Blood in the Fields

Industrial Agriculture, Land Enclosure, and Political Violence

"Developments associated with enclosure and industrialism have not only undone property for the many but have also dissolved their societies and scattered their members, generating the conditions in which people have nothing to sell but their labor to strangers. It is both because people have been dispossessed of their land and disembeded from their societies that [Pope] Leo [XIII] thinks they are without protection— surrendered, isolated, and helpless before those who would prey upon their vulnerability.”¹

A recurring theme in Junger’s writing is a return to the land, or at the very least, a lament for the death of landed life. Modern society has swept us up into the machinery of its complex entanglement, the machines themselves fill our ears at all times, and dominate everything from the physical living space of our neighborhoods to the arrangement of our workspaces to the nature of work itself. But how were we all brought off the land? How did we get here? We did not all, like old Wittgrewe from The Glass Bees, leave the life of the rural horseman to become trolley conductors; by now most of us have never known a simple life, and we dream of it as very complex.

It is time for a serious conversation on the consequences of the rise of capitalism and the replacement of the society that existed before it. I will be using Matt Whelan’s excellent book Blood in the Fields for a historiography on the impact of liberalism, industrialism and capitalism on landed people and the social consequences of corporate oligopoly on land ownership. Blood in the Fields has been particularly enlightening and extremely useful for a number of reasons, the first being that Whelan’s use of El Salvador means that this story takes place in the late 1800s through the better part of the 20th Century, meaning records and documentation is far better preserved from this period than, say, the 1500s and 1600s when these programs were being implemented in Europe. Secondly, between the Oligarchs and the Communists was a third figure in El Salvador; Archbishop Oscar Romero, who took position outside the program of either group, and who was assassinated in the apex moment of social political violence. Romero’s legacy has been tarnished after his death, taken up by communists as a martyr because of his advocacy for land reform, communists who are more than willing to overlook such trivialities as his explicit rejection of liberation theology, or his not being a communist. The oligarchs, whose death squads assassinated him, were of course more than willing to abet the communists in this, as they benefited from his legacy being tarnished by association with communism given that they weren’t keen on losing their monopoly on the nation’s land.

In many ways, the economic consolidation that El Salvador went through in the 1800s is like the consolidation that has occurred in the United States, and is still occurring here, but on a drastically higher level in El Salvador. In this process, massive concentration of all land in the hands of a few people (in El Salvador, 14 families, in the US, massive multinational corporations & hedge funds) coupled with the use of that land for the production of cash crops that don’t feed people. In El Salvador, this was coffee, which alone had reached 90% of the total export value of the country by the beginning of the 20th century. In the United States, this means inedible GMO corn and soybeans to be processed to make poisonous ‘food’ products. Saving the United States from the fate of El Salvador, in this respect, is the fact that only about two percent of the country’s population still work the land for a living— their displacement already occurred, having long since become the urban poor in a longer, more digestible process that nevertheless still plagues us in the encroaching form of cosmopolitan bug-man style pod living.

For a liberal Salvadorian elite intent on enriching themselves on cash crops, one thing stood in the way of their future; the fact that the country, already populated by villages farmed for millennia by their local inhabitants, was not for sale. For the modern state, however, this is simply a matter of paperwork.

The emerging Salvadorian state began to implement policies prioritizing commercial agriculture… government officials increasingly regarded the complex patchwork of formal and informal land tenure arrangements to be a particularly problematic colonial legacy, so they set to work streamlining them to make agriculture more organized and efficient.

The 1881 decree declares that the existence of communal lands is “contrary to the economic, political, and social principles that the Republic has accepted,” because these lands “impede the development of agriculture, obstruct the circulation of wealth, and weaken family bonds and the independence of the individual.” The abolition of the ejidos [farmlands owned communally by small villages] came the following year…²

Following the enclosure of common land, a society that was genuinely interested in fostering the values stated above could have undertaken a project to divide existing ejidos among the families already tending them, and allowing local villages reasonable flexibility in assessing the value of and distribution of plots to family patriarchs. This, as we should not be shocked to learn, is not what took place. Instead what took place was, as Whelan says, “a process of legalized theft that dispossessed the campesinado [subsistence farmers] and forced them into wage labor.”³ In this process, formerly communal land was parceled out into titles, and then sold by the government to those with the capital to purchase them— not likely to be subsistence farmers.

As coffee profits soared, so did land values and their associated costs, including taxes. Banks, established by and run by the Coffee elite families, began to target smaller farmers, foreclosing on their farms in an effort to consolidate huge coffee estates. As one coffee planter said in 1931, “If we sell our land to these mozos [workers] we will have nobody to pick our coffee for us.”⁴ How tragic. Though, isn’t it strange that we hear identical arguments today from huge agricultural conglomerates? Only now, instead of the dispossession of Americans from their land, they call for the mass importation of already dispossessed people. And then came industrialization.

During the first expansion of coffee cultivation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the large plantations could absorb those dispossessed because of the high demand for labor. In contrast, the widespread use of agrochemicals and higher-yielding crop varieties in the second expansion meant landholders were considerably less reliant on labor. Therefore, instead of absorbing people, this second expansion tended to expel them, further contributing to the swelling numbers in search of land and work…

The sociologist Segundo Montes, another of the Jesuits killed in 1989, summarized the developments we have just been surveying: “The entire economic and financial system, as well as the state apparatus, functions to reproduce this capitalist mode of agricultural production.” What is especially important to see for our purposes is that this particular mode of export-agricultural production did not just produce coffee… it also produced people without land— and it produced them in abundance. For this reason, descriptions of these developments as ‘exploitative’ or ‘oppressive’ are, strictly speaking, inaccurate. People were not simply being abused or treated unfairly by their societies; they were being excluded and discarded altogether.⁵

Whelan rightly connects what happened to the de-landed people of El Salvador to the process of dispossession sweeping across the West; ‘you will own nothing and be happy.’ Rent your house, car, television, appliances, finance your furniture, rent your music, your movie collection— deals to be altered at any time. Don’t like it? Try living under a bridge. This is what Whelan acknowledges, that Pope Francis has called a ‘throw away culture’, in which people “are no longer society’s underside or its fringes or its disenfranchised… [but] its ‘leftovers’”⁶ In this way, as Whelan says, “the basic institutions the exploited and the oppressed count upon were being devastated, the very idea of society [even] in the minimal sense of shared social membership [became] attacked.”⁷ We are like modern, urban mozos, we labor for wages in a world owned by a few others, for whom we shuffle from place to place to service; and they scorn us just the same. The difference seems to be that our elite have concocted a system of pervasive electronic stimulation and an industrially produced diet of processed slog that together keep most people distracted, fat, sick, and drug-addled.

The same protestations that we see today in fiery conflicts over corporate monopolization, tech-overlordism and the like, were present in Salvadorian political contentions. The Salvadorian government argued that “the very existence of common lands ‘deprives farmers of the benefits of cultivating their own property, defrauding both the state and the individual.’”⁸ Libertarians and ‘classical’ market liberals still crawl out from their decomposing pits of political irrelevancy to take the same position against any policy that might regulate corporate power or devolve to local governments the ability to push back on outside money. We should understand that, in contrast to what these people believe, customary law is as important (perhaps more important, I would say) than statutory law— and in this regard, “common lands are a particular form of property, not its absence. Community members had usufruct rights over land to cultivate, to graze cattle, and so on— rights that were regulated communally.”⁹ We must understand that the statutory laws drafted to end communal ownership and to allow land consolidation were not done simply to formalize customary tradition and ensure families were not deprived of land; the mass dispossession of landed people was the point of it all in the first place, as the subsistence farming of the campesinado was not going to enrich the governing elite.

[Despite promising an increase in production under the new policies,] liberals did not mean the increased production of what most Salvadorians relied upon for their subsistence— namely, maize, beans, sorghum, rice, manioc, and so on. These crops, like the people who cultivated them, were implicated in backwardness and of traditionalism. What liberals meant by production was production of crops for export, especially coffee.¹⁰

I can only speculate; did perhaps the liberals mean something similar when promising the increased ‘productivity’ of American industry under NAFTA? Modern life, in this way, has become a kind of enclosure. Social enclosure, physical, urban spacial enclosure, economic enclosure; and now with the mass purchasing of the nation’s farmland and wilderness areas, increasingly the enclosure of the countryside as well. What Archbishop Romero recognized, and what he spoke on, was an acknowledgement “of the inability of people to access land and livelihood as a form of violence.”¹¹

Among us the terrible words of the prophets of Israel remain true.

Among us there are those who sell the just for money and the poor for a pair of sandals; those who hoard violence and spoil in their palaces; those who crush the poor; those who bring near the kingdom of violence, while they lie in beds of ivory; those who join house to house and annex field to field until they occupy everything and remain alone in the land.¹²

Among us, too.

The de-landed people of El Salvador turn en masse to the cities, where they set up tenement villages, or stayed in the countryside to become squatters; setting up shack houses on marginal land like rocky hilltops, steeply inclined hillsides or along roads and ditches. In this way, their very existence became an act of de-legitimization of the government and the Coffee elite, who organized the military and private security forces to harass or execute them.

“‘They continued to act in accordance with the belief in their ancient right of access to land.’ Their need was its own law. To disobey it would have been like trying to disobey the preservation of themselves in existence.”¹³

In many ways, the movements of Junger’s characters feel motivated by similar forces. As represented by the domination of the machines in The Glass Bees, the replacement of the Cavalry by the mechanized world; or the position of the Hermitage in On the Marble Cliffs; or perhaps most literally Martin Venator’s recluse bunker in Eumeswil. As we become striated, dominated, programmed, and tossed aside by our new systems of technological enclosure, we will look to the Waldgänger, the Forest Fleer. The image and form of the Anarch can be turned to as we make our Forest Passage.

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Thank you for reading Position & Decision! I hope you enjoyed today’s essay. I want to take this opportunity to touch base on a couple issues I’ve mentioned sporadically so far, mostly on Twitter;

I have read On the Marble Cliffs again, as well as Visit to Godenholm since my last essay, and short pieces on both of those books can be expected in the near future.

I have come into possession of an original copy of a book where Junger discusses his WWI Photo-journal. The book is extremely old and in very delicate condition. I want to get good quality exhibits of the photographs out of it and then discuss those here, that will be coming along in the near future as well.

I will be revisiting this book, Blood in the Fields, for an expanded discussion of why resistance to this kind of enclosure is not comparable to land expropriation or confiscation. That will likely come with discussion of the Spanish Civil War, and, likely, some discussion of localism and subsidiarity.

Thank you all again for reading.

1. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p. 167

2. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.49

3. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.54

4. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.54

5. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.59-60

6. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p. 60

7. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.60

8. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.52

9. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.52

10. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.53

11. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.27

12. Romero, “La dimension politica de la de desde la opcion por los pobres,” 187.

13. Whelan, Matthew Philipp “Blood in the Fields: Oscar Romero, Catholic Social Teaching, and Land Reform” p.61