That shit is personal
An argument against exploitation in relationship to people and nonhuman people (plants)
What about farming (your own garden, perhaps) are you curious about? Do you have questions about getting your spot ready for winter? Or about how to start a totally new thing next spring? Leave us a comment and we’ll answer questions in our November newsletter.
We do small, everyday actions to interrupt capitalism in agriculture; the parts of agriculture we’re told are normal. Like repurposing used plastic cups and spent coffee grounds—from the coffee shop we come to in order to send you this newsletter—interrupting the chain of new plastics produced for agriculture.
Up and down
Capitalism has created a situation whereby the only way to make profit (especially in agriculture) is to exploit others—and often yourself. We won’t. We have been wondering for a while, why an anti-capitalist way of treating people and nonhuman people (plants, animals, water, etc.) is so often viewed as lesser.
Why have people come to expect that ego equals experience and good business requires heartless exploitation?
We are not trying to capitalism in a way that takes any more resources from our already poor region. And because we aren’t exploiting our community for quick cash, we are not seen as reliable narrators.
If we were going hard for the coffee that already grows on the farm, we could be doing exactly what the rich folks living between here and Ohio do; pay our poorest, least privileged, and sometimes oldest neighbors $7 a day to pick the beans. Not $7 an hour, but $7 A DAY! (btw that is what Alex made per hour, 25 years ago detasseling corn in Nebraska).
The equation looks something like this: Acres deforested multiplied by the number of people exploited, divided by the degree of exploitation, minus the sky high prices of fertilizers due to the jones act, equals the potential profit to be made in coffee.
The only way to capitalism in agriculture is to exploit someone.
Putting the pieces back together
We are still having to tent like we are camping for recreation. This year the rainy season is living up to its name in fitful starts and stops. A little over a week since the municipal water came back (and seems like it won’t stop again immediately) and a little over a week since the sinkhole in the highway was finally fixed.
Since the living shelter collapsed, we have been in the process of rebuilding. Because of the precarity, we’ve had to put away most of the art supplies and haven’t been able to make time to draw; something about this feels like failure.
How do we find balance? How do we reconcile that balance with what is going on in the world? These drawings are our incomplete, and imperfect answer.
A few critiques and a thought
We’ve told people, repeatedly, that things are tough. That when we show up, we do so at great energetic and material cost. We wish it didn’t always come to us sharing some really personal shit to have a voice, to be considered reliable narrators of our own Iives. Alas.