https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyiAJ9s_Dlk

MEANWHILE:

Europe is no longer a colonial power. Europe must say goodbye to this history and clean up its act. We want to shape a federal Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok against the increasingly unrestrained spread of re-feudalisation under transatlantic patronage. It is in this spirit that the sell-out of Ukraine’s black soil to Western financial centres is currently taking place. The World Bank wants to “reshape” agriculture in “Eastern Europe and Central Asia”, and Emmanuel Macron propagated a “European awakenin” in his speech in Dresden on 27 May 20241. This consists – not very innovatively – merely of rehashing the military past of colonial Europe, of the globally active colonial powers – under the transatlantic direction of the only world power.

A good 100 years ago, ‘internal colonisation’ took up the political contradiction of colonial Europe as seen from the land question!

The still unresolved conflict over land as the basis of life

As early as the early 16th century, when in England under Henry VIII the landed gentry separated the settled rural population from the land and chased it away, the fundamental problem of economic development became apparent: people live off the land! All people live off the land. The question is how people organise themselves on the land. Interior colonisation has been concerned with this since the 19th century, when industrialisation began to fundamentally change the spatial order and the relationship and distribution of people on the land: The farming population distributed on the arable land became a distinct minority, as industrial development progressed. In Europe, this process began in England in the 16th century and it did not reach Russia until the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century.
  Through the so-called “enclosure”, the feudal landlord broke the fief previously entrusted to him by God out of the fiefdom context and seized it as his private property in the Roman sense of ius utendi et abutendi (the right to use, but also to abuse a thing) and turned the people living on the previous fief into people without rights, separated from the land.
  Karl Polanyi (1886–1964), economist and historian, who analysed current events in 1944 under the title “The Great Transformation”, had something decisive to say about this: “What we call land is a piece of nature inseparably interwoven with the living conditions of man. To take this piece of nature and turn this into a market was perhaps the most absurd endeavour of our ancestors.”2 “It is precisely the absence of the threat of starvation for the individual that makes primitive society in a sense more humane than market society …”3

The Great Transformation

Many of today’s sayings speak of the disappearance of agriculture as the historical feature of our time. In the course of a good 100 years, the population working the land has declined from 90 per cent to just a few per cent of the total population.

Internal colonisation and its endeavours

In contrast to the violent appropriation of land and expulsion of the indigenous population as a primal conflict, internal colonisation deals with the opposite question, namely how economic, spatial and social development on the ancestral land base, off which everyone lives, must accordingly be reorganised for the benefit of all. This is because the structural changes triggered by industrialisation, such as the exodus from agriculture, the rapidly growing settlement areas and the increasing loss of land for the population and caused by it, require a reorganisation of infrastructure, supply, energy, transport and planning measures for the orderly development of the entire area. Inner colonisation aims to shape the development of our own living space together with economic and cultural progress.
  Overcoming economic backwardness, overcoming arduous labour and the desire for a secure supply are in the interests of the community. In earlier times, 90 % of the population living in the countryside and in the villages worked in agriculture, and they were unprogressive. Their life also included 150 festive days per year4, a contemplative cultural life that combined working hours with the rhythm of life. Goethe has given us impressive insights into the world of life and work in the cottages of small farms with their weaving looms. Working life and cultural life intertwined and created the essential foundations and standards for the Enlightenment.

