Under capitalism, food is either one of two things, a comodity, or a luxury. Either food is something you buy for as cheap as possible in the supermarket, a burger from macdonalds, a carton a box a can a plastic bag. Or food is a luxury art piece made by some celebrity chef or another where you (or lets be honest, people richer than you) pay to eat some abomination "fusion" quisine and drink expensive wine while having dull smalltalk with your co-workers. Of course, in a society which doesn't look like industrial capitalism, food is neither of these things. According to Marx, peasents in feudal times engaged in production purely for use value, I assume he would imagine a serf sees his food as simply "that thing which keeps me from starving". However here I dispute this, firstly because there is plenty of eveidence that unlike the stereotypes might suggest, peasents actually ate well, local fresh seasonal produce, artisan brown breads, lobster and salmon and all sorts of spices which have since fallen out of use in european cooking. This new perspective that people in the past actually ate tasty, neutritious diets is now seemingly breaking into public consciousness, but it's not quite what I'm talking about here. I am not here asking what people ate, I am asking about their relationship to food.

Not just in the past, I can' tknow that without a time machine, I am trying to imagine what my relationship to food might be in a world that doesn't look like industrial capitalism. I can imagine, rather than producing food simply for its use value, I might have rather a different view, where the distinction between production and product are blurred. If I am alive (which I hope I am), then I am sustained by food. If I am happy and healthy, then I am sustained by good food. My experience of being is deeply, deeply tied with the food I produce and consume, so much so that I may come to view it, not as a comodity, nor as a useful product, but that the totality of food and the land which grows it, are an extension of my self. I will die if my permaculture dies, and i will suffer if it suffers, and i will thrive as it thrives. We are as one. A truly post-capitalist mindset is one which values other things above pure production, and this is something which I see leftists struggling to envision. Many leftists (perhaps as a consequence of arguing with capitalists), repeat ideals about how actually, communism is more productive than capitalism and so on. When i think about my idea of anarchism, I cannot delude myself into thinking this will be the case. It may be more stable and sustainable than either communism or capitalism, but it will certainly not be as productive. This is a feature, not a bug. Abolishing capitalism means reorienting life away from production. Tribal subsistence societies often value chore-labour (like say grinding flour or churning milk) as a part of the fabric of communal social structure, women gather in a shaded area and socialise as they do the essential chores. Of course I'd like to see every gender chipping in to do things like this unlike often strict patriarchies of tribal society, but we can see in places like rojava and traditional ways of life in less patriarchal societies like kerala that patriarchy here is imposed upon a mode of production and social organisation which is not inherantly patriarchal. What I mean to say here is, the abolition of work here entails reorienting attitudes away from productive output and towards the totality of the creative process, including it's social aspects. Such proceses are not even alien to many people who might read this blog. I have a feeling whenever I am tinkering with linux on my thinkpad that I am creatively affecting an aspect of my self, which is as much a tool as my hands are a tool.

Im not saying this place will be a utopia. Far from it. However it will be one thing, possible, which I cannot say about industrial civilisation. There is only one way that industrial civilisation become possible long term, and that's if someone somehow figures out how to make fusion power viable, and then with our new cheap energy abundance mines asteroids once the earth's resources dry up. Im not even so cynical that I believe that's impossible, I just think that's a pretty big if to place all your bets on. As things stand, when natural resources like fossil fuels start to dry up, we are not going to have capacity to continue to live in this energy-rich, comodity-society.

There are many people who call themselves anti-capitalist. I think there is a degree of absurdity to their thought. They will point to "actually existing socialism" or something similar, in the form of many modern attempts at escaping capitalism, the classics are all there right, all the revolutions you've heard of and some you haven't. They are more than ready to critique and take inspiration from and argue about the merits of these attempts. That's great and all but isn't it missing out on something even bigger. If you want to look at actual examples of people living without capitalism, why ignore the tens of thousands of years that everyone did?

