This Bear Has Claws
On The Insufficiency of Letting Them Eat Otherwise
Longtime readers will know that I enjoy spirited debate and am no shrinking violet when it comes to throwing a writerly jab or ten. (Sorry, Ross.) Lest you think my hibernation has dulled my claws, I’m proud to present Strongpaw’s poor imitation of a mailbag. I occasionally post links to kind things people write about my work, but today I will be giving some loving attention and tender ministrations to the critics.
I must issue a hearty congratulations to friend-of-the-newsletter Professor Benjamin L. Cohen for landing a piece in the usually excellent LA Review of Books. Cohen reviewed Kate Brown’s new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere, which looks quite good and I’m eager to read (I mean both of those statements quite earnestly), along with another book, which, in a remarkable coincidence, shares the title Jan and I gave our book, Feed the People!. What are the odds? Odder still, if Cohen’s summary of the book he reviewed is accurate, the book he reviewed comes to a number of conclusions that are directly opposed to ours. Weird, huh? I haven’t read the book he reviewed, and I hope he’ll take the time to review our book at some later date.
I kid, I kid. Cohen was also reviewing our book alongside Brown’s. I’ll mirror Cohen’s level of collegiality—this will be fun!—because Cohen certainly lays out some real zingers. Jan and I are accused of promoting a “Meatless Butz paradigm,” a reference to Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture and food-left bugaboo, Earl Butz. One could fairly say that leveling that accusation shortly after introducing Butz as a guy fired from his position at the USDA for telling a racist joke means the prejudicial effect of the epithet, as the lawyers like to say, vastly exceeds its probative value.
Besides bizarrely (and hopefully unintentionally) implying Jan and I are racists (thanks!), Cohen’s argument is that we prioritize efficiency and productivity above all else and particularly over and against the humanistic values espoused by Wendell Berry in a debate Berry conducted with Butz nearly 50 years ago. Butz, you may know, implemented policies that were intended to expand the production of commodity grains—mostly corn and soybeans—for global export. In the debate between Butz and Berry that Cohen links to, Butz’s specific argument is that American agriculture should be organized to generate maximum profit for farmers, who should be ruthlessly guided by the demands of global markets. Butz is explicit about that argument, and if it were one Jan and I made in the book, you could, indeed, fairly criticize us along those lines, Vegan Earl Butzes.
In sections of the book that Cohen doesn’t mention, we explicitly and unconditionally criticize Butz’s way of thinking, if not his policies by name. In particular, we hold up commodity corn, soybeans, and animal products as primary examples of where productivity and efficiency narrowly serve private profit with devastating socialized costs. We write that the production of those commodities is a disaster, albeit one that has proved extremely lucrative for incumbent farmers and other agribusinesses. We also write that it is the product of government policies that are optimized to make commercial farming more profitable for a tiny group of already quite wealthy people rather than providing living humans with affordable, nutritious, and delicious meals. The latter is what we think should be prioritized, which is why policies that would decrease the amount of land dedicated to growing corn and soybeans, as well as decrease the production of meat and increase the production of fresh vegetables, are what we advocate for throughout the book. We say all this repeatedly, but I won’t bore you by self-quoting the numerous times we say it. I’ll quote what we wrote in the conclusion, in a passage that apparently missed Cohen’s tenacious scrutiny. I apologize for the length, but it truly takes willful blindness to miss it, although, since it appears at page 237, I suppose it’s possible Cohen had already given up on the book. To whit:
Food has to stay affordable for consumers, and agriculture has to continue to be highly productive. Less productivity means more land use or more reliance on labor in dangerous and poorly compensated jobs. More expensive food will increase food insecurity and could cause a further deterioration in nutrition. Throughout this book we have argued for practices and policies that preserve and improve productivity and explained how that in turn can shore up support for progressive practices and policies. We also recognize that although workers and communities sometimes reap the benefits of improved labor productivity in the food system, it’s often been siphoned off by the already rich and powerful, leaving problems to fester and worsen. Part of building a better food system means recapturing the gains from highly productive modern agriculture and redistributing it to those who need it most or redirecting it away from harmful ends to beneficial ones, be it for people or for the planet.