The fruits of the soil and the fruits of the division of labour

In order to break up this cultural lifetime of the people and thus make it accessible to economic value-creating exploitation by the emerging market players, Henry VIII of England felt justified in setting fire to his own farming villages and coercing the ancestral population forcibly to leave the ancestral soil of their existence and livelihood and to migrate – destitute – to the centres of the industrial areas that were emerging at the time. And in this state of destitution, as a now ‘free’ labour force, they no longer had a legitimate share in the fruits of the division of labour as they had previously had in the fruits of the land.
  These conflicts between improvements and the changes associated with progress, and thus the question of how people organise themselves economically so that not only the work but also the fruits of labour are shared, have not been resolved since the 16th century and have repeatedly been the cause of violence, wars and destruction.
  90 % of the peasant population used to enjoy the livelihood security of their land base as a manageable, albeit modest, level of prosperity. Expropriation and expulsion put an abrupt end to this. But the increasing tax burden in favour of the feudal aristocracy’s growing demands also left the people working the land with fewer and fewer resources for their reproduction and impoverished them. If the tax burden becomes too high and is consumed by the authorities without compensation, the population becomes restive. The competence of the feudal order was questioned, seen as serving only the interests of the nobility and recognised as mismanagement. In France, this called mainly the physiocrats to the fore, who emphasised land production as the basis of economic wealth. In his famous tableau, François Quesnay, 1694–1774, attempted for the first time to create an overview of the services that extract materials, process them and, in turn, retroactively facilitate the labour of all for the benefit of all. From the physiocrats’ point of view, only agriculture, which extracts raw materials from the soil, is productive. The rest of the economy is merely concerned with the transformation of raw materials.

Industrial development without the formation of metropolises – a visit from England

In Switzerland, on the other hand, agriculture was able to develop much earlier, from the 14th century onwards, without the feudal aristocracy, and thus prosper for the reproduction and improvement of the rural economy on climatically and pedologically (in terms of soil quality) rather modest soils. It is worth mentioning that, around 1800, Goethe visited Kleinjogg, a pioneer of physiocratic farming methods in Rümlang (north of Zurich), several times to learn about the practical achievements of peasant agriculture freed from feudal burdens: not exploiting the soil itself, but through fertiliser cycles giving back to it what was taken from it.
  Just over half a century later in the middle of the 19th century, the English House of Commons sent John Stuart Mill to Switzerland to clarify why the Swiss textile industry was able to withstand English competition despite its limited technological possibilities. The fact that such a question was even asked in England shows how developed this colonial power was, which was putting out its informal feelers everywhere.
  Mill learnt that the textile workers in the spinning mill in Uster had a stable small-scale agricultural livelihood within walking distance in Nänikon. During economic downturns or in times of underemployment, they intensified their small-scale farming, while the spinning mill entrepreneur did not have to bear any labour costs. In addition, the decentralised village settlement structure of Switzerland, which was able to develop free of taxes in a dense network of villages and hamlets following the expulsion of the feudal nobility, was a fundamental prerequisite for the early industrialisation of Switzerland. Intensive development of the country and consequently good transport routes, decentralised access to water power and the labour pool of small-scale agriculture, which had a steady livelihood on its own homesteads during economic fluctuations, kept transaction costs and social reproduction costs low. However, the decisive prerequisite was that in Switzerland there was no forced displacement of the population from the countryside to the industrial centres: food, housing and work remained closely interwoven, which on the one hand resulted in enormous savings in housing construction, and on the other hand also contributed to an unprecedented level of schooling and vocational training for the entire population, which was documented by Albert Anker. The social misery of the English working-class neighbourhoods of the industrial cities did not exist in Switzerland!

