someone on revleft mentioned the "one mile diet" in cuba. i googled it and it turns out to be popular in some womens magazines. they're encouraging their readers and offering tips and advice to start your own garden. i think this is something it would benefit a lot of leftist groups to start doing, encouraging members to have their own, or small communal, gardens, or some other practical projects. this would be a good way to spend more time with each other and discuss things in a friendly way, and would undoubtedly bring in interest from our neighbors, which is usually a good thing.

i think in general leftists might learn a lot from more analytically paying attention to what is going on in popular culture, especially what they're basically recommending as coping mechanisms for the misery of capital. it would give us a much larger pool of strategies and tactics to draw from, or at least help us understand how our enemies use them.

This diet (as well as the 100-mile diet) has been really popular around these parts lately. I think it just ties into the whole individualist-liberal-hippie thing where we can all change the world by going on this diet.

Shouldn't this be in diy or maybe practice and propaganda, not strategy?

But yes I think that we should all produce for ourselves as much as possible.

obviously it ties in to that, but i also think going on a "one mile diet" as these magazines are advising will inevitably mean greater interaction with one's neighbors as you will be outside a lot, and if multiple people are gardening they will work out trades, etc. one of the magazines appeared to have set up a garden at their office, and given every employee a plot. in general i think they will have the side effect of fostering a stronger local community for those who get involved and its this aspect of their recommendations i'm more interested in than other benefits like having your own food, cost saving, etc. i think pro-revolutionaries could be undertaking and encouraging projects like this to foster good relations with our neighbors and experiment with it as a form of organizing against capital, as a zone of opportunity outside of the workplace.

i don't think so. my intention in posting this isn't specifically gardening or diy projects, but to start adapting a revolutionary strategy to the 21st century by paying attention to how capital is organizing the means to sustain itself, and if we can appropriate their means to our ends. if lenin was correct about the capitalists selling us the rope to hang them with, then it seems to me we should be looking to pro-bourgeois sources for inspiration, ideas and methods just as much as, if not more than, traditional pro-revolutionary sources.

We should all live like feudal serfs, in other words? Small, self-sustaining, cut-off agricultural enterprises belong to the Middle Ages. While it may be a nice bit of fun for privileged Westerners with eccentric ideas and time on their hands, there really is nothing to celebrate about them as far as them being serious alternatives to the status quo. Ask impoverished farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, people who have no choice but to engage in subsistence farming.

For socialists, the only progressive alternative to capitalist agriculture is for agricultural workers to take over the most advanced means of producing food and expand them in the interests of all -- so that we can produce an abundance of food and so that no one has to endure backbreaking agricultural labour ever again.

please stop derailing my thread.

Yeah, this sort of thing has more potential than a lot of communists give it credit for. The way I see it, a lot of people try turning this into an economic issue when the psychological impact is the most significant facet of this kind of project. Modern capitalism is rooted in the increasing atomization of our communities, and our interactions/surroundings have become a function of economic activity (work, shopping, etc.) To transcend this upside-down, separated way of life, revolution is necessary, but to work towards revolution we need to build communal activity, interaction, etc. Moreover, in a society that systematically strips individuals of any sense of empowerment, the possibility of creating something as an autonomous community is the first step towards the collective self-confidence required for tearing down the power structures of capitalism. In this vein, I think community gardening can be part of a broader movement of social centers, neighborhood assemblies, etc. -- as long as we don't let these projects lose their radical character and fade into stasis.

I've mentioned it, but I didn't mean the trendy do-it-yourself gardening. While good, I would rather have it be a government program.

And despite what Vanguard1917 believes, being environmental and being responsible with the limited production capacity of the soil is NOT regressive.

The short-range diet does not necessitate inefficient production. You can have a local collective or a farming collective shipping food from 3000 miles away.
But go ahead Vanguard1917, waste our resources so you can live in congested cities.

This doesn't have to be a sciences and environment topic. This is a topic of social and economic organization. And for anyone who doesn't feel that this is important (V1917) read John Bellamy Foster's work (editor, Monthly Review). Marx clearly stated innumerable times, especially in Capital that metabolic rift is a huge concern. not simply the energy of agriculture good transportation, but also the soil nutrient exporting.

Where do you think the calcium in our bones, in our food comes from. Where does it go when we die?

If the majority of the world is sucking the nutrients out of remote areas and pooping and pissing it into the rivers and oceans and then preserving more of it in wooden coffins when they die, then we have a "contradiction". Something Marx spent his greater research focusing on...the contradictions of capitalism.

I like your points. It is important to remember the social-ideological impacts alongside the material impacts of such organization of our economy. Neither exist in vacuums.

