Down with the Cities Part 18

A social structure in which few farmers feed a great number of idlers forces the farmers into labor-saving, high-yield, ma.s.s-supply agriculture, and this necessitates the heavy use of agricultural chemicals and chemical fertilizers, as well as making the farmers neglect the application of compost to the land. The inevitable result is oil-soaked fields and a kind of agriculture characterized by contamination, plunder, and destruction. One could also say that the idlers, by means of the progress of science and technology, have promoted the mechanization and contamination of agriculture, thus making it possible for a handful of farmers to feed legions of idlers. The city sucks up everything.

Therefore food contamination is, simply put, brought about by the social structure, not by the laziness and greed of farmers.

Needless to say, the contempt for agriculture and the priority of the secondary and tertiary industries are also causes of the fall in the farming population. When over half the people were farmers, half the content of our language and song books were based in the farming villages, and the stories and songs glorified agriculture and the farmers, but now that less than half the population are farmers, such stories and songs have all but disappeared. For the same reason, one rarely if ever sees the farming villages or the farmers in television shows or in the piles of magazines and novels.

In this case it is an inversion to say that the contempt for agriculture and the respect for urban industries have brought about the reduction in the farm population. Changes in the social structure are brought about by the power relationships of material productive capacity (or the money economy); social trends and consciousness is merely a reflection of such.

Therefore the contempt for agriculture is not a problem of education or att.i.tude, but decidedly one of social structure.

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This is the main theme of this chapter, and so I will write in more detail about this later. But now I would like to emphasize here that increasing the agrarian population (that is, sending the secondary/tertiary population back to the farms), getting everyone to pull weeds by hand, make compost, give up agricultural chemicals, and produce modest quant.i.ties of clean vegetables, while being our goal, is quite impossible and unrealistic unless we solve the land problem.

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There is no other building material which has so well built the arrogant city and wrought such damage to the Land as concrete.

Has there ever been an instance in which cement was used for a purpose other than to plaster over the Land? Whether it is made into buildings, fences, wharves, Hume pipe, or to make channels, its ultimate role is inevitably to block off the Land. So for every bag of cement that is produced, that much more of the Land will be covered over. And the cement factories are running at full capacity every day, turning out great amounts of cement (to cover over the Land), and sending it to be sold in the city.

"Urbanization" can now be perfectly equated to "concretization."

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Nostradamus hinted that "the crisis of humanity will come raining down from the sky," but, while I have no intention of contending with the Great Nostradamus, I believe that the crisis of humanity will come from the Land -- not as fast as falling from the sky, but just as surely.

I have said it many times, and I will say it again: As long as our present "peace" continues as it is -- destruction of the forests, desertification, the loss of topsoil and the acc.u.mulation of salts, the contamination of soil and water with synthetic chemicals, and the accompanying expansion of the cities -- we will see the desolation of the Land continue. "Peace"

signifies the stability, prosperity, and prodigality of the city, and it is impossible to maintain this kind of peace without sacrificing the Land.

It is "peace" that destroys the Land and leads humanity to ruin.

Furthermore, if a war should start Nostradamus will be correct; either way, it means we have no future.

The only thing that will barely guarantee our survival is a scaled-down life, a life of regression and austerity. To put it another way, our survival depends solely upon the disappearance of the Maker of Peace (the peace of prosperity and ease), that is, the city.

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The reason wars over land do not occur in the natural world as they do in the human world is because other living things take and acc.u.mulate no more than they need. A lion kills no more than it needs to eat its fill, and a sparrow will not store up more insects and seeds after it has eaten enough. Only human beings, for whatever reason, establish economic societies, and go wild over the acc.u.mulation of wealth. If we too do not know sufficiency we will surely perish. Wild (natural) animals should be our model.

CHAPTER IX Independent Farming

Of all the occupations on Earth, the only one that allows us to be independent is farming. All occupations other than farming must depend at least upon agriculture, or else they have no source of life; for this reason independence is impossible. If, as a result of their contempt for agriculture, the other occupations try to become independent of it, their pract.i.tioners will soon die!

Agriculture is, at the least, none other than a "means in itself"

for maintaining one's own life, so as long as one does not seek excesses such as convenience, extravagance, and ease, and is prepared for a life of austerity, it is possible to become totally independent.

What on earth do people mean, then, when they say, "It's impossible to get along just by farming. One can't keep food on the table by being a farmer"? It is one thing if one is referring to factories or apartment buildings in the concrete cities, but such a remark is quite incomprehensible if the speaker is a person who has the land which produces the food by which he can keep himself alive. But of course we know that these people mean it is impossible for them to acquire the trinkets and gimcracks and pleasures that urban extravagance offers.