The peculiarities of rural economy – a visit from Russia

Half a century later, in 1912, the Russian agronomist Professor Alexander Chayanov came to Switzerland to find out more about agriculture in Switzerland and its development at the Farmers’ Secretariat in Brugg. Not because Russia was looking for sales markets or economic advantages in trade with Switzerland. Rather, the agronomist wanted to know what economic laws had kept small-scale agriculture alive in industrialised Switzerland. He was interested in the economic laws followed by peasant agriculture.5 Chayanov tried to gain in-depth knowledge of the peculiarities of peasant economy in order to implement them in Russia. He was looking for ways in which the change in the agricultural structure of the numerically predominant rural population, which in Russia had previously been fettered to the land owned by the nobility, could now – as a result of the land reform – be organised according to the principles of free family farming. In a sense, this was the reverse of the enclosure of village agriculture and its privatisation by the landed gentry in England. Now, in Russia, the landed gentry were to be expropriated and the land allocated to the peasants who had been freed from serfdom but had remained landless. They were to become landowners in the manner of free family farms.
  At the same time, the technical innovations of industry were to be incorporated into agriculture to make labour easier. Chayanov made a distinction between capitalist enterprise, which orientated its production towards net profit, and peasant economy, which aimed to achieve an optimum balance between input and output.
  Professor Ernst Laur, who also taught at the ETH, had collected statistical data on these matters for the Swiss Farmers’ Secretariat in Brugg. For example, the land-poor Swiss farms he studied tripled their intensity; they experienced a significant reduction in earnings per unit of labour, but gained the opportunity to make full use of their labour and feed their families even on the small amount of land available to them. “Similarly, the land-poor peasant farms of northern and western Russia are expanding flax and potato crops, which are sometimes less profitable compared to oats, but have a higher labour capacity and increase the families’ gross earnings.”6
  What were the reasons for the economic hardiness of family farms compared to industrial capitalist farms? Where is the economic and technical optimum of peasant agriculture?
  At the end of the 19th century, Russia was still an agricultural country with 90 per cent of the population employed in agriculture. Industrial development had only just begun in Russia at the turn of the century. A huge transformation had to be accomplished in a short space of time.

Internal colonisation a hundred years ago

In contrast, industrial development in Switzerland was already clearly on the rise and the reallocation of the population’s land supply, the so-called in-migration, the development of settlements was already well advanced.
  From the SVIL annual report of 1919: “In Switzerland, which has had no tradition of colonisation, the idea of colonisation [internal colonisation] began to emerge during the war economy of the First World War. It was a purposeful, systematic internal colonisation, a long-term economic and national political task of the first order. In a relatively short space of time, Switzerland had developed from an agricultural country into an industrialised nation whose highly developed economy was increasingly based on imports from abroad. Whereas in the first half of the 19th century around 300,000 hectares were still under cereal cultivation, by 1880 the area under cultivation had fallen to around 200,000 hectares and by the turn of the century to around 100,000 hectares. This development was accompanied by a local population agglomeration, which led to the formation of towns […].”7
  In 1919, Professor Hans Bernhard, founder and director of the SVIL, outlined the future task of internal colonisation in Switzerland with this comment on the ongoing upheaval of progressive industrialisation and the progressive loss of land ownership by the population, which was increasingly drifting to industry.
  Switzerland knew no social misery from land displacement. However, Switzerland was unexpectedly hit by the collapse of free trade as a result of the First World War. In the 19th century – entirely geared towards duty-free free trade – bread grain was no longer grown in Switzerland, but was almost entirely imported. This import collapsed in 1917 because the Allies confiscated the grain shipments that had landed in Genoa and which Switzerland had already paid for, and diverted them to the famine regions of Eastern Europe. As a result, shortages and the threat of starvation suddenly became an issue in Switzerland.
  It was recognised that free trade was still burdened with the original stigma of separating the population from the land and, as a result of the supply crisis, this was a problem pressing for a solution.
  Hans Bernhard and Alexander Chayanov were united by the same idea of reform, but applied differently to their respective countries. Bernhard: “Abroad, internal colonisation mainly involved measures to divide up large estates. In Switzerland, on the other hand, the main problem was the fragmentation of estates, which required their reconsolidation.”8
  In relation to Russia: How can the dissolution of the large estates of the nobility and serfdom be used to link the population thus freed up with the land, and how must this agriculture be organised so that the yield from the land does not collapse, and so that at the same time, the work on the land is made easier according to the technically available means? How can effort and benefit be organised without capitalist profit-thinking taking over the land unilaterally and depriving the entire population of its livelihood?
  In relation to Switzerland: How can a densely structured small-scale agriculture in an already advanced industrial country be restructured with the technically available means and through internal colonisation, in such a way that the agricultural land area as well as the land yield can be maintained as food and supply security for the population, and all this on the basis of a professional farming structure?