Potential changes to the food system should be made with an eye toward increased productivity on the one hand and affordable and abundant food on the other. But these are not worthy ends in and of themselves. Low food prices are, in general, a good thing. They are not only politically important, but they are also a great outcome of modern food production because they fulfill a basic human need—food—at the cost of minimal labor. But pushing for low prices isn’t worth putting kids to work cleaning meatpacking plants or gutting the minimum wage. Not every bit of productivity savings is worth it. The whole point of keeping food affordable is to improve general social welfare, not to immiserate some portion of the workforce just so that a food corporation’s stock price perks up a few extra cents. Put differently, we are so emphatically supportive of labor-saving technological improvements guided by public investment and regulation precisely because they can ease the cost pressures that higher labor costs might incur.
Nor do we think all food should be as cheap as possible. In fact, some foods should be more expensive to disincentivize their production and consumption, such as sugary drinks because of their health effects and red meat because of its contribution to climate change. But the principle that a nutritious diet is accessible to all people should guide visions for a better food system and, indeed, may be the number-one demand the public makes of those who would change it. We remain skeptical about the efficacy and political feasibility of outright bans on foods; thus, we favor regulations that are consistent with the dignity of individual choice, even as we are candid about the need for all food items to bear the true social costs of their production and consumption.
Meanwhile, embracing productivity for its own sake is part of the reason we have many of the problems that we do with the food system. US corn agriculture is enormously productive, so much so that we’ve found useless things to do with all that corn. Being productive is good if you’re producing good things (like delicious affordable food), less if you’re producing toxic manure lagoons and biofuels. Ignoring this basic difference can lead to outright outlandish suggestions, such as a New York Times op-ed published in December 2024 that argued for more factory farms because they are the most efficient way of producing meat and because the author seems overly certain that people will never reduce their meat consumption—an assumption often made but rarely substantiated. This sort of narrow-minded thinking about productivity got us the horror of factory farms in the first place and is also why so much land is wasted growing corn to burn as ethanol. When we argue for productivity, it is in the sense of using the tools and technologies of modern agriculture and applying them to the general task of creating an abundant and affordable supply of food for direct human consumption.
Meanwhile, we commend treating with respect and trying to understand other people’s pleasures—yes, even their meaty pleasures—but with the proviso that we also have to be candid with people about the scientifically documented harmful consequences those pleasures bring. Democratic hedonism’s commitment to pleasure pluralism comes with a healthy dose of being willing to tell it like it is. As we discussed in Chapter 3, CAFOs are a relatively more efficient way of producing animals, yes, but a very inefficient way of producing calories and protein at scale. It is, in the aggregate, unproductive. You can treat people who eat meat with respect while being clear about this fact; indeed, being honest in your disagreement is what real respect looks like.
Continuing to improve productivity in food and agriculture requires an openness to technological innovation that will not square with the idea that farming can, or should, be returned to a simpler, purer Edenic state. The surest way to ameliorate many of the most grievous harms generated by the food system—even those allegedly caused by the food system’s supposed industrialization—is more and better technology. Want less pesticides on your food, for instance? The most reliable ways to reduce pesticide use at scale are better spraying technology and GM varieties that are engineered to be more resistant to pests.
It is true that we are curious about technologies that can make the production of foods to sate human needs more efficient and less costly, and we do not reject particular technologies in a knee-jerk fashion as “unnatural” or always destined to immiserate workers and bind them to the will of capital just because they are currently being developed by unsavory actors primarily motivated by private profit. Quite to the contrary, we believe that people who care about the general welfare and are institutionally incentivized to protect it must be constructively involved in the development of those technologies if we wish to avoid those disastrous outcomes. There are many ways we might accomplish that. One of them, again repeatedly noted in the book, is to support broader public investment in agricultural and food technology and basic science, particularly if it results in open-access and publicly owned intellectual property. Another way is to increase the power of workers in the food system more broadly and, in alliance with state regulators, to help steer the governance of firms that are developing and using those technologies. Is this enough to sustain the accusation of a Butzian flavor? I’ll let you be the judge.
