Lugh’s Pact: Revolutionary Agrarianism
By Slippery Elm
Also available as a downloadable PDF.
We appear to be entering an era in which Food is approaching the position that Oil holds as a prominent determinant of the geopolitical landscape.
For much of the twentieth century, wars have been waged over access to oil fields, control of shipping routes, and to establish monopolies of production, refinement, and distribution in the fossil fuels industry. In addition to being a driving force behind the emergence of industrial civilization and that of capitalism, fossil fuels are also a necessity for the manufacture of modern weapons, military equipment and technology. This has made them an indispensable ingredient in the struggle between nations to achieve imperial supremacy.
However, as the climate emergency intensifies, many of the world’s warmest countries—which are incidentally some of the biggest producers of food—are predicted to undergo mass desertification. Likewise, temperatures are increasing in cooler countries, which creates different opportunities for food production in places that were once limited by climate. This, alongside sea ice melting and thereby opening new routes for shipping, means the map of the global food system from production to distribution is being redrawn. As the map of the food system is redrawn, the map of power shifts with it.
Food security and the relationship between food and power increasingly appear as topics of discussion in the news and among social commentators. For example, Slavoj Žižek recently expressed his opinion that Russia’s imperial ambitions in Ukraine are based on controlling one of the largest grain producing territories in the world, and that Putin’s ire at Finland and Sweden attempting to join NATO is due to the Russian state’s ultimate goal of controlling the Arctic sea, which as the ice melts, will become one of the world’s primary shipping routes. By monopolizing food production and distribution, Žižek believes Putin will seek to hold the world’s food supply ransom and thereby achieve global hegemony through blackmail. Regardless of whether or not he is correct, we can recognize a clear pattern emerging in which food security appears at the centre of public discourse. [1]
This redrafting of the map of the global food system is occurring at the same time pollinators necessary for the growth of crops and setting of fruit face the threat of extinction; that water reservoirs for irrigation dry up; that the soil is becoming ever more poisoned and depleted; that farm land and infrastructure are destroyed by fires and flash floods; that fisheries dwindle; that the general populace becomes increasingly food illiterate at the behest of big agribusiness and capitalists engineering for a digital negation of society; that Peak Oil casts doubt on the ability to continue high-input farming in perpetuity; that inflation is rendering food ever more inaccessible for much of the worlds population; that the processes of privatization and enclosure accelerate exponentially; that extreme weather events, disease, and war threaten an already vulnerable supply chain.
To meet the looming threat of food insecurity, the urban liberal bourgeoisie and their tech-bro intellectual load donkeys propose ultra-processed foods, precision fermentation, robotic bees for pollination, “smart” greenhouses, machine and AI based labour inputs, and industrial insect farming. These are the attitudes that make popular classes jump onto freedom convoy bandwagons, paradoxically waving the nationalist flags of their own oppression and cheer-lead by members of Forbes lists who force workers to sleep on factory floors. [2]
None of these bourgeois “solutions” recognize the unbelievable wealth and generosity of Nature when humans form reciprocal relationships with the land and with other species. They brush over the fact that production is inefficient when organized based on the law of maximum profit, privatization, state coercion, and the extortion of human labour. They ignore the fact that food supplies are withheld to manipulate prices, and that scarcity is not a natural occurrence but fabricated. They carry the pretence that knowledge of the land, the stars, the weather, the birds, and the care of plants and animals are for “primitive” people, and that the lore of oral traditions or the lore of an almanac is redundant when there are apps. For liberals and reformists, the idea that “green” tech will save us or that it is possible to profit your way out of a climate crisis is the new opiate of the masses.
In contemporary liberal discourse, populism has taken on the meaning of right-wing movements led by figures lacking university degrees. But populism can also come from the left, and be inspired not by the survival-of-the-fittest framework but by mutual aid and solidarity among peoples, species, and the land.
The food system is ground zero. The climate emergency, as well as the inceptions of both capitalism and the state are linked to the conquest of agriculture by military elites. The time has come for a revolutionary agrarianism that is both social and anarchic. However, in this era of unprecedented crisis, revolutionary agrarianism does not emerge from an ideological fantasy or from intellectual social engineering, but as a necessary and practical response to the challenges we face.
