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natural-order [2017/09/30 15:39]
Richard Greeman
natural-order [2018/03/09 17:35] (current)
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-===== The Natural Order Re-Established ​=====+===== Restoring the Earth =====
  
 Little by little the natural order was re-establishing itself on earth. In the agricultural countries of the South, the peasants had taken back the good lands expropriated by invaders and used to cultivate luxury products for export to rich countries. These export commodities —coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, spices – had been produced by the labor of impoverished natives reduced to semi-slavery. Their children had ended up in horrible favelas, bidonvilles,​ slums and urban projects where they lived on garbage. In the name of “free markets,” rich monopolies had ruined peasant markets by flooding them with produce at the lowest prices. That unfair competition was subsidized by the “democratic” governments that offered gross subsidies to big agro-business enterprises. Little by little the natural order was re-establishing itself on earth. In the agricultural countries of the South, the peasants had taken back the good lands expropriated by invaders and used to cultivate luxury products for export to rich countries. These export commodities —coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, bananas, spices – had been produced by the labor of impoverished natives reduced to semi-slavery. Their children had ended up in horrible favelas, bidonvilles,​ slums and urban projects where they lived on garbage. In the name of “free markets,” rich monopolies had ruined peasant markets by flooding them with produce at the lowest prices. That unfair competition was subsidized by the “democratic” governments that offered gross subsidies to big agro-business enterprises.
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 Thus the natural rapport between city and country was re-established almost spontaneously in outbursts of solidarity, mutual help and cooperation. For the first time in five imperialist centuries, nobody was dying of hunger either in the rich fields of the earth or in the slums of great opulent cities. Thus the natural rapport between city and country was re-established almost spontaneously in outbursts of solidarity, mutual help and cooperation. For the first time in five imperialist centuries, nobody was dying of hunger either in the rich fields of the earth or in the slums of great opulent cities.
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 +Today in 2117 we live on a planet where vast desert lands have been reclaimed through irrigation and the revival of long-dormant native seeds, where new forests have been planted to halt erosion, prevent desertification,​ and absorb CO2 while releasing oxygen, where animal and vegetable waste matter is recycled as nature fertilizer, where permaculture techniques have replaced chemical fertilizers and pesticides, where small farmers flourish and provide fresh, healthy, seasonal produce to local markets which also serve to unite communities,​ etc, etc. 
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 +Yet all this was not only possible, it was already actually happening in a century ago on a small scale in the interstices of capitalist society, visible elements of the new world growing within the old.
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 +We now look back in horrified amazement at the world of 2017 — a planet of continued enclosures where forest people were exterminated and forests cut down to graze cattle for McDonald'​s burgers, where peasants were legally deprived of the right to plant their own seeds and forced to buy them from global monopolies like Montsanto, where peasants routinely committed suicide to escape the overwhelming burden of debt, where traditional subsistance farmers in Mexico
 +were ruined by the dumping of huge amounts of cheap industrially-produced corn into local markets, where vast factory-farms,​ owned by banks and conglomerates,​ were making billions transforming inputs of petroleum-based chemical fertilizers and pesticides into mega-tons of uniformly tasteless produce designed to attract the eye and to remain salable for weeks after harvesting, where agricultural products were transported thousands of miles to markets at a huge cost in carbon pollution, where monopolistic distribution chains paid farmers ridiculously low prices for their produce and suck up enormous profits overcharging customers, where nearly half of this excess produce went to waste in the '​advanced'​ while famines raged across half the world, where food riots out periodically broke out in Asia, and where the extraction of petroleum for industrial agriculture and the clear-cutting of forests for profitable luxury crops like palm oil contributed massively to global warming and impending climate catastrophe.
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 [[transportation|Transportation]] [[transportation|Transportation]]
natural-order.1506800388.txt.gz · Last modified: 2017/09/30 15:39 by Richard Greeman