Elsewhere in the book we dedicate an entire chapter to strengthening the ability of workers to organize in the food system, a position I believe Butz vocally opposed. Cohen handwaves those 32 pages, apparently interpreted to be unrelated to our larger project, in this single sentence: “In a chapter on labor, they walk the picket line with Waffle House workers fighting for better wages and protections against the fistfights that plague late-night shifts, explaining that the strikers also love the diner’s menu and want an improved, not defunct, workplace.” Later he rebukes our approach to labor with this cryptic sentence: “The difference is not that organic farms are free of labor issues and industrial sites are not; it’s that organic scales make control and influence possible while industrial ones don’t.” I’m not entirely sure what “organic scales” means and think the editors at LARB did him a disservice by letting this sneak into print, but I presume he means that organic farms are, on average, smaller-scale and, therefore, easier to “control and influence.” Both sides of this claim are tenuous. On the one hand, Cohen name-checks Julie Guthman immediately after this as a corrective for our work, but as Guthman notes in her book, Agrarian Dreams, organic can be squared with large-scale production. The contrast of small good organic farms with big bad organic farms is a false opposition, and that mystifies the political economy of agriculture, an object that both Guthman and we try to keep in our sights. And, on the other hand, as we point out in that 32-page defense of unionization and sectoral bargaining, small farms are typically harder to organize than large ones for basic practical reasons, which is why many of the most successful efforts to organize agricultural workers have emerged from the struggle of workers on conventional, larger farms that have many more employees. In other words, contra Cohen’s claim, it is not apparent that, in fact, organic farms are necessarily smaller or that smaller farmers are necessarily easier to “control and influence.” (Notably, Cohen fails to clarify what entity is doing the controlling and influencing, regulators or consumers.) I’d love to have a serious and nuanced debate with Cohen on this point, but he doesn’t address, much less rebut, our actual arguments. We are misconstrued as enablers of the very capitalists we explicitly and repeatedly would like to constrain through stronger regulations and better-organized workers, a key takeaway of our book.
I suspect Butz would also take a dim view of another chapter in our book, in which we argue for the expansion of social welfare programs that directly redistribute resources to hungry people and, especially, hungry children. I do not know what Cohen thinks of SNAP and universal school lunch programs because he has almost nothing to say about that chapter. For what it’s worth, I am skeptical of proposals that purport to alleviate hunger by asking poor people, very often members of the working poor who toil in restaurants and grocery stores, to labor on urban farms because we are convinced the labor of doing so is de facto pleasurable for everyone—as an empirical fact, it is not—and perhaps morally edifying for them. These requests often come over and against straightforward requests from the working poor for better pay, direct redistribution of income, and the ability to decide for themselves what they would like to eat and how they would like to spend their meager free time. By all means, I think some or many may decide to eat food grown in their own gardens, and they should be helped to do so, but working in a garden ought not be the requisite for assistance. Indeed, I’ll take the harder line still: every last person, even the scofflaw and shirker, deserves a meal, whether they worked or not, and policies that make that possible are what we aimed for. I think highly of Brown’s scholarship and look forward to reading her book. I will not criticize it without having read it. I will, however, quote verbatim what we said about community gardens in our book. In yet another passage Cohen neglects, we write the following:
Now, poke around New York City food politics long enough, and another solution to food insecurity will inevitably be brought up: urban gardens. Walk the streets of the city’s boroughs, and sooner or later you’ll run into a part of a city block not filled with concrete. Be it between two brownstones in Brooklyn or in the shadow of newly built condos in the Bronx, you’ll see a patch of green, often filled with planters brimming with vegetables, sometimes marked with hand-lettered wood signs. They are beautiful, bespoke incongruities in the gray cityscape. New York City is home to hundreds of community gardens, at least 550 of which are supported by the city’s GreenThumb program.
The gardens have a storied past of reclaiming urban space for communities and being sites of resistance to unchecked development, including pitched battles between gardeners and city hall over land leases. Studies of urban gardens consistently show their myriad benefits, ranging from the health perks of physical work outside to creating stronger communities and acting as spaces to incubate and act on the principles of direct democracy. And sometimes it’s just good to get some dirt under your fingernails. It’s beautiful to harvest something.
Community gardens are an invaluable part of life in the city. But one thing community gardens are not great at is improving food access, no matter how often this claim gets repeated.
Sure, producing your own food, especially in neighborhoods where ready access to fresh food is lacking, is a good thing. However, the problem in the city, and much of the country, isn’t that there is an insufficient supply of tomatoes and cucumbers (availability) but that the people who should be eating the tomatoes and cucumbers cannot afford to buy them (access). Free or cheap locally produced food seems to be just what’s needed, and to the extent community gardens provide produce to needy populations, that’s fantastic. But it’s just not a transformative intervention at any meaningful scale. Statistics for production quantities in these small gardens are hard to come by, but a 2012 report of 106 participating gardens showed a total annual yield of 87,000 pounds of food. For the sake of argument, let’s multiply that by 5 to match the official number of the city’s gardens and assume they produce 435,000 pounds of food every year. An impressive bounty to be sure, especially when grown by hobbyists on small plots, but less than 10 percent of all the food distributed by WSCAH alone. And while it means that some people who might not be able to afford those tomatoes or cucumbers do get some now and then, New York City residents consume about 20 billion pounds of food every year. This means that even with our generous estimates, community gardens produce .002 percent (2 one-thousandths of one percentage point) of the city’s food supply. Qualitatively invaluable, quantitatively valueless. Harsh but true.
