A new 30-page booklet called Organicism and Fascism in the UK claims that the organic movement, including the Soil Association and the Biodynamic Association and also, by association, the Oxford Real Farming Conference, is tainted by its Far Right and racist origins which it fails to face up to. In truth, says Colin Tudge, the thesis is misguided and misdirected
The booklet would be of no account if it was simply a Far Left rant, but it isn’t. It was written by serious people — Tatiana Gravito, Andre Kpodonu and Tom Wakeford (henceforth collectively to be called GKW) – on behalf of Seeding Reparations (linktr.ee/seedrep). According at least to the printed version of the booklet, the work is sponsored by Farming the Future, the Friends Provident Foundation, Resourcing Justice, and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust – though the online version makes no mention of this. The booklet is “making waves”, as the expression has it.
GKW observe first of all as any cognisant person must that there’s a lot wrong with the UK’s food system and that to put it right we must dig very deep. Tinkering will not do. But, they ask:
“Where does one start with such a monumental task?”
In practice their approach is one of “Reparation”, which is very much in vogue right now. Societies and indeed whole nations are enjoined to look into their own history and face whatever mistakes they or their forefathers may have made in their murky past, and what sins they have committed, that might help to account for whatever is wrong in the world right now. There’s a parallel in this with Freudian analysis: probe the deepest reaches of our minds and memories; expose and analyse whatever we find; extirpate whatever is clouding our thoughts and creating disharmony; and start again with a clean slate. This sounds suitably therapeutic although it isn’t clear how effective the method is, as is true of Freudian analysis in general. Even so, we should surely heed the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana who famously asserted in his Life of Reason (1905) that;
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
Indeed. To get to the bottom of things it is as well to begin with history.
But history is full of traps. Above all, we should not cherry-pick the facts to support some preconceived thesis, as old-style school textbooks tended to do (as in Britain always acted with the best of intentions, and all the rest are backward or are up to no good). But GKW fall right in. They set out to show that the organic movement is rooted in deeply pernicious ideas from which it cannot escape. They do, though, give us fair warning:
“The information we present here may prompt you to experience uncomfortable emotions. It has not been easy to write. We know it might offend some.”
In truth the information they present would be more shocking if the ground had not been so well trodden long ago – not least in 2002 by Philip Conford in The Origins of the Organic Movement (with a Foreword by Jonathan Dimbleby). Curiously, GKW list Conford’s book in the index though they don’t quote him in their text. Thus without actually saying so, GKW manage to convey the impression that Britain’s organic movement has perpetrated some kind of cover-up. I am indeed offended, but only because the authors have not done their research properly and have not it seems spoken to any of the people who would have been able to put them straight.
So what is their thesis?
The thesis: strong on rhetoric, weak on argument
What, first of all, is Organicism? And are organic farmers necessarily “Organicist”?
According to Wikipedia , organicism is —
“the philosophical position that states that the universe and its various parts (including human societies) ought to be considered alive and naturally ordered, much like a living organism.”
By this definition, it isn’t obvious that the organic movement should be seen to be organicist at all. For although many or most of the organic farmers that I know have spiritual leanings, and see the natural world as a wonder and a gift (even if they don’t necessarily express these ideas in religious terms), all those who do it for a living and not simply as a hobby are driven at least equally by reasoning that is strictly practical. The organic approach is needed, they say, to avoid ecological collapse on their own farms and in the world in general; for reasons of health and animal welfare; to avoid the enormous costs of chemical inputs; and because, sometimes, organic produce attracts a premium. Of course, too, most of the world’s farmers are “organic” by default. They don’t make use of agrochemistry because it’s not in their tradition; they get along well enough without it; and they can’t afford it anyway. After all, recognisable agriculture has been around for 10,000 years and supported a steadily expanding human population through thick and thin while the industrial kind that depends on agrochemistry has been with us for barely a couple of centuries and has already helped to bring the natural world to within a few decades of collapse.
