Richard
Levins

I.

The Industrial Revolution created a pattern of technology characterized by increasing quantities of constant capital and energy per worker, subdivision of tasks, standardization of products, and growth of scale of operations. This technology was the result of capitalist enterprises seeking maximum profits, greater social control over labor by control over the production process, and the creation of that knowledge which seemed best suited to serve these goals.

This led to dramatic increases in production and to the prosperity of those who were in the vanguard of the process. So universal has this pattern of capitalist development been that it appears as a “natural,” optimal and even inevitable and only way of development. The efficiency of capitalist technology with respect to its own criteria of profitability and control disguises itself as universal efficiency. Modernization and progress then appear to mean rapid adoption of this technological strategy.

An uncritical acceptance of capitalist efficiency as efficiency per se (that is, as the best allocation of resources for specified goals), an excessive deference toward the achievements of capitalist technology, and an acceptance of the pattern of knowledge and ignorance generated by capitalist development as if it were dictated by nature, can carry over into socialist development where it represents a continuation of capitalist intellectual domination. It becomes a threat to socialist development and to the national independence of liberated colonies.

In our view, the struggle against this technological trajectory is an important political task for revolutionaries working in and around science. It must be emphasized that our criticism of that technological pattern is not a call to return to pre-capitalist ways of farming, or to go back to nature, or a small-is-beautiful revolution against the suffering engendered by imperialism. Rather, we claim that development does not imply a single, inevitable pathway; that new social relations make it necessary, possible to create new criteria of “efficiency: and new knowledge to serve it; and that both in the short and in the long run, it is dangerous and harmful to adopt the technological determinism of capitalist development theory.

II.

In the short run, the danger of passive technology emulation is that it creates dependence on large amounts of inputs, often from abroad but in any case demanding scarce resources; it creates vulnerability to the uncertainties of weather, pest population dynamics, and markets; and reinforces the kind of short-sighted economic calculation which undermines the potential power of socialist planning. In the long run, it is unstable.

III.

The capitalist technological pattern in agriculture is a successional form. That is, it permits rapid expansion but undermines its own base not an equilibrium relation with nature. Over the last 500 years, but especially in recent decades, we have seen the self-limiting nature of that pattern:

  1. Destruction of soil fertility through the elimination of many of the soil organisms vital to its regeneration, through compaction, erosion, and salinization. These processes can be covered up in part by greater inputs of mechanical power, fertilizer and irrigation technology.

  2. Exacerbation of pest problems by depletion of genetic diversity, local and geographic monoculture patterns, types of plant breeding, and destruction of predator and parasite communities. Pest damage now is at about the same level as at the beginning of the century, with increasing investments in pest control barely keeping up with the creation of new problems.

  3. Damage to people's health.

  4. Damage to the environment—run-off, eutrophication, nitrates in atmosphere, loss of detoxifying capacities in the soil, the pervasive spread and accumulation of pesticides and by products of food processing, destruction of wildlife.

  5. Subordination of food quality and nutritional value to the requirements of market, storage, transport, mechanical harvesting, and other consequences of the capitalist pattern of development.

It has been able to continue increasing production only at the price of even faster increases of capital and environment.

IV.

Our criticism is aimed at the capitalist technological mode as a whole. We are not suggesting that fertilizers should not be used or that pesticides are never permissible. Rather, we insist that their value is not self-evident, that ther are alternatives, that knowledge can be developed in directions other than those requiring brute force techniques. What follows is therefore not a specific program for any particular crop, but the outlining of potential alternatives aiming at the following:

  1. Agriculture must produce enough food. Any dismissal of production goals as mere consumerism fails to understand how the production of goods facilitate the social changes which we want from socialist development. But the production goals of socialist agriculture differ from those of capitalism in several major ways:

    1. The goal is to meet production targets with minimum input and damage rather than maximization of profit. While actual productivity is below target levels, or is aimed at foreign exchange, the difference is less apparent.

    2. The subordination of exchange value to use value. A crop which permits the generation of more value per hectare because it absorbs more labor may be less desirable than a crop with higher nutritional value which generates less income.

    3. The evaluation of alternatives can take into account multiple goals including indirect effects which are ignored by the capitalist rubric of efficiency.

  1. The agricultural system must be resistant to uncertainty, minimizing the maximum harmful impacts of unexpected weather, pests or other natural or induced disasters. As the capacity for long-term storage and for redistribution of areas larger than weather regions increases, it may become less necessary to reduce variability locally. But for the forseeable future, reduction of vulnerability is a major goal.

  2. The technology must not threaten the health of the agricultural workers. As a general rule, biologically-active chemicals are dangerous to people (e.g., about 10-20% of the pesticides are carcinogens) so that the minimization of pesticides becomes a technical goal.

  3. The pattern of agriculture should protect the environment, including soil fertility, detoxification of the atmosphere, watershed, wildlife, avoid eutrophication and nitrous oxide pollution.

  4. The selection of crops and development of varieties should take into account yield, nutrition, vulnerability, effects on other crops, and for industrial crops also health (e.g., breed cotton to reduce the bracts which, as dust, contribute to brown lung).

  5. The organization of labor in agriculture should be compatible with other productive and social activities, and cropping patterns should take demand for labor into account.

The following technical options would become available:

  1. Land use pattern would evolve from the spontaneous heterogeneity of minifundia through the homogeneity of capitalist commercial farming toward a new, planned heterogeneity. This heterogeneity would take into account needs for local food supply, demand for labor, a wider diversity of types of crops, the management of microclimate, the provision of refugia for the organisms which contribute to pest control, the possibilities of quarantine barriers, agronomic interactions among plants, and the needs of mechanization. It would give rise to planning on several spatial and temporal scales from within-plot to regional.

  2. Technology would evolve from labor-intensive through capital-intensive to thought-intensive. Pest control would be based on an almost self-operating ecosystem maintained by the spatial heterogeneity and provision of some supplementary resources. The microflora and arthropods would be the first line of defense, making invasion and outbreaks unlikely. The patchiness would retard spread of outbreaks. More direct intervention would be limited to cases where outbreaks escape from control.

  3. Soil fertility would be maintained by intensive recycling, cropping patter, management of microflora and carefully-timed minimum mineral supplements. The location of processing facilities would take into account the recycling needs.

  4. The system requires a high level of ecological understanding at the farm and regional level. Monitoring would be an important form of agricultural labor, combining mental and physical labor and making it possible to unite the detailed, intimate particular knowledge that farmers have of their own immediate situation with the generalized insights coming from scientific study.

The implementation of this strategy can only be the product of intellectual struggle between the single path and branching path models of development. It in fact does take place in socialist and post-colonial societies around issues of agriculture, public health, environment, planning and design.

The peculiar unevenness of development on a world scale makes it necessary for revolutionaries in capitalist countries to participate in this struggle: in capitalist societies the social organization and ideology prevent the available resources from being aimed at these goals. In present day developing socialist societies, the advanced social relations are held back by lack of resources, including trained people. The real urgencies of production encourage the adoption of existing technologies. But revolutionary scientists in the advanced prosperous capitalisms can use some of the intellectual resources accumulated from the plunder of the world by imperialism, combine them with the social and philosophical insights of Marxism, and help produce the science which cannot be applied here nor as yet created there.

This cannot be done as a red A.I.D., but rather as part of the international solidarity among comrades.