We will defend community gardens to the death as crucial sites for community building, gardening education, and respite from the crush of the city. But if we’re being serious about addressing food access, we must look for pathways like SNAP and food pantries that connect the affordable food grown on large-scale, productive farms to the food-insecure consumers who need it.
Let us compare that text with Cohen’s claim about our feelings about gardens, which is another attempt to catch us in a contradiction: “Although small farms and gardens won’t bring the authors pleasure, they look back with longing to one of their childhood gardens of bounty.” Wrong. Gardens do provide us—Jan and I both—with pleasure and they are perfectly defensible for that reason—indeed, we defend them for that reason in the very text Cohen purports to review. What they are not, by our reckoning, is a very efficient way to get affordable food to hungry people. And so, if resources are scarce, we may be forced to choose between two noble priorities: feeding people in an efficient fashion by effecting resource transfers or furnishing some portion of them with access to pleasurable gardening experiences. If we had to choose, we know where we would land, but it is the distinct privilege of Cohen’s position that he will never have to explain how he would choose, much less reckon with the possibility that there are unpleasant trade-offs that have to be made. He can, however, blame us for our candor on the issue, which seems to stem from a frustration that we decline to indulge in a predictable “capitalism is to blame” punt that hides culpability for resource inequality in the mostly ahistorical vagueries of pseudo-leftist sloganeering rather than the particular material realities with which we must contend, bound as we are by actual materialist analysis. Better than choosing, of course, would be escaping an austerity that would make these alternatives mutually exclusive, which is precisely why we argue for abundant, accessible, and delicious food and the productive plant agriculture that could power it. We do so not to prevent people from enjoying gardening if that’s what they would like to do; we do so to ensure that they can garden if that’s what they would like to do.
Of course, all this talk of trade-offs and numbers must make Cohen itchy, for in Cohen’s favorable summary of Berry’s missives on the topic of “quantities,” we learn they are things talked about only by capitalists and technocrats. He begins the review with this uncritical summary of Wendell Berry’s response to Earl Butz in the aforementioned debate: “The quant guys are exploiters, Berry wrote, who are here not for you but for capital.”
Cohen isn’t brave enough to say outright he agrees, and I will not put words in his mouth, preferring to do him a courtesy he couldn’t be bothered to offer us, so I’ll respond only to Berry here as Cohen paraphrases him: The world would, indeed, be a much easier place to navigate if we could recognize exploiters solely on their proclivity to cite numbers and statistics in their prose. In my experience, it just ain’t so, least of all because many exploiters act much and explain little, whether quant or qual. But both quantities and qualities are needed to help us to interpret a social field and political choices. They are both ways in which we attempt to make sense of the particularity of experience in relationship to conceptual abstractions and a social field too vast to be comprehended by any single individual. And so, yes, Marxists too must learn how to count, for if you think in a battle against capital, it is only the quality and not the quantity of soldiers that matters, you will lose every battle you fight. And class war is not a marketing contest, and the citation of statistics no more makes one an exploiter than Butz’s folksy demeanor made him a salt-of-the-earth, ordinary yeoman. I suppose Cohen does know this, and certainly Brown does, for in bolstering the case for gardens, Cohen recites a great number of quantities, albeit, in my opinion, quantities that are not terribly persuasive for settling the claim upon which we very may respectfully disagree with Brown: the claim that community gardens are an effective tool to improve food access for hungry people.