I see some non-anarchist lefties criticising anarchists for not have realistic sollutions to basic problems, particularly problems of economics. Now often anarchists do give bad answers to these questions, so I don't entirely blame people for laughing at them for that. However I contest that there is a sort of mental gymnastics going on in the minds of the questioners. They may ask a question along the lines of "how does society keep running, and distribute the things people need to the people who need them without state apparatus?", then an anarchist may answer, but here there is a trap. They then look at our answers and either say they're unrealistic (again, I will not defend too hard anarchists on twitter who have no understanding of economics, or are overly utopian), or that they are not suficient to the standards which say state communism can supply. I think when they ask "how will a society function in anarchy", they get surprised when the answer is "significantly different from how it functions under industrial capitalism". Someone might critique me by saying "oh so you want everyone to go back to being farmers?" because what they really want is for somehow everything to continue as-is, but with the "bad stuff" that keeps the backend running taken out. Yes, i think most people will grow a good portion of their own food. I think the fact that we don't right now is a luxury we are paying for with mass environmental destruction, and that is not sustainable in the long run. People managed their own food supplies communally for a really long time and the state had to use physical violence to get them to stop. If you think something as normal as being near to the production process of the things you consume is a step backwards, then firstly I dont think you've actually understood marxism in the first place but secondly you think there is such thing as steps backwards and forwards. Life is going to be hard, life has always been hard and will continue to be hard and I am not deluded enough to tell you that we can live in fully automated post-scarcity luxury by reorienting the mode of production. I simply make the claim that life will *be* at all. You really think growing some potatoes is harder than living in the fallout of mass ecological catastrophy? Of course I'm not proposing everyone spend all their time farming, in existing subsistence communities this is not that case, and it has never been the case in history. You have probably heard that the average serf worked fewer days than modern service workers. And they had to spend around 20% of their time farming for the local lord, which would obviously not be the case here.

I know it's been done to death in anticapitalist circles, so I'll keep it breif but I do think this attitude stinks of capitalits realism. Leftists who want society to simultaneously change completely, while not functionally changing at all, because they can't imagine interacting with the world in any way other than they do now being anything other than terrible.

The term subsistence has a bad wrap, "merely subsisting" seems to be a negative, however when used in the context of "subsitence farming" i think it should bring a possitive conotation. Work, the work you do to stay alive and keep your community eating, should ideally not take up too much of your time. You need time and energy to spend doing other things. So a subsistence farmer is someone who farms just as much as they need, no more, no less, and has maximum time to spend doing other things. Subsistence as opposed to what? Generally, the other form of farming is comercial farming. Farming much more than you need, than you could ever possibly use, in order to sell on and turn a profit. It's not exactly a new practice. European peasents often farmed rye for themselves, a more resliant, cheap, and hardy crop, but also wheat to sell at market, which earned a higher price. Surplus product is actually pretty common when doing things youreself, growing things. You have to milk a sheep sometimes 5 times a day or more. This is probably too much milk to consume at once as a single person. You have to find ways to preserve it, and also to give it away, to share it. It's not like having an excess of food is a purely modern phenomenon, it's been that way (situationally) for a long time. The difference is scale, and aseasonality.

I suppose i might touch on a little bit of other stuff I've been thinking about recently, specifically to do with animal agriculture and veganism. I sometimes think I think too much about vegans. Do they "live rent free in my head"? Of course, I would never charge rent. I think I am interested in them because they often occupy similar spaces to me, like anarchy and ecology, and also have a very clear cut moral framework (at first glance at least). So perhaps I just come across them a lot. Not sure. Anyway, I am not a vegan, although I ackgnowledge and agree with a lot of their critique of industrial factory farming. I do not think a plant based diet is very sensible in post-civ. Here I won't really challenge the moral arguments of veganism, but I am interested in the envoronmental ones. It is a fact that animal agriculture is on the surface an ineficient use of land. It takes more land per product to raise livestock than to grow crops. However the thing I see vegans miss here is that this is not some great revelation, but a fact that is pretty easy to figure out and has been known for thousands of years. The question should be instead, why did people decide to raise livestock in the first place if it's so ineficient? Surely an early agricultural society doesn't have the land or labour to waste on something so inefficient. Well the answer is that it is not in fact inefficient, there is one very simple fact. Not all land is appropriate to grow crops on. Some land can only grow grass. The stored energy in the plants which livestock graze on is in a form which humans can't use, cellulose, but grazing animals can digest and turn into a usable form. There is a reason sheep and goat herders tend to be found in rocky mountanous areas, you can't grow crops there very well at all.

