The Agrarian Circle

Agriculture fixes their civilization into real estate, in a circle constantly widened by the expansion of commerce.

The formation of agricultural domains surrounded them with a wall that protected and imprisoned them at the same time. The scythe that harvested their fields of culture and occupation seems to hang its shadow over them and wrap them in a constant danger. Though they tighten their borders, dig deeper and deeper into the exploitable regions underground, and heighten their rooftops further into the infinite celestial dome, the act of appropriating a god, a master, and a spirit, they are nevertheless seized them by the head and enclosed forever into a ever more minuscule space. They spin around on whatever length of chain that is accorded them by the economy of their function and by their economic function: they expand and develop the exploitation of the earth and exchange the goods produced by it.

How could one see anything new under the sun when everything is dirtied and cleaned, mixed up and separated out in the waters of one and the same tub, whether it be the size of a village, a State, an empire, a continent, or a planet, galaxies colonized as far as the bored eye can see by an invariable need to make money, set up power, and conquer markets and territories?

The Terror of the Outside and the Inside

Beyond the borders that delimit property begins the country that belongs to no one, the land of disorganized nature, seen as a savage and hostile chaos by the first laborers. So we see that the farming community, fixed to the earth that it sows, curls up into its shell, and dives behind its ditches and walls in frightened expectation of an intrusion. Isn’t that frightened presence an insult and a challenge to the natural freedom of the wanderers?

There is not a single stone in the walls erected by agrarian society that doesn’t incite to the invasion of nomads, which doesn’t solicit the flood from outside; there is not a single stone which, in their walls cemented by the civilization of the mind, doesn’t invoke the horror and appeal of animal barbarism, an apocalypse come from animals.

Besides, what was there for the nomads in these isolated camps, opposing their unusual barriers to the coming and going of the hunter-gatherers, but a bit of food to gather, a good to glean? That’s how gathering became pillage and migrators became expropriators, that is, property owners in power.

These barriers to their free movement enraged the hordes, and those who were not destroyed conquered villages and were taken prisoner in turn. Such was the end of the civilizations predating the Neolithic, civilizations without a sovereign economy.

Becoming sedentary fixed behaviors into the routine of the scythes. Change started looking like a threat, and the unchangeable started looking like security. The pacifying repetition of seasonal gestures is like a buckle on a time that runs back upon itself, secreting a cyclical thinking, the redundancy of myths.

But at the same time, what a frustration this constrained immobility imposes, with the tractor and harrow hanging over one’s right to enter or leave! As much as it does in the rural areas, a second bind encircles: the invisible presence of the laws, which arm the masters and disarm the slaves, while the body itself is wrapped up at the top like an empire, hardened in the artificial trappings of a fetal and withered envelope which protects and imprisons it. Now are you surprised at the aggressiveness and cruelty that signaled the appearance of the Neolithic villages and city-States, according to the unanimous declaration of the historians?

Nature is Sick

The exploitation of the surface and subsoil of the earth has set up a wall between man and nature, that is, a rampart against man as nature, issued from a natural environment. The tradition of antiphysis has no other origin.

In patriarchal society, nature shares the fate of women and of the dominated classes. She is admirable from afar. Does she break the yoke that constrains her in the fury of her elemental rage? Then it’s a hostile, murderous, monstrous force, a threat to civilization. Does she let herself be flayed and raped by the agrarian, impregnated and robbed by rent, subjugated by thought? Then she deserves the masters’ condescension.

A rebel on the outside and a slave on the inside, they have to keep her watched from high atop the protective walls all the time. The spirit dreads the demands of the flesh, like the exploiter dreads the revolt of the exploited, like the property-owner dreads expropriation.

For all their having renounced a freedom which, while it was uncertain, contained the seed of the creation of a truly human destiny and a humanized nature, they’ve still only got any security in their fear of the gods, in a fetal protection prolonged artificially, in an enclosure against nature where the economy castrates and suffocates them. For them, peace is nothing but a worn-out, out of breath war.