And here’s another problem: capitalism isn’t one stall to choose from among many at the local farmers’ market; it’s a system of property relations enforced by men with guns, and I can promise you those men know exactly how many bullets they have. Sadder still, so long as community gardens and groovy family farms exist within the larger extant framework of private property, they are not meaningfully anti-capitalist in the sense that, say, Raj Patel or Julie Guthman or any of the other sophisticated writers Cohen opposes us to typically mean. (That’s not to say that Patel or Guthman agrees with us on all or most of these things.) Cohen writes, in a favorable summary of Brown, “Trying to recover work that’s been forcibly undone doesn’t have to be nostalgic; it can be liberating.” No. I think again that this is wrong. It may feel liberating. It may help to facilitate an understanding of the world that will steel us for the coming challenge of liberation. But it is not liberation from capitalism to work on a land that is secured through the same property relations and does nothing to disturb those property relations that also secure the rights of the most extractive and irresponsible corn and hog farmers to their acres. To be anti-capitalist under the conditions of our regime of property relations requires one to transform the rules, not simply to pretend that your private garden operated without their benefit. One can do so by violating those rules and becoming a criminal or, if one is still committed to the work of pluralist democracy as Jan and I are, fighting to change the rules for everyone. Gardens don’t do that. Farms don’t do that. CSAs don’t do that. They do other things, many of them beautiful, worthy, and defensible, but they are not sufficient for the tasks of either violating the rules or altering them, though in some cases they can be plausibly argued as additive precursors to either. But, yes, our book is about the rules. Our goal is to help people who may want to change them for the better. Modest charity would read us and evaluate us by that goal—we may still be quite lacking—but I cannot even detect modest charity in Cohen’s description of our book.
There is one passage that I think goes beyond merely sloppy to something quite a bit sadder for its author. Cohen makes a series of grasping attempts to expose contradictions in our book in a single paragraph, attempts that yield such underwhelming sentences as, “They explain that unprocessed brown rice leads to lower disease rates than milled white rice but also claim that organics aren’t that healthier.” I’m not quite sure what the sentence means since it seems to conflate processing with organics, but apparently it exposes a contradiction. And: “They critique Berry for minimizing settler culture, even while they advocate for an industrial scale that exacerbates a settlement ethos on dispossessed native lands.” Cohen, again failing to engage the substance of the text he is critiquing, may not realize that the agriculture of North American indigenous peoples, as we note in the book, often harnessed the labor of entire large communities and, thus, frequently operated at larger scales than the settler agriculture, praised by Berry, that violently displaced it. That settler agriculture was often organized around the labor of single family units residing on land secured through private property. If Cohen knew much about contemporary tribal agriculture, he would also know that tribal communities are quite capable of operating large-scale and highly mechanized farms, and many do.
But the paragraph ends with this bit: “Berry’s 1990 essay on ‘the pleasures of eating’ includes seven action items, which they call a list of chores. Their conclusion has a list of 10.” Sick burn! We criticize Berry for having a list and then have an even longer list of our own! But as with every one of Cohen’s inconsistencies, the contradiction resolves when you read the actual passages. We’re not arguing against lists of actions,. Berry’s list of seven actions is his description of steps the average person can take to obtain “extensive pleasure” from food, which he says “is pretty fully available to the urban consumer who will make the necessary effort.” His actions all relate to how one should organize and prepare for one’s activities as a food consumer who intends to use money to purchase food, and presumably the more you do of these actions, the closer to extensive pleasure you’ll get. But that’s an empirical claim that is, yes, testable. Does, for example, talking to the farmer you purchase your produce from give you pleasure? Maybe the world would be a better place if it did, but that’s not Berry’s claim. Berry’s claim is that it does generate pleasure. We think the failure of most consumers to do the thing Berry claims “is pretty fully available to” them is actually strong evidence that some significant portion of people, contrary to Berry and Cohen’s wishcasting, don’t actually experience these actions as pleasurable. Some I regret to inform you, may not even like gardening, and hand-waving their preferences as a problem magically resolved after the revolution is just not going to cut it.
Of course, it bears repeating that Berry’s whole list is premised on a theory of social change in which more discerning consumers purchase food from gentler, less exploitative vendors, with a different set of expert educators—folks like Cohen, one supposes—helping the proles to discern the kindly capitalists from the ogreish ones. Of course, one could also read that form of taste as class-formative: people who can distinguish good capitalists from bad capitalists are the worthy betters of those who can not. Now that I think about it, that closely resembles the history of Whole Foods. Yet again, this is aesthetic faux-radicalism and, root and bone, takes private property and capitalism as the water in which we will always swim, the imagined limits to it being mostly vibes. But being a conscientious capitalist does not make you anti-capitalist. It pains me to say so, but that’s the reality.