The people who domesticated animals weren't stupid, they chose and bread animals who produced more than just meat. Meat is pretty inefficent, so we raise animals which produce milk and eggs and wool primarily, and meat as a secondary product. This brings me onto another point which is this: generally each crop can be used for only one thing, grains and vegetables for eating, things like hemp or cotton for textiles, similar things like this. [EDIT: I have been informed that hemp is actually much more versetile than I had thought, "The grain is edible. And when you properly separate the fiber the Hurd that’s waste can be made into hempcrete or like rodent bedding. Also apparently hemp is good at pulling heavy metals. It’s the sheep of plants"] Animals have a much more diverse use vallue, as well as meat, dairy, you can get hides, feathers, wools, bones for carving, saturated fats for food preservation and myraiad other uses, bladders to store liquids, horns, teeth, and extremely importantly, manure, without which you will struggle to grow crops in absence of modern fertilisers. Have two feilds, crops in one, sheep in the other, swap them over every year replenishing the soil of both. A single slaughtered animal is an entire wealth of useful material, so even if it was that much more costly to raise livestock than grow crops, you also get much more use out of it. Of course industrial agriculture ignores a lot of this use and is incredibly wasteful, but that is very different from raising animals at all.

And I have one last gotcha up my sleeve. Growing huge feilds of monoculture grains and food crops is an absolute environmental disaster as well, likely responsile for mass death of insect species, requires fertilisers and pesticides which poison the environment, not to mention the labour rights of often misstreated underpaid immigrand farmhands who do most of the actual hard work on the feilds. It's an open secret that monoculture crop farming is one of the major factors in bee population decline, it's cascading down and ruining the food chain. At this point you have to take the possition of "just because I eat plants, doesn't mean I support the way they are produced, and I try my best to buy from more responsible sources where I can". Hey look, it's the exact same possition meat eaters take too! checkmate, lib owned.

I admit I feel a little guilty here, since vegans really do nothing wrong, there is no reason to shit on them. The vegans and vegitarians I know are all lovely people, who don't eat meat just because they find it gross, which is perfectly understandable, and also because it's expensive, which is also perfectly understandable. I have nothing at all against vegans in general, I just wanted to get some things off my chest about flaws in their ideology. But hell, there's plenty of flaws in my ideology too. What exactly am I doing to actually create the world I want to see? I can kid myself that being a NEET running a minimal website etc is doing anything good, where as really it's just avoiding doing anything too bad. Even if I were to start my own permaculture tomorrow, and live off of it for my needs, start a commune, whatever, that's once again just minimizing my own impact, not actually challenging anything fundamental in a real way. What one person can do is limited, sure, and how they can go about doing it I will leave up to the reader's imagination for obvious reasons, but it's not like I'm involved in anything like that.

How does healthcare work in a post-industrial world? Does it doom people to die because of lack of modern medicine? My counterargument is that we're all fucked anyway, society collapses anyway, figuring out good ways to live in that collapse is going to save people, rather than expending countless resources trying to prevent it which would ultimately leave fewer resources for healthcare, and anti-biotics are going to stop working soon enough so we're doomed either way, and it's probably possible to synthesis a lot of drugs without industrial processes etc but all of that is really just a cussion for the big fall. How do you make propper PPE without industrial process. You are going to struggle. It's not going to exist as well as it does now. It's a tradeoff, and one I'm not sure i'm happy making. I can continue to list counterpoints minimizing the weight of this tradeoff but small or big, it's going to happen. Even the words "post-collapse" are controversial to me. Do I really think techno-capital is going to let itself die just because it sucks for humans? Not so much. I hope we can create small pockets. That's all.

Just some areas where things aren't quite so fucked. That's all I want.

Most revolutionaries have an anger at the way things are, but that anger is fueled by an optism that things can get better. That was probably me a few years ago too. But these days I dont know that things can ever really, truly get better. After all even if we abolish all the systems that need to be abolished, we're still stuck inside human bodies and human brains, we'll still suffer. Some people seem to think in utopia we won't suffer, or at least not to nearly the same degree we do now. I don't agree. All of human history is an attempt to run from suffering. Liberal capitalism was born out of the same desire. Now I'm just doing the same thing. Humans will still suffer no matter what. Consciousness is a virus. It's an oroubouros virus who's existence has always been implied since the big bang, and who's end was set in stone at the same time. The destruction of the universe. Antinatalists argue that we should stop reproducing, so no other humans are born and therefore never have to suffer. What if another animal also evolves consciousness, indeed many aren't too far off already. Ok we must steralise the earth. But what about other planets, life could evolve consciousness there too. The only way to ensure that we truly kill the virus of consciousness, the only vaccine, is to destroy the entire universe. You want purpose? Meaning? That's it. That's the only way this can ever end. It's the only possible end.

So yeah of course I'm not acheiving anything. No one is. All we can do is suffer and destroy. I'd like to keep using my thinkpad to play brutal doom in the meantime. It's a fun game. Doom runs on anything. Even the human mind.