For the purposes of discussion, however, let us concede that the modern organic movement in all its forms did derive to some extent, or possibly even to a significant extent, from the pre-existing thread of organicism. Why is this so dreadful?
For four kinds of reasons, say GKW:
1: Some of the key founders of the modern organic movement had seriously right wing leanings with racist tendencies
GKW cite three putatively baleful influences in particular: Rudolf Steiner; Jorian Jenks; and Albert Howard. So:
In 1924 the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925) founded the Anthroposophy movement (which has been going strong ever since). The term “anthroposophy” derives from the Greek (anthropos meaning ‘human’ and sophia meaning ‘wisdom’). In essence it sees human consciousness as an extension or a component of the “mind” of the universe itself, the cosmos. Steiner himself defined anthroposophy as
“… a path of knowledge, which intends to lead what is spiritual in the human being to what is spiritual in the universe.”
He said much else that to many people including me seems well worth pursuing including —
“You can get an idea of human nature only when you can see the relationship of the individual human being to the whole cosmos.”
And:
“A truth which comes to us from outside always bears the stamp of uncertainty. We can believe only what appears to each one of us in our own hearts as truth.”
Many people have echoed this last thought in one way or another including St Augustine (354-430):
“Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth.”
— which Pope John Paul II quoted in his encyclical letter, Faith and Reason, in 1998.
Steiner’s thinking encroaches on all walks of life, notably including health, farming, and education. Thus he advocated a healthy diet, of fresh food, grown locally in small units and without inputs of the artificial fertilisers that by the 1920s were beginning to be produced on an industrial scale and were and are seen to be “scientific” and therefore rational and therefore safe and good and were embraced by the post WWI government anxious to build up Britain’s agriculture and forestry and increase self-reliance asap. From this way of thinking he developed the biodynamic movement: farming and growing that also had a mystical element which included arcane practices, some of which many see to be occult. For instance, biodynamic farmers are urged to bury a cow’s horn stuffed with manure to encourage plant growth. This isn’t the place for prolonged discussion but it is worth noting in passing that some modern farmers and scientists are putting Steiner’s methods to the test and reporting positive results (see for example these scientific papers listed on the Biodynamic Association’s website); and Steiner himself claimed that all his recommendations were based on traditional practice. In line with his general theme Steiner also recommended expressionist dance and homeopathic medicine and devised a system of general education rooted in these grand ideas.
Many see Steiner’s kind of thinking as anti-scientific and therefore nutty and bad. Others see it at least as a useful counter to “scientism” – the belief that truth can be and must be attained by rationality alone, by which they mean observation, measurement, and mathematical analysis. In the end, after all, (as I have argued many a time and oft) even the most hard-nosed scientists must decide what they take to be true, and whatever the evidence, that decision, inescapably, is a matter of intuition. The discussion re rationality and intuition, and science and scientism, is on-going, and surely always will be, outside anthroposophical circles as well as within. And Steiner’s contribution to the discussion surely at least deserves to be taken seriously.
But what many people including GKW (and me) find alarming are Steiner’s forays into anthropology. In particular, he divided the human species into three “root races” which he called Negro, Mongol, and Caucasian. Caucasians, he declared, are the only “truly civilised race”, and in an essay written in 1922 he linked blond hair to “advanced mental abilities”. In truth, this is an exersise in eugenics, and in the 1920s eugenics was seen to be a respectable science. It was embraced by some eminent biologists who simply felt that its ideas were true and that if we truly aspired to put the world on a firm footing then truth had to be faced up to. A hundred years later it’s clear that as science, early 20th century eugenicist thinking was crude in the extreme and in important respects was just plain wrong. Politically and socially of course it was and is disastrous, a deeply pernicious calumny.