The ‘enclosures’ of today – the example of Ukraine

The Eurasian black earth soils and the ‘Green New Deal’

The free sale of millions of hectares of peasant, co-operative and state land in Ukraine, made possible by the current abolition of the previous land law, makes the land accessible to global financial players worth trillions of dollars, for their world food strategies!9
  According to the World Bank, the value of real goods and services worldwide is 90 trillion dollars. In contrast, the financial bubble already amounts to more than 500 trillion dollars, which is being pushed around outside the real economy by the BlackRocks and their ilk and fattened up by banks and central banks with billions of dollars pumped into the financial system out of thin air. In the meantime, even these circles have realised that this cannot continue. So, what to do with this huge surplus of financial assets, before it disintegrates?
  Their idea is to use it to finance a “Green New Deal”. However, this does not answer the question of how the transition to an ecological economy will ever be profitable in terms of investment, compared to a growth economy. This is to be achieved by buying up large areas of our planet, forests, water reservoirs and agricultural land in order to later demand lucrative taxes on the “ecosystem services” associated with this property from the general population as recipients of environmental services. Investment banking estimates the value of nature’s ecosystems worldwide at 4 quadrillion (4,000 trillion) dollars. So, with the investment of 500 trillion dollars, a value of around 4,000 trillion dollars can be acquired!
  This is the continued “enclosure” on a global scale: the widespread privatisation of the natural basis of life, the land!
  The Oakland Institute’s 2023 report entitled “War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land” describes the situation in Ukraine as follows:
  “With 33 million hectares of arable land, Ukraine has large swaths of the most fertile farmland in the world. Misguided privatization and corrupt governance since the early 1990s have concentrated land in the hands of a new oligarchic class. Around 4.3 million hectares are under large-scale agriculture, with the bulk, 3 million hectares, in the hands of just a dozen large agribusiness firms. In addition, according to the government, about 5 million hectares – the size of two Crimea – have been “stolen” by private interests from the state of Ukraine. The total amount of land controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals, and large agribusinesses is thus over 9 million hectares, exceeding 28 per cent of the country’s arable land. The rest is used by over 8 million Ukrainian farmers.
  In 2021, these conditions were consolidated by a controversial land reform: it was part of a structural adjustment programme that came about under the auspices of Western financial institutions and in the wake of the Maidan overthrow, which brought a pro-EU government to power.
  Today, 28 % of the fertile land – 9 million hectares – are controlled by oligarchs, corrupt individuals and large agro-corporations. The largest landowners today – apart from the oligarchs – are European or US-American, including two stock corporations, one based in the USA, the other in Saudi Arabia.
  Prominent investors include the Vanguard Group, Kopernik Global Investors, BNP Asset Management Holding, Goldman Sachs’ NN Investment Partners Holdings, and Norges Bank Investment Management, which manages Norway’s state-owned fund. A large number of US pension funds, as well as private and university foundations have also invested in Ukrainian land. And many of these companies are indebted to Western financial institutions - in particular the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the International Finance Cooperation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank. In addition, Kiev has engaged BlackRock and JPMorgan in 2023 to help set up a fund to raise public capital that could attract private investment for the reconstruction of Ukraine, which is estimated to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.”10

