasing wages) for food and everything else? And what about the quality and price of our foods? The inflation on food products should be a wake-up call y'all!!
We need rural development. Not capitalist accumulation in rural areas, but services and resources to (re)build social life in our non-metro areas, to repair soils and waterways, to exchange skills and develop just and democratic (self)government. We need farm co-operatives and resources for small farmers. This is crucial if we are going to topple the corporate agricultural armies who are destroying rural life in the global South and are the top dogs in the neoliberal juntas. It is the genocide of NAFTA and other "free trade" deals that is at the root of the uprooting of so many folks who migrate to the u.s. from México. It is the ecocide of factory farming, mountain top removal, strip mining, and deforestation that is killing the planet and driving the weather crazy.
We need new maroons who are willing to build new types of rural/semi-urban communities for re-building the land, uniting rural and urban traditions and struggles, and teaching skills from food production to herbal medicine to construction trades and converting engines to biodiesel. That's how I see myself: a contemporary maroon, connecting the urban and the rural, finding new ways to carve out autonomous spaces outside the metropolis as both a liberated territory and as a staging ground for struggle in/against/for the metropolis.
We need cooperative ownership of land in cities and outside of cities. In fact, I would propose that every land cooperative should own land in the city and in the surrounding rural area. In Cuba there was a program slogan that called for the "urbanization of the country and the ruralization of the city".
An increase of resource investment in rural areas must be ON TOP OF social investment in cities. That is we cannot allow them to be played off one another. WE WANT EVERYTHING, DAMMIT! And how we gonna get these resources? We gotta learn from our comrades in the South: occupy, protest, organize, cooperate!
In this moment when the struggle over housing and gentrification is setting its sights on the question of land, we need to seize the opportunity to broaden our vision. Land is not something that ends at the city limits. It is an interconnected eco-social system. Our food and water and air depend on rural areas. The city and the country are one organic unit. The separation of the two has been no less damaging to our peoples than the separation and antagonisms around race, gender, nationalities, etc that have been set into hierarchies to the benefit of those who rule.
By connecting the rural to the urban we will begin to regain the land and the social relations (for land is an eco-social relation) that are the foundations of autonomy and community.
Down with the tyranny of landlords, urban and rural!
End landlessness/homelessness!
Comprehensive Land Reform in the u.s.!
from the mountains of desire,
Don Petro
I never felt so good as I did when I was working that garden. It was hard work, but it was also calming. Not only that, I was continuously amazed by the things I saw in my own backyard. The white snails with their enormous shells, the flambouyant red fungi that exploded in the nooks of trenches, even the hedgehog that always ate my blackberries the day before I planned to pick them. I didn't know it then, but something in me germinated during those early times of gardening: a desire for a less urban life.
But it was difficult to know this, since many of us city folks are raised without a concept of anything but an urban life. No one encourages us to grow up and move into the country. Of course, the big reason for this is economic. There is little money invested in non-urban areas. Jobs are scarce, infrastructure (water, electricity, paved roads) is often shitty , and poverty is much more common. Folks have become urban because that's what most people have had to do in order to survive.
What has forced this migration? The mechanization of agriculture, the concentration of land ownership into fewer and fewer hands, corporate monopolies over agricultural products, and the sheer brutality and violence used to enforce the 'order' of rural social hierarchies (e.g. slavery, latifundas, sharecropping, debt peonage, para/military terror, etc). At the same time cities have become places where more and more capital has been invested, generating jobs.
Thus, 2008 is the year when, for the first time, more than half of the world's population is living in urban areas. This is a huge change from the beginning of the 20th century (the 1900's) when only about 14% lived in cities.
Why, then, am I talking about life after ubanism if now is the most urban period in human history? The first and most obvious reason is that such cancerous urbanism is unsustainable. On a basic level the growth of cities, which has been mostly in the global South, has meant the growth of slums with little access to basic services and needs like jobs, water, housing, and safety. Ecologically as well cities on the scale that we are seeing them today are not practical. They simply suck up too much energy and belch out too much pollution.
If that isn't enough then consider the fact that even though the main motivation for moving from the rural to the urban areas is economic, urban areas are not structured to provide all these folks with employment. Rural to urban migration has always been something that urban industrial capitalists have encouraged because it put more people in competition for the same jobs, thus lowering wages. Landlords and real estate capitalists have also profited from the shifts in the uses of urban land, whether by building labor camp housing (i.e. slums, projects, etc) or luxury, leisure and business properties. Meanwhile the rural land owners, from families to megacorporations, have snatched up more and more land for themselves.
One of the greatests losses that many of us urban folks have endured is the fading away of our rurally based cultural heritages. Often that has meant losing our autonomy--our capacity to do things for ourselves--as well as our ability to form healthy communities. Land is the basis for community and for autonomy. Forced into becoming renters and wage-slaves we have lost many of the skills, knowledge, and cultural folkways that grew from sharing land.