Alas, the idea that “race” is an easily defined biological category and that race in general and skin colour in general are linked to mental capacity lived on in scientific circles until well into the 1970s and, very clearly, in some political and even academic circles it lives on still. But it is de facto racist and hence is fodder for the Far Right and hence is indeed fascistic. And yet: such thinking is surely not essential to Steiner’s principal thesis — and it certainly is not an essentialstrut in the idea of organicism, which is GKW’s principal target. Indeed, since organicism is in the end about oneness – the oneness of humanity, the oneness of humanity with all life, and the oneness of life with the fabric and spirit of the universe – racism, which is so obviously divisive and exclusive, seems to be its precise opposite. Just as Pierre-Simon Laplace said of God, Steiner had no need for that (racist) hypothesis. But he embraced it nonetheless. A great pity.
However: GKW’s second target, the English farmer and polemicist Jorian Jenks (1899-1963), was an out-and-out Fascist: an active member of the British Union of Fascists and a friend, till relations cooled, of Oswald Moseley. Like Moseley, he was banged up for a time early in WWII for his pro-Fascist leanings and propaganda. This is all deeply regrettable but as is so often the case, Jenks did make some useful points as well. Notably, say GKW,
“Jenks claimed that Britain needed to ‘repopulate the land’ and encourage the return of the ‘small working farmer’.”
Well, I certainly would not “repopulate the land” from coast to coast, if it was up to me. Britain and the world at large surely need as much wilderness as can be achieved, or as near as we can get to wilderness in this transformed world, and everyone everywhere should make their cities as wildlife-friendly as is possible. But “the small working farmer”, surely, is precisely what is needed. I suggested some years ago as a starting point for discussion that, probably, no country should employ more than 50 per cent of its workforce on the land and none should employ fewer than 10 per cent. This would mean that Britain could do with 10 times more farmers than it has now, perforce on smaller units – and, I have found, many farmers agree with this. But context is all. I am not dreaming of some imaginary idealised Feudal past as Jenks seems to have had in mind but of a long-term viable and agreeable future (based on the post-organicist but related concept of agroecology).
However, say GKW,
“Like the British Union of Fascists … Jenks also believed that authoritarian rule was necessary to provide the necessary stability for changes towards organicism to take place.”
To be sure, the Fascists were not and are not alone in wanting governments that actually govern – provided those governments are as Abraham Lincoln famously put the matter:
“… of the people and for the people.”
But this of course was not in practice what the BUF offered or indeed is on offer right now. (We do need to make democracy work!)
The third prime target of GKW’s opprobrium is Albert Howard (1873-1947). He was a botanist by education: he gained his degree in Biological Sciences from St John’s, Cambridge, in 1896 and a Diploma of Phytopathology in 1897. From 1899 he taught agriculture in the West Indies; then from 1905 to 1924 he was Imperial Economic Botanist to the Government of India; and from 1924 to 1931 was Director of the Institute of Plant Industry and Agricultural Adviser in Indore. Howard was one of those many enlightened souls employed by the Empire who realised that the people he had been sent to advise had at least as much to teach him as he had to impart. In particular, at Indore, he observed, studied, and greatly admired the indigenous skills of composting – henceforth known as the Indore method. He referred to the peasant farmers and to the pests he found in the soil at Indore as his two professors.
To misquote Mark Antony: “Did this in Albert seem fascistic?” But, say GKW, he was —
“ … a scientist of the British raj”
‘Nuff said. Open and shut. Guilty as charged.
Inspired by India Albert became one of the de facto founders of the Soil Association along with Eve Balfour; and, ask GKW:
“Why does the organic movement continue to pay homage to Howard’s understanding of the soil, while appearing to fail to acknowledge both that his ideas came from Indians and that many of these farmers were suffering conditions of widespread famine caused by the genocidal policies of the British Raj of which Howard was part?”
I’m not quite sure I follow GKW’s line of thought here, or whether the charge — that the organic movement failed or fails to acknowledge the seminal role of the Indian peasant farmers — is actually true.
But GKW have another line of attack:
2: The allegedly Far Right ideas and proclivities of the organic movement’s founders continued and continue to infect its attitudes
Specifically, GKW tell us:
“ … after the Second World War, members of organisations like the Soil Association and the Biodynamic Association ignored the far-right narratives that gave fertile ground for Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech to seed a white supremacist discourse that blossomed into the overt racism of the riots of summer 2024.”
