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Cooking
the Books 2
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Back to the Iron Age?
“They eat food from skips, wear discarded clothes and want to topple
capitalism”, wrote Brian O’Connell in an article headed “Masters of
free lunch” in the Irish Times (4 September). He was describing
the activities of a group of people who call themselves “freegans” – “a
combination of the words free and vegan, whose aim is to live as
non-commercially as possible”. They “don’t believe in working for
money”, nor in paying for the things they need to live.
Socialists don’t either, but in the context of a society based on the
common ownership of the means of life where there’d be no need for
money or buying and selling, not as a lifestyle choice within
capitalism. No doubt it is theoretically possible to live within
capitalism without using money, but to what end? Not even 5 percent of
the population (and that’s probably an exaggeration), let alone a
majority, could live like that. Not that skip diving for food and other
things needed to survive is ever likely to appeal to more than a tiny
handful of people.
So, we are talking about an inevitably very marginal activity, and one
that depends on most other people working for wages and producing the
wealth of society, including the thrown-away products the freegans
gather and consume. As everything produced under capitalism is the
result of exploitation, they are carrying to its logical extreme the
practice of those who refrain from buying certain products on ethical
grounds. They see themselves as the ultimate “ethical consumers”, even
if they are doing through voluntary choice what a number of others are
obliged to do through economic necessity.
But how is such a lifestyle going to “topple capitalism”? We can’t deny
that they are against capitalism or what one of them is quoted as
calling “a profit-driven commodities economy”. The trouble is that
that’s not all they are against. They also denounce “industrialism” and
“globalism”. They want to renounce the real and potential benefits of
industrial production and go back to living a simple agricultural life
with an Iron Age technology but without using animals.
According to O’Connell:
“Freeganism has its roots in traditional activities such as
gleaning, or historical collectives such as the Diggers, a group of
agrarian communists who flourished in mid-17th-century England . . .
[T]he first official use of the word ‘freegan’ appeared in 2000 and
began to gain popularity through a website, Freegan.info, set up in New
York by Adam Weissman and Wendy Sher in 2003”.
Hang on a minute! Website? Doesn’t that assume the existence of
“industrialism” and in fact a highly developed technology? And is not
the internet one of the more prominent aspects of “globalism”?
The freegans are right, however, to want to recreate the social
relationships of early human society, which were co-operative and
sharing and based on giving and taking rather than buying and selling.
Socialists want this too, but we say this can be done without having to
renounce the advances in sanitation, medicine and comfort that modern
science and technology have brought, including the ability to find
ecologically-acceptable techniques of energy generation and industrial
production. We want to restore the original common ownership of the
Earth’s resources – for the Earth to become, as the Diggers put it, “a
common Treasury for All” – and the social relationships that went
with it, while retaining both industrialism and globalism.
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