Now what about our list? For starters, it’s not a list of tasks that will bring you closer to pleasure. It’s a list of examples of actions individuals can take, many of them that may be, in point of fact, unpleasant, and most of them are not predicated on people understanding themselves as consumers using their purchasing power to help worthy small capitalists prevail in their battle against unworthy big capitalists. (We note, that it is through prevailing in this fight, that small capitalists are transformed into big capitalists.) Indeed, in nearly every case the purpose of the action we present is either to expand the food options available to other people (not merely ourselves) or to alter the rules that govern access to food and other resources in our terribly unequal society. You can do all of the things we list. You can do none of the things we list. None of them are posited as musts, though we think they all have some value. All of them are provided to illustrate our approach, which is the difference between examples describing a rule and a list of steps constituting one. It is not a list of chores that will facilitate your transcendence by helping you to shoot the shit about local produce, but it should clarify the larger claim, again neglected by Cohen, that consumer actions alone are unlikely to alter the rules that govern our society, especially when they are not supported by large-scale institutions and a well-ordered regulatory state. That will require political action, exactly the thing our book is intended to rouse. And it is ultimately changing the rules that we hope to effect if the task, as I would define it, is to chain capital more firmly to the implacable rock of the state and, by doing so, change the rules we call private property for the better. If I am to be accused of false nostalgia for anything, let it be for nostalgia for a functioning regulatory state and a food left composed of people who would defend it against these late vultures.
As for Berry, modern readers often mistake his frequent celebrations of labor for Marxist analysis and interpret him as a sort of country-fried Herbert Marcuse. More discerning readers will recognize that with his poetics, technophobia, antiurbanism, and sneering Christian moralism, he’s a better fit for Martin Heidegger, especially Heidegger’s late writings on technology. Indeed, the arguments against expertise Berry puts forward in The Unsettling of America, much of it echoed in Cohen’s review, share uncanny parallels with Heidegger’s critique of technicism and the Map of the World in “The Question Concerning Technology.”
Heidegger, you will recall, had hitched his wagon to the Nazi party, thinking perhaps that their rhetorical anti-modernism and folksy populism would be a good vehicle to renew German culture grown degenerate and sickly in the wan light of technological modernity. His gambit proved disastrous, personally and for Germany. The Nazis, their folksy, oft-agrarian rhetoric aside, did not disassemble modernity, capital, and the technocratic state to restore Germany to bygone Volkish vigor. Instead, they dedicated the state with frightful fervor to their murderous ends.
In the aftermath of the catastrophe of the Second World War, disgraced and shunned, Heidegger withdrew to a hut in the Black Forest—we might call it a country house. He hiked and gardened. He composed sour tracts on the sorry state of the world, the aforementioned writings on technology. There was no reflection on his role in the catastrophe. Nor was there any serious analysis of the political mistakes of the 1920s and 1930s, an effort to examine how and why Germany’s center and left had failed to unite and resist the Nazi seizure of the German state. Instead, the catastrophe was blamed on “technicism” writ large, a tendency in the organization of society wrought by our relationship to technology that reduced human being to a grand “standing reserve,” disposable, fungible, and instrumental. It’s a compelling vision on its surface, but, in context, its diagnosis is also so broad and vague that the catastrophe of Nazism, in fact, appeared suddenly as everyone’s fault and perhaps therefore no one’s fault. Most of all, it was not Heidegger’s fault, since Heidegger now was the most vocal and pristine critic of technicism. He even lived in a hut in the woods and gardened! And this also explained the bitterness of Heidegger’s castigations of modernity. How dare the world blame him for Nazism just because he had joined the Nazi party when it was he more than anyone who, in his asceticism and poetic withdrawal, fought technicism with the utmost passion and who modeled the truest radical acts: poetry and farming.
We face in our moment another catastrophe or, more precisely, are already neck-deep in it. Reactionaries have once again seized the state. They did it promising to tear down our disappointing modernity with its overbearing and burdensome regulatory state, to free the productive energies of the society it shackles, and, thereby, to restore a lost Eden and, with it, our broken, sickly, poisoned bodies. In practice, the reactionaries do not shackle the state, nor capital, but redirect both towards ever more shocking and violent ends. In the face of this, many curse the weapon the enemy wields yet will not struggle to wrest it from them.
If you hope to oppose their actions, you must fight these people for control of the state. You must turn them out of it and redirect its powers towards better ends. You must deactivate its war-making abilities and redouble its regulatory capacities. That is the challenge. That is politics. You cannot garden your way out of it nor hide in your country home. The slogans of dime-store libertarianism are no refuge, nor are those of the lifestyle anti-capitalists; these are but the sad echoes of the same rhetoric that led us to this place, decades of bitter recriminations about the failure of the regulatory state that accomplished nothing but its abandonment as a site of ongoing class struggle. The day is late. As I said, the men with guns know how many bullets they have. Fight them for the state or perish for all time.