This argument on the face of it is so contrived that further comment seems superfluous. But I have already spent hours and hours on this piece so I will see it through to the bitter end. So to recap:
In 1968 the then Shadow Secretary of State for Defence, Enoch Powell, made his infamous, never-to-be-forgotten “rivers-of-blood” anti-immigration speech. He told a Conservative Party meeting in Birmingham that:
“We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population.”
And:
“In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”
He went on to quote the Sybil’s prophecy from Virgil’s Aeneid:
“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.”
Well, Powell was a classical scholar (Trinity College Cambridge) and at age 25, at the University of Sydney, he became the youngest professor in the British Commonwealth. The only other classicist I know in high political office was Boris Johnson (Balliol, Oxford). So much for the traditional conceit that a classical education is the gateway to wisdom. The then leader of the Conservatives, Edward Heath, an old-style Tory with a conscience, sacked Powell the day after his speech. (One of the very few remaining old-style Tories-with-a-conscience in any position of influence that I know about is John Major. They are an endangered species; swept aside by the tidal wave of neoliberalism triggered by Margaret Thatcher.)
Fifty-two years later, on May 25 2020, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a 46-year-old black man called George Floyd was murdered in plain sight by a 44-year-old white policeman called Derek Chauvin. Floyd was arrested for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill and by way of restraint Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for nine minutes while Floyd pleaded for respite, while two other policemen lent assistance and a fourth kept bystanders at bay. News of this horror spread rapidly around the world. It led to riots in the US and generally added weight to the Black Lives Matter movement that had begun in 2013. Chauvin was later sentenced to 22 years in jail for murder and presumably is still in prison.
And again:
On July 29 2024 three young girls were stabbed and killed at a dance party in the Lancashire seaside town of Southport. The murderer was and is a British citizen and was born in Cardiff but Far Right agitators told the world that he was a Muslim asylum seeker — and this triggered racist and Islamophobic riots in 24 cities in England and in Belfast, with arson, looting, and violent attacks on mosques and on Muslim people. The riots began on July 30 and continued until August 5. It was, say GKW,
“…the most widespread violent disorder in England since WWII”.
Afterwards the local people helped to clear up the mess, repaired the mosques, and generally extended the hand of friendship and amity to the Muslim community. But the whole episode was all too horrible for words, never to be fully erased, despite the best efforts of the local people.
Episodes like this of course affect everybody. Atrocities leave permanent scars. But what specifically have they to do with the organic movement? Well, say GKW:
“While some pro-organic and other environmental organisations did make statements in support of the UK Black Lives matter movement that arose after Floyd’s murder, [they did not] respond to the riots of 2024 … And yet the same narratives used to fuel people’s anger and ignite them in August 2024 were closely entwined with the emergence 100 years ago of pro-organic forms of environmentalism”.
Well, it may be that the Soil Association made no public statements on these incidents but then, to my knowledge, neither did the Musicians’ Union or the members of the Magic Circle. Although I haven’t asked them, I would guess they all felt as most of us surely do that such events are foul in the extreme but to make a public show without having anything specifically useful to contribute just adds to the noise. Clearing up the mess and expressing unity as the people of Southport did is indeed helpful. A public show of grief and anger for the sake of it is self-indulgent and counter-productive. I note though that five years on from Floyd’s murder, an editorial in Nature (May 27) reflected on the lack of progress in ending racism in science. We all of course have much to do.
However, say GKW:
“The sad truth is that pro-organic and environmental movements, both in the UK and across the global North, have subtly accommodated [white supremacist and racist] tropes over many decades. And now, backed by insurgent tech oligarchs, they are re-emerging globally.”