It’s only in illusion that the ingeniousness of their techniques makes them better people. Measured by the truly human, these are only weak little men, incapable of producing anything that doesn’t grow on its own in the face of inhumanity and denaturation, dignified rivals to the gods which engendered them by coupling an incapacity to live with a rage to dominate.

Private or Collective, Economy Dehumanizes Just the Same

There’s no fence that doesn’t call forth ruptures, no property that doesn’t excite the avidity of the excluded, no prohibition that does not incite transgression. That’s the explanation for the old dictum, “he who hath land hath war”.

From the instant the right to property closes off the smallest corner of earth in its pliers of profit and technocracy, natural freeness is broken into pieces and auctioned off. Water for irrigation, the earth to fertilize, the habitat, wanderings, the air itself, everything produces interest, everything’s paid for and is made to pay, while hate, frustration, and aggressiveness attend a great funeral procession for the morality of the usurers.

And what would be different if the ownership of the fields, factories, and means of production were collective rather than private? If it were in the hands of all instead of the hands of a few, would natural freeness be any less denied and wrecked by the same privileges of the economy? Would the pollution of everything marketable have less impact under the auspices of collectivism than it does under the upturned cup of monopolistic capitalism?

Agrarian Immobility

Two pillars hold aloft the strata of their civilization: agriculture and commerce. These are the two pillars of a temple; since they’re so deeply implanted in the earth, as we know, they have always fed the illusion that they come from some heavenly edifice, the mystery of which dissipates only too late.

Closing in on man and society, the shadow of the scythe which is the agrarian structure encloses both of them in the ferment of an endemic fear. The fear of leaving the beaten paths, escaping routine, going beyond prejudice and customs, of committing themselves to the wrong side of the barricades, of losing one’s possessions, one’s place, one’s habits.

There a moldy sick-bed is made, which haunts the nightmares of immobility: the myths, the religious dogmas, the reactionary ideologies, the refusal to change and move forward, the hate and terror of foreigners, nationalism, racism, bureaucratic despotism, the ferocity of crimes and punishments, fanaticism, the frenzy of destroying and destroying oneself.

There, bestial animalness is caught in the trap of a ghetto society, a society folded in upon itself in a besieged, protectionist, muscular, fetal shell, the shell of a rigid society which engenders cults of patriarchal virility and perpetuates itself into the modernity of industrial nations like Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, Nazi Germany, or the United States, where the impact of the revolution of 1789 did not break the encirclement of consciences and of the chain of unchangeable behaviors.

Commodity Mobility

As much as the exploitation of the soil is rooted in the fixity of an eternal return, so much does commerce — that is, the measured exchange of goods produced for work — engender mobility, introduce change, and conduce to openness. Clearing out the familiar walls and known frontiers, it ventures out into savage regions, explores inviolate nature, and implants, further and further out, those bridgeheads of civilization, the counters and markets. It’s the great arm daring to reach out towards other territories the rottenness of a regime strangled by a strictly agricultural economy. It’s the conquering wing flapping off towards other horizons the sluggishness of a walled in culture. And thus it smashes to pieces the circle of the peasants’ unchangeableness, without abolishing it.

Extirpating humanity from its shell, it pushes it forward with the dynamism of interest, and lends it a bigger house, which is its universe to conquer. Its insatiable avidity incites it to dig deeper under ground to drag out a quintessence of profit from the rock, from the carbon, the minerals, the oil, the uranium — and doing so it also digs into the insides of men, in order that no machine be foreign to the intimacy of thought and flesh. Audacity, inventiveness, progress and humanism are born in its wake.

However, even the hardiest expeditions complete the cycle of withdrawal. The boats that go out come back to port, the law of gain reigns upon arrival and departure. Adventurers, pioneers, seekers, chimera-makers, prophets, and revolutionaries – all the roads they take, unusual as they may be, still just lead to the cash registers.