The secondary and tertiary industries, in their infinite mercy, make their governments grant subsidies to agriculture, which is the only occupation on earth capable of independence, but this is nothing less than a clever reversal meant to pull the wool over our eyes. That agriculture must continually curry favor with others as well as suffer great difficulties is without a doubt because of the deception, dirty tricks, and schemes of Money (or the schemes and plundering of the money economy, known as the "market principle"), as characterized by agricultural subsidies.

Could there possibly be any other reason?

I therefore believe that in order for agriculture to avoid the interference of the secondary and tertiary industries, it must first become independent of money. Money cheats the farmers; the devilish machinery of the money economy makes the farmers take on debts, and its phantom money (loans) make double plunder possible.

Note well that the ultimate cause of the farmers' privation lies in the exchange of food for pieces of paper, and that subsidies are mere bait to prepare for plunder.

Money: An Instrument of Plunder

The mint churns out tons of money, and with government bonds as the medium, wads of this money roll to all corners of the country (as, for example, the salaries of public employees and appropriations for public works projects). [51] Some of this paper money is saved, and some of it is used to buy food. If you take it to the store and throw it into a shopping basket, it changes magically into food. So there is absolutely no basis for a.s.serting that money will not be used for the plunder of food. If there were no such plunder by means of money, it would be impossible for the city to survive for even a day unless it took food by force.

Let us a.s.sume now that part of that money which was saved is now lent out to the farmers in the form of agricultural loans. It will be immediately consumed by the purchase of machinery, fertilizers, and agricultural chemicals, whereby it is returned to the pockets of Capital; all that remains with the farmers are debts. And just as I pointed out before, these debts contribute, over a long period of time, to the plunder of agricultural products. In order to pay back their loans, the farmers must work themselves into the ground, continually offering great quant.i.ties of farm products to the city.

Money is none other than a weapon for the purpose of ripping off agricultural produce.

Control of Agriculture with Debts

During a meeting at which was discussed the internationalization of agriculture, Ibuka Masaru, the Honorary President of Sony, said that "Agriculture has only 1/1,500th the productive power of industry." Since money as well is produced at 1,500 times the efficiency of food, it too functions according to the same logic as industry does. (For example, let us say that you borrow money from the bank. If you turn out goods at the rate of several tens a minute, you can pay back the principle with interest in only a short time. Or, if you move several thousand units of your product around in a certain way, you can always pay back the money you borrowed for capital.) But Nature moves according to very slow rhythms, and agriculture is bound by the laws of Nature; to try and make agriculture move at the fast pace of money inevitably means that agriculture will be left behind.

Should one borrow money in order to get started in agriculture, one will find that, even if the interest is half what it would be for business or industry (or even if one gets someone to pay the interest for one -- for example, a subsidy), it will be quite impossible to pay back the loan by means of agricultural produce alone.

The same goes for dairy farmers in Hokkaido, for those who raise cattle, for those who raise broilers and laying chickens, for citrus farmers, for mechanized farmers, and even for the American farmer, the incarnation of the large-scale modern farming method (it is said that, as of 1985, American agriculture is 54 trillion in debt). And this is not the only way money oppresses agriculture, for it has yet to rout the farmer decisively.

If, for example, there is a b.u.mper crop of cabbage, the total cost of harvest, sorting, packing, shipping and kickbacks at the market is sometimes far greater than the selling price of the cabbage. The more the farmers ship, the more money they lose, and so there are times when they plow the cabbage into the fields with a bulldozer.

The more the farmers work (the more food they offer the city), the more money they lose. Has there ever been such an idiotic system? And that is money economics for you -- the devilish machine (the market principle) invented by the city.

It is quite true that, after a certain point, one needs no more agricultural products since stuffing oneself full might bring about digestive disorders. An excess of other products will not bring about indigestion, and as long as one has a place to put them, it is possible to have many in order to feed one's vanity.

It is the market principle that takes advantage of this one weak point of agriculture.

The market principle -- another way of expressing this is "business." For example, the price of eggs is not decided as a result of compet.i.tive selling on the market; in actuality, a few market big shots make the decision after seeing how many and what kind of eggs are being shipped into the market at Tokyo. Local prices are based upon the price in Tokyo, so when Tokyo gets a lot of eggs, the price in other places is low even if there are not enough eggs. Therefore the market principle is a business technique, the art of wheeling and dealing.

Back a hundred or so years ago, this was a tea-producing region.

Every year at tea-picking time the broker would visit the farmers. "This year the price of tea is higher than ever. Give it everything you've got, and pick every last leaf."

Joyful at the news, the farmers would work their hardest, squeezing every last bit out of their tea fields. The broker, watching for the moment when the tea was ready, would run breathlessly to the farmers with a telegram in hand: "This is terrible! I've just received a telegram from Yokohama -- the price for new tea has fallen to rock bottom!" Thus it was the simplest thing for the merchant to use business technique to deceive the farmers.