Besides seeming inherently daft, the reference to “insurgent tech oligarchs” is confusing. It alludes to the power and indeed the dominance of the corporates and their often unthinking scientism and technophilia, manifest these days in the zeal for biotech, including Bill Gates’s ambition to re-run the Green Revolution in Africa. Thus, say GKW:
“The manifestoes of these far right billionaires promise protection for some of us, so long as we are willing to allow a handful of corporations to become ever more rich by financialising almost every element of the living world, facilitated by all-pervasive technologies of surveillance and control that they will own.”
GKW imply that the organic movement feeds into this – for why else would they make such a point in their anti-organicist, anti-organic polemic? Yet the people they accuse of actual or cryptic fascism are among the most vigorous opponents of gratuitous high-tech and of corporate control. The argument is, if I understand it correctly, that because the organic movement had some Far Right progenitors and neoliberalism is inherently right wing, they belong in the same conceptual camp and therefore must be in cahoots. But what all this really demonstrates is that all very big ideas, including the political notions of Left and Right wing, are highly heterogeneous, and all include many different elements that often seem to be on opposite sides. More of this later.
Neither does the Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC) escape the eagle scrutiny of GKW. Thus, they tell us – the third of their four lines of attack:
3: “In 2018 ORFC invited Lord Goldsmith to interview the then Secretary of State for Environment, Farming, and Rural Affairs, Michael Gove, MP, in a live-streamed session”
And yet:
“Two years earlier, Goldsmith had run a campaign to be mayor of London against Sir Sadiq Khan that was regarded by some Muslim groups as being Islamophobic, and by others as deliberately using racist tropes.”
Well goodness me!
I take no part in the organisation of ORFC these days but I am a co-founder (together with my wife Ruth (nee West), and Graham Harvey, whose idea it was). I was involved to an extent in 2018 however, and I very briefly interviewed Gove before Gove’s minder pulled the plugs, just as I was getting to the meaty bits. (You can view the interview as far as it got on Youtube if you’ve a mind to.) ORFC invited Gove because he was new to the job and was promising, post-Brexit, to make big changes, and everyone wanted to know what he had in mind. He was in Oxford primarily to talk to the old Establishment Oxford Farming Conference (OFC) which runs at the same time, and ORFC seized the opportunity to put him on the spot. We (I think in 2018 I could still legitimately say “we”) wanted to install our own interviewer of course – preferably some well-informed farmer. But cabinet ministers won’t talk publicly except on their own terms and it was either Zac Goldsmith or nothing. Goldsmith wasn’t a bad choice. Whatever his perceived shortcomings he was and is a champion of the natural world, and after a formal onstage dialogue between him and Gove (the content of which I can’t remember) he opened discussion to the audience, with no restrictions on what they could ask. Before the Gove interview we prepared the ground with a discussion facilitated by Kath Dalmeny, Chief Executive of Sustain. The discussion was titled “Brexit: the state of play – what do we know now and what’s coming over the horizon”.
All in all, then, I would say the ORFC did the best that could in practice be done to get to the bottom of Gove’s thinking at a crucial time. I don’t know what positives came out of it all but the same is true of all attempts by everyone to put experienced politicians on the spot. Whoever is interviewing them, in whatever circumstances, experienced politicians reveal only what they want to reveal, or are briefed to reveal, and although politicians like to seem fully in control of whatever it is they are supposed to be in charge of this is never really the case, as they are well aware. So they must always bluff to some extent. (On points of detail, too, Zac Goldsmith wasn’t yet a Lord in 2018 and Sadiq Khan wasn’t a Sir until 1925. Goldsmith resigned as an MP in 2016 because of the government’s decision to have a third runway at Heathrow; and he resigned as Minister of State in 2023, because of government “apathy” towards the environment.)
But GKW sniff dark and sinister undercurrents nonetheless:
“Those who devote two days in early January to participating in the ORFC, and those who fund it, inevitably reflect established networks of influence among those who have been involved in the reform of UK food and farming. A report by Policy Exchange has found that farming and environment sectors are the two that have less racial diversity in England and Wales than any other. A