Well, at least one thing I think needs to be said about this. Many within the leftist movement will critizise initiatives as 'lifestylism'. What they mean is that it's an illusion that changing your own lifestyle will change the world, because the mayority of polution and shit comes from governments and multinationals.
Because of this, they abandon 'lifestylism' and continue their lifes in this capitalist society by consuming as much as all the other sheep, munching on their fastfood and throwing their garbage on the street (both literally and figuratively).

Well, in that case, give me the 'bourgois lifestylists' anytime over the true 'revolutionairy' with the McBurger in his hand. I agree that 'lifestylism' isn't enough, but it is needed. We can't just talk the talk, we need to walk the walk. We need ecological gardening. We need to be socialists and share our produce. We need to stop consuming and acumulating.
And I think in this way, eco-villages or diy-gardening is very important. As soon as I have any piece of ground I can use, I will make a biological 'moestuintje' (dutch), to grow some vegetables.

I like what youre saying, but I think you're perpetuating the false dichotomy.

It doesn't have to be enlightened middle class whites who start a lifestyle movement. The atomization has to end! I advocate more localized and visible farming with markets where people can connect.

Simple science dictates the biggest problems are the recycling of nutrients and long-distance farming.

backyard farming alone will not change that. We need to organize for compost collection and better use of sewage water to be used for fertilizer. Saving your own compost is good, but don't expect to morally or even rationally convince a large number of people to quickly adopt our examples. We need to radicalize by action! The Black Panthers could make a community instantly aware of them by putting armed guards at street corners by schools to make sure people don't run over black school children until the day the city hall relents and installs stop signs in the ghettoes. A food-garbage/compost collection would make people rethink their habits.

South Korea collects food waste separately and have a very high tolerance for recyclables, and because of that I have seen how slowly I make "garbage" when smelly food is taken out of the equation. Physical experience does far more than a book does sometimes.

i'd like it if we could get the thread back on topic. again, my point in posting about this wasn't to encourage gardening because of any possible ecological or economic benefits it might have, but to examine this trend as something that could be used by pro-revolutionaries as an experiment in community organization and to promote the idea of looking to bourgeois sources for new ideas and tactics.

I didnt read anything before this that said we should be like "feudal serfs"
Somehow this post reminds me of the GOP tea party people.
But anyways I think it's a good idea to garden and grow ur own stuff! But I think community based/wide gardens are better. Altho I will say that vanguard is right that mass farming should be primarily by farmers. Growing everything you'd eat is very hard. Esspecially in winter

It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to produce much, the whole point is that it allows people to interact beyond the restrictions that this money society imposes on us (as wage slaves and brainless consumers). Anything that is against the total social alienation that we experience today is certainly a step forward.

I think it is a very viable strategy. Not only does it disrupt capitalist labor/social relations but it also both gives a man a fish and teaches him to fish at the same time. The alienation inherent in urban life must be attacked and we must know and help our neighbors. Also it creates lots of opportunities for comrades to interact with people and expose them to our points of view in a comfortable environment. Any way to make the anti-capitalist movement more visible is needed, especially if people are also being helped in the form of food, knowledge or voluntary labor.

It won't work. This was tried on every scale during the 60s from window boxes, to neighborhood gardens, to communes. It didn't change a thing. The alienation in communities can't be overcome by projects such as this.

The reason why Marxists look to the working class and organize in and with the working class is that at the point of concentration of labor and capital, in the struggle for surplus value, lies the political, economic, psychological heart of capitalism. This is where the primary contradiction is, and this is where the stuggle to overcome it takes place.

Not in a garden.

RED DAVE

i'm not suggesting gardening as something that should become the primary form of struggle to the detriment of organizing and agitating within the working class, but as another area where the class can be organized. working people have lives outside of the office, and i can certainly talk to a wider range of people from my class in my neighborhood and my job than just on the job. i think its also important to mount a counter-offensive against the "enclosure" of social life that the ruling class has been pushing since the development of capitalist relations. furthermore, i'm only using gardening as one example of the main idea i am trying to get across, not as the only possible form it could take.

Incorrect

What about the South Central Farm, LA? Some of the former farmers of this once community-owned urban farm have relocated to other land the government gave, but they've been holding nightly vigils for years to get the land back before ?? Horowitz can build a warehouse or whatever on it.

I advocate local self sufficient homegrown food as a way to free yourself from capitalism BUT freeing ones self is not enough. We need to collectivize the industrial means of production. Separating yourself from total dependence on the capitalist system is a good thing but we will always be connected to capitalism in one way or another until it is abolished.

I guess my point is- these things are good but should not be the only tool in the revolutionaries tool box.

um, i didn't say anything about freeing yourself from capitalism, or that this should be the only focus for pro-revolutionaries. in fact, i said the opposite.