It’s 2022, and money is still with us… money is still against us. If only it were, still.
I thought it’d be good for me to define what I feel money is at this current historical moment, though I doubt it’s rarely, if ever, strayed far from being this: money is a device to exercise coercion. The more of it is offered to you in exchange, the more likely you will do something out of your natural inclination, or the more of it you will do as the degree of money increases. Things you wouldn’t have otherwise done, but money matches the distaste for the activity/labor/giving up of a possession for a certain quantity of money, and so you are coerced through this medium that we’ve allowed to veil what is really going on. The genealogy of money and that money is not transhistorical, but was created/furthered/imposed by a certain group on larger groups of people is exactly why some people have it/create more of it, and why some people are on the other end. Ultimately if you don’t comply or enough of you have banded together and not complied with money’s intrusion into your time and freedom, you have been the target of military force/propaganda that has forced you and the land you dwell on, dead or alive, to become part of the swollen empire that has money as one of its basic systems of circulation, along with energy that also maintains the empire from atrophying back to a non-globalized natural setting.
Where my thinking was coming from that lead me to talk about this? I was thinking of talking and sharing “What is food sovereignty” since it’s a term myself and several others have used a lot in these recent years, and something we’ve thought about fighting for, so it is sensible to have some sort of grasp of what it is. But all along trying to imagine an articulation of it and the fact that something so basic hasn’t been widely articulated or available, told me how bad the private property-ification of the world was and is and continues to be, and so I thought a clearer explanation of what the problem is, other than just “green pieces of paper/digital bits/property deeds/laws/governance” but to unpack a little of how it all functions to coerce us into doing things that are out of what we’d do otherwise.
*I feel I’m writing too much and discussing this too much in a way that a British teacher would applaud, so I’m going to do my best to check that and not let the cold calculating ways of speaking take over; I am a human writing this, a human very much feeling the weight of an oppressive system coming down to some degree on me and witnessing to a horrific degree the weight and burden coming down on others who are further away from food sovereignty, for example. Just had to say that, my long break from writing and I realize my voice has changed and the OCD very much inherent in me is trying to be okay to sound off without a huge time contribution and any editions.
**The war against the world, aka the euphemism climate change, has me doing things I wouldn’t otherwise do, as I see total ecosystem collapse looming and the 6th mass extinction becoming total extinction, but these are things I accept as real challenges and I want to heal the land… I’d want to heal the land even if there was no longer term doom that’d come from leaving it broken/destroyed the way I found it. This feels a lot more compelling to call on my time and effort than a vague, unexplained manifestation of quantified value in the terms of money, a network that seems to favor certain people and disfavor many others. The living in me sees the non-living in the money, whereas the living in me sees the death in ecosystem collapse. Death is something that feels natural to deal with, money just feels unnatural and so dealing with is not part of my promised animal experience, and I’m going to do my best to avoid it as one should avoid walking into a stagnant mosquito and alligator loaded swamp. Ademas…
Food sovereignty as a right, is the way I’m angling to posit this, and so access to food SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH ACCESS TO MONEY. The monetization of almost all things on and below the Earth’s surface now—the cancer that we’ve seen spread, to put monetary figures on both meta-imaginary nominal values of money in financial hedge spreads, to money quantifying every living thing and every part of every living thing, totally stepping over and basic rights to life those currently-living, future-in-question-living entities are once the economy gets a hold of them and rips them into money-ified exchangeable bits, the monetization of all this—has pushed access to food, just like access to shelter, out of reach for many, both those who choose to refuse and even those humans who try to comply with the money system but get caught up in wars against their people, get injured and are limited to work, and the vacillations of an unreliable economy and distribution of money. Money will never be fair, it can only be a fare. Money can’t solve money, just as cancer can’t solve cancer. Only a reclaiming of the land and all things that money has touched and divided into exchangeable bits, only this can heal the versatile wounds put on the land and people. Food sovereignty is one such angle. It is one of a few basic things that resonates with people: a right to have food and not have that access be threatened by any force for whatever reason. Food sovereignty rights, like all rights, are a push against money, to push money out of a certain space, namely that of access to food—real food, not food desert new food—which also entails a right to access land/water, because all food comes from these places, historically and arguably in the future, once present obsessions with technological solutions are shown to be nothing but offsets of energy/nutrients acquired from the land and redistributed and packaged in ephemeral availabilities (Tech food solutions are akin to EROI –> technologies that create food are still dependent on the original source and do not add anything novel other than temporary distribution of food in, perhaps, urban environs or other equally hostile environs, i.e. Anarctica). Humans have a right to be on the land, to access land that is healthy enough to sustain them. Humans evolved because of this relation never being challenged. And now that is challenged, for several millenia in certain places and now on a world-wide scale, evidence that it is being challenged and that millions of humans are dying of it all the time is in the history of many wars and conflicts, especially surrounding European history but it is not limited there. Food sovereignty is up against a fence. It is time to both challenge the fence’s existence and step away from it so that our food vines may grow on the fences remains, and we may access the land without something always against our back, like money, pushing us, suffocating us, confusing our values. Money is the ad absurdum, and we need to flee it’s deadly cancerous logic. Onwards to freedom! Being with Food!!
Subverses 