I moved to NC to reconnect to my rural heritage. (The South not only has the largest concentration of Black folks in the u.s., it also has the most rural folks of all the u.s. regions). Up North Black culture is an almost exclusively urban phenomenon. No doubt we have developed strong and powerful traditions, but we have lost a part of ourselves. The South is also increasingly urban, but there still exists a rural tradition amongst Black folks and other folks too. This is what I'm immersing myself in. Learning about raising animals and also killing them. Learning about fixing things and making them. Learning about families and geneaologies and the overlapping histories of Black folks and white folks and indigenous peoples and brown folks of all kinds.
The other day I went out to a dairy farm and listened to a man talk about cows. I saw the calves and pondered over the fact that conception rates for cattle have gone from 80% to 40% in the last 50 years. Why? How? We don't know yet, he says. I rode out and sat with a six-year-old girl named Eden and watched the bald eagles circle their nest in the pine tree over the corn field. The corn field where the corn is a foot shorter than it should be because we are still in a drought. And I thought how much work has to be done in our generation. How many questions of an urgent nature, such as "What's happening to the life-systems that are the foundation of our foodways?", that need to be addressed.
A few weeks ago my brother's girlfriend came to visit from Baltimore. That city that so many know through The Wire HBO show. A city of poverty, drug dependence, violence, and desperate hope (often called despair). She stayed for a few days on the farm where my brother works and by the end she was agreeing with my brother and I that our people need to get beyond urbanism because that culture, that way of just-barely-living (i.e. hustling) is killing us.
But I am not advocating simple flight from the cities. We can't run from the city looking for a utopia in the rural areas. It didn't work when we came to the cities, so why would it work in reverse? The problem isn't the idea of living it cities by itself. The problem is that the cities that now exist are capitalist cities. They are cities where all the contradictions and hierarchies of the system are concentrated into a tiny area. If we learn anything from our combined rural and urban experiences of migration, wage-slavery, debt peonage, gentrification, and ecological disaster, it should be that what we need is comprehensive land reform.
By comprehensive I mean land reform that restructures both urban and rural ways of dealing with land. These days there is exciting work being done on the "right to the city" fights against gentrification. But there are also rural or non-metropolitan struggles going on outside cities by small towns and rural areas against hog farming that poisons the water and the air; against resorts and tourist industries that monopolize, exclusivize, and destroy beaches and other ecological areas; against highways and wal-marts. We need to connect these struggles.
But we need to go further. We need to begin envisioning and fighting for a world beyond urbanism. That means a world where resources are invested outside the big cities as well as inside them. The right to the city is important but we also need a right to the country. Our people need to have access to land to grow food, raise animals, care for the earth that is the basis for the communities and life-ways of both cities and non-urban areas. According to the Right to the City Alliance, 85% of people in the u.s. live in urban areas and these areas account for 85% of jobs. But then, who owns and controls the use of the vast majority of non-metropolitan land in the u.s.? And how does that effect those in the city, who are dependent upon their jobs (for which there is increasing competition and decreasing wages) for food and everything else? And what about the quality and price of our foods? The inflation on food products should be a wake-up call y'all!!
We need rural development. Not capitalist accumulation in rural areas, but services and resources to (re)build social life in our non-metro areas, to repair soils and waterways, to exchange skills and develop just and democratic (self)government. We need farm co-operatives and resources for small farmers. This is crucial if we are going to topple the corporate agricultural armies who are destroying rural life in the global South and are the top dogs in the neoliberal juntas. It is the genocide of NAFTA and other "free trade" deals that is at the root of the uprooting of so many folks who migrate to the u.s. from México. It is the ecocide of factory farming, mountain top removal, strip mining, and deforestation that is killing the planet and driving the weather crazy.
We need new maroons who are willing to build new types of rural/semi-urban communities for re-building the land, uniting rural and urban traditions and struggles, and teaching skills from food production to herbal medicine to construction trades and converting engines to biodiesel. That's how I see myself: a contemporary maroon, connecting the urban and the rural, finding new ways to carve out autonomous spaces outside the metropolis as both a liberated territory and as a staging ground for struggle in/against/for the metropolis.
We need cooperative ownership of land in cities and outside of cities. In fact, I would propose that every land cooperative should own land in the city and in the surrounding rural area. In Cuba there was a program slogan that called for the "urbanization of the country and the ruralization of the city".
An increase of resource investment in rural areas must be ON TOP OF social investment in cities. That is we cannot allow them to be played off one another. WE WANT EVERYTHING, DAMMIT! And how we gonna get these resources? We gotta learn from our comrades in the South: occupy, protest, organize, cooperate!
In this moment when the struggle over housing and gentrification is setting its sights on the question of land, we need to seize the opportunity to broaden our vision. Land is not something that ends at the city limits. It is an interconnected eco-social system. Our food and water and air depend on rural areas. The city and the country are one organic unit. The separation of the two has been no less damaging to our peoples than the separation and antagonisms around race, gender, nationalities, etc that have been set into hierarchies to the benefit of those who rule.
By connecting the rural to the urban we will begin to regain the land and the social relations (for land is an eco-social relation) that are the foundations of autonomy and community.
Down with the tyranny of landlords, urban and rural!
End landlessness/homelessness!
Comprehensive Land Reform in the u.s.!
from the mountains of desire,
Don Petro
No comments:
Post a Comment