Through the dark clouds gathering over this cracked, war-torn and asphyxiated landscape comes an emissary from the otherworld who, alongside others, can help transform our relationship with the land and to farming.
Lugh
The Celtic god Lugh makes his appearance in the epic tale Taín Bó Cuailnge onto the scene of a landscape much like that described above. There are dark clouds. Corpses litter the battlefield. Cúchulainn, the tale’s hero, is riddled with wounds, and exhausted. He has just given a desperate war cry which has stirred the fiends and goblins and sprites of the glens and demons of the air, and made the crow-feathered Badb bring confusion upon the armies of his enemies, whom he faces alone. In his moment of peril, he spies a bright figure clad in a green mantle, bearing a black shield embossed with white-bronze, and wielding a five-pronged spear with ethereal martial prowess. The bright figure passes among the fallen bodies and smoke of the battlefield unseen to all but Cúchulainn and his charioteer. This figure is Lugh, who Cúchulainn identifies as a friend from the Sí, from the realm of Fairy. Upon reaching the hero, Lugh charms Cúchulainn into sleep, applies plants from fairy forts and healing herbs, and chants over his gaping wounds. He then assumes the task of keeping the enemy at bay until Cúchulainn can rest and recover, for the hero had not slept nor rested a night from Samhain till Imbolc.
Lugh is often a misunderstood figure in contemporary paganism. Many contemporary pagans consider him to be a Sun god. This may be partly the result of Victorian era scholars believing his name to be derived from the Proto-Indo-European root leuk- meaning “flashing light”. However, rather than being primarily solar in nature, it is more accurate to understand him as mercurial. The current consensus among Celtic scholars is that his name derives from lewgh- meaning to “bind by oath”. The Romans considered Lugh to be the Celtic counterpart of Mercury, and like his Roman trickster counterpart he is a many-skilled patron of all the Arts, and is the deity that presides over the striking of pacts and swearing of oaths.
It is in examining this last attribute that we begin to see Lugh’s connection with agrarianism. The word “farm” comes from the Latin firma meaning “a fixed agreement or contract”. Later the word came to denote a revenue source, or the collection of a sum or due, as in “tax farming” and the collection of rent. Beyond relationships of extortion, we can perceive the farm as simply a pact or an agreement. These agreements can be also be empowering, and struck in the spirit of egalitarianism. In many animist cultures, agriculture and animal husbandry—and indeed the harvesting of food by other means, whether hunting, fishing, or gathering—is perceived as a relationship of exchange with the spirits of the land, plants and animals. The secret of farming, born of the wisdom and power of the gods and spirits, is an act of bringing the elements of life into balance, so that all may thrive.
In Celtic mythology, Lugh is famous for his role in the Battle of Maighe Tuireadh, a battle fought by the Tuatha Dé Danann to emancipate themselves from the yoke of their oppressors, the Fomhóraigh. [3] Lugh participates in the battle, though rather than a martial bellicose god, we see his role in this as more of a trickster who overcomes through cunning. He defeats Balor, who is thought to embody the destructive forces of the Sun: drought, pestilence, and disease. Then, in a similar Luciferian manner to which Prometheus steals fire from the gods, Lugh wrests the agricultural secrets of tillage and harvest from the vanquished enemy king, Bres. In this way, we can see Lugh as a hero of the oppressed, who empowers the downtrodden through providing them with the knowledge and wisdom to provide for themselves, instead of relying on the meagre sustenance drip-fed to them by their overlords, who in turn prevent them free access to the land and its gifts, and withhold the knowledge to produce these gifts as an exclusive secret of the elite.
The Farm as Pact
The State may garb itself in the ceremonial dress of palaces, parliaments and podiums; of crown jewels and military parades; of patriotic carnivals or the heroism of international sports contests; and may seek legitimacy in fear-mongering and the grandeur of national literatures. However, upon dispelling the inebriating effect of these cheap stage-magic tricks, the State is nothing but a self-styled elite who extract taxes per force. Who govern through hollow legalism upheld by violence. The emergence of the State is not based on agriculture, but on the throttling of agriculture.