Unresolved issues

Despite the WTO, conflicts over markets are still unresolved in connection with the need for economic growth. Land, raw materials and energy are the intensifying points of contention that Halford John Mackinder pointed to 100 years ago in “The Geographical Pivot of History”. Zbignew Brzezinski also drew attention to this connection, which determines geopolitics, in “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives” at the end of the 1990s.
  Today, 100 years after Mackinder, Switzerland is heading, without any alternative, towards a Switzerland of 10 and even 12 million inhabitants, while the population of Ukraine is declining significantly due to emigration.
  How does Switzerland solve the dwindling of its own food base? Will this lead to the surrender of sovereignty? How does the current dependency on natural resources present itself? In a world with a high division of labour, are the established agricultural land base and the basic idea of internal colonisation still relevant?
  The “total enclosures” are aimed at the entire natural basis, including the microbiome. “Digi, nano, bio, neuro” are the abbreviations of the technologies that are being promoted in order to further seize our living environment and thus supposedly solve the conflicts that the technologies used so far have left in their wake”. However, as Professor Mathias Binswanger shows, the all-round recording of all contexts of life that is being sought in this way does not lead to more room for manoeuvre and a more efficient, resource-saving order with more freedom, but rather the individual data to be regulated grows faster than the available computing power.11 In other words, whoever has the most computing power determines the facts – and whoever has the most purchasing power has the material resources.
  What new livelihoods are being opened up by digitalisation, nanotechnology, bioscience (microbiome) and neuroscience that were previously unavailable?
  In addition, there are sustainability postulates to detach human nutrition from the soil for reasons of so-called environmental protection and to relocate it to industrially synthesised reactors. The previous “organic” and environmental protection arguments and health medicine combine to create a production or manufacturing method that is separated from the biological soil. The living world is thus being removed from its natural basis and transferred to the “organic sector”. The aim is to implement what internal colonisation warned against 100 years ago: the industrialisation of our natural basis. This realises the utopia of a way of life that has been removed from nature and transferred to the retort!
  The “free market” of the growth economy cannot solve the increasing conflicts over food, housing, urbanisation, mobility and the supply of energy and raw materials. While the inviolability of the free market is persistently emphasised on the one hand, trade wars are escalating on the other. In addition, sustainability targets are constantly being made more stringent. Attempts are being made to enforce global regulations in the areas of health, nutrition and energy metabolism – with the boundaries between open trade wars and social development goals regulations becoming blurred. Does environmental protection serve the trade war, or does the trade war justify its goals with environmental protection arguments? Is the Paris CO2 agreement aimed at the energy supply of the BRICS states? Is geoengineering climate warfare? The ‘sustainability goals’ obviously serve to enforce the synthetic production of human nutrition with the invoked relief of the environment. The fact that this reset, as advocated by the WEF, for example, only exacerbates the crisis – especially in the areas of energy and food – is of no concern to its promoters. This is because the underlying context is different: the propagated environmental goals and the demanded “reset” are intended to enforce global “containment 2.0”.

From sustainable development to the Great Reset

The more the crisis processes intensify, the more the field for regulating society and its living environment widens. The first ideas in this direction were formulated in Rio+20. Since then, they have been linked via the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 17 to the WEF Great Reset and the sanctions regime expanded by the US financial sector to form a powerful global power apparatus. Polanyi outlined the methodological principle of this type of economic activity in his chapter “Market and man”:
  “In the powerful states of the West, this unlimited and unrestricted monetary sovereignty was combined with the complete opposite, an unrelenting pressure to expand market economy and market society into other areas.”12 And Polanyi adds: “To separate work from other activities of life and subject it to the law of the market means to extinguish all organisational forms of being and replace them with another form of organisation, an atomistic and individualistic form.”13 Today, AI is being used to try to regulate this ‘atomistic and individualistic form’ of existence created by “containment” – without any meaning in life!
  And in the area of agriculture and food, we are faced with the concrete question of whether, countering the differences in production and market conditions between agriculture and industry established so far as well as the unresolved conflict between the growth economy and the natural basis, a form of life and nutrition removed from the natural basis of life is being enforced under the guise of the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals): the industrialisation of food à la WEF, namely in a form that is removed from the real contexts of life and sacrifices the meaning of life and the happiness of people.
  In the illusion of having the unlimited increase in wealth under control, its relationship to the natural basis is ignored. It is claimed that the economy can replace the soil or the natural basis and create a new business area for the escalating conflict between the non-renewable natural basis and eternal growth by completely removing the boundaries of the basis of life – as is being attempted in Ukraine, for example – by acquiring millions and millions of hectares of agricultural land under the guise of a “Green New Deal”.  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2024/nr-18/19-17-september-2024/die-innenkolonisation-wie-europa-sein-verhaeltnis-zu-grund-und-boden-wieder-in-ordnung-bringen-muss

READ FROM TOP

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.