By Charles Eisenstein at Brownstone dot org.
I've been rereading John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. This passage from Chapter 5 is shockingly relevant to the farm crisis today. It describes the early stages of the consolidation and corporatization of farms that continue to accelerate. Even more relevantly, it illuminates the systemic nature of that process, which defies any attempt to locate blame. Here, agents of institutional landowners are coming to notify tenant farmers that they must leave their land.
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank - or the Company - needs - wants - insists - must have - as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them.
These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.
Next comes a man driving a tractor, demolishing the homes and gardens of farmers who had farmed the land for generations. Steinbeck understood that no human being - not the man driving the tractor, nor the bank that hired him, nor the bank's local president, nor its board of directors back East, nor its shareholders and bondholders, were to blame for that loss. Or, perhaps, all were to blame. But really, it is the reflex of blame itself that he casts into doubt.
Blame allures the victims of a system with its promise of an easy solution. It substitutes a problem that we know how to fix for one that we do not. Here is an exchange between a tenant farmer and the tractor driver, who has warned the tenant that his house is in the way of the tractor:
"I built it with my hands. Straightened old nails to put the sheathing on. Rafters are wired to the stringers with baling wire. It's mine. I built it. You bump it down - I'll be in the window with a rifle. You even come too close and I'll pot you like a rabbit."
"It's not me. There's nothing I can do. I'll lose my job if I don't do it. And look - suppose you kill me? They'll just hang you, but long before you're hung there'll be another guy on the tractor, and he'll bump the house down. You're not killing the right guy."
"That's so," the tenant said. "Who gave you orders? I'll go after him. He's the one to kill."
"You're wrong. He got his orders from the bank. The bank told him, 'Clear those people out or it's your job.'"
"Well, there's a president of the bank. There's a board of directors. I'll fill up the magazine of the rifle and go into the bank."
The driver said, "Fellow was telling me the bank gets orders from the East. The orders were, 'Make the land show profit or we'll close you up.'"
"But where does it stop? Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I kill the man that's starving me."
"I don't know. Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe like you said, the property's doing it. Anyway I told you my orders."
Maybe there is nobody to shoot. Then what? OK, within this monster made of men (and these days, women too), among those manning the machine, some are more cruel, more rapacious, more ruthless than others. But they did not design the system. It's more like the system designed them.
I just got off a call with some activists in the regenerative agriculture...