Therefore, primary production and in particular the production of food must be an important locus of revolution. The true social contract is not the “consent” of the people to relinquish their freedom to authority, but the relationships we have with the land and all living things, with our families, friends and loved ones. The land gives us what we need to survive and live fulfilling lives. The bonds that connect us are bonds of respect and of love; we express that love through food. Our relationship with the land may be transactional, but not in the capitalist sense. It is a pact made with spirits. It is kin to plants making pacts with carbon dioxide and with the very sunlight to produce oxygen and sugar, or to the exchange of sweet nothings between lovers.
The natural human condition is not asocial and isolated. It is not a “war of all against all” as per Hobbes’ Leviathan. To be human is to be social, and to be embedded in the web of life and natural elemental forces that make up our world. Social relations, whether friendships, family ties, or romantic partnerships and dalliances, need not and should not be regulated by external authority, but by the personal consent, autonomy and right to equal freedom that we each of us naturally possess. Indeed, it is the State and the capitalist lords it serves, that makes life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. Therefore, our agrarianism must be shot through with the anarchic spirit of a Ricardo Flores Magón or an Emiliano Zapata and not with the neo-feudal state capitalism of a Chairman Mao.
The law that binds the farmer to the land is not the law of a bureaucratic political class attempting to profit from surplus, but natural law: the land gives the farmer life—the farmer protects and cares for the land. Collectivism in agriculture is practical for production, but coercion is not. Coercion and discipline through punishment, forced quotas, and farming by association when this does not come voluntarily, are not only moral aberrations but recipes for failure. And not only in the sense of crop failure, but of the revolutionary idea itself.
It is not only food security we are calling for, but food sovereignty. Throughout history, food systems have been transformed through expropriation per force, but there is also expropriation per cunning. We see this in share cropping agreements between farmers, in leases based on empowerment rather than extortion, in land matching initiatives that connect young would-be farmers, or aspiring farmers facing other barriers, to land owners willing to let “their” land be farmed for free. Toxic land relations will not be effectively transformed overnight, but we find inspiration in these practical revolutionary steps forward in agriculture, and in the way they can be supported by concurrent steps in other trades such as textiles and building.
We see expropriation per cunning in the way that our comrades who are low income and landless have approached land owners in their communities with farm proposals, and have thereafter succeeded in acquiring access to acres of arable land with, at times, free lodging provided in outbuildings on site. In how we have created a large village square that is also a highly productive mixed vegetable and flower farm that feeds hundreds of people every year, that hosts a children’s garden for preschoolers, a tool lending library, a medicinal herb circle with sixty different herbs and sites for agricultural innovation and demonstration—in the very heart and centre of our town. In how it has become a food hub for a collective of local farms, and a packing site for a Community Supported Agriculture program that feeds people in need.
We thereby see that it is false to declare another world is possible, because another world is actual! And this despite all the environmental, social, economic, and racial injustices that every day blight the earth. It is actual in places like that described above and in so many others, all over the world. We call for the revolutionary impulse to shift offline into spaces such as these, and to nurture their growth, sustainability and propagation. [4]
Notes
[1] Žižek’s whole article is relevant to this piece, but the quote we are especially referring to is this: “But Russia doesn’t simply ignore global warming – why was it so mad at the Scandinavian countries when they expressed their intention to join Nato? With global warming, what is at stake is the control of the Arctic passage. (That’s why Trump wanted to buy Greenland from Denmark.) Due to the explosive development of China, Japan and South Korea, the main transport route will run north of Russia and Scandinavia. Russia’s strategic plan is to profit from global warming: control the world’s main transport route, plus develop Siberia and control Ukraine. In this way, Russia will dominate so much food production that it will be able to blackmail the whole world. This is the ultimate economic reality beneath Putin’s imperial dream.” Recently, just over a year after Žižek wrote this, Russia has pulled out of the Black Sea grain deal, and we have seen ambassadors from the USA and the UK describe the situation as “black mail”, “holding the world hostage”, and declare “food is not a weapon”.
[2] We will expand this point more in a future article.
[3] The Fomhóraigh are more commonly known as the Fomorians in English.
[4] For more on farming and permaculture as they relate to practical revolutionary principles, see “Risāla al-Filaḥa” in The Dead Hermes Epistolary.
Slippery Elm
is the author of The Dead Hermes Epistolary (Gods&Radicals Press: 2019). He is a poet, dancer, herbalist, and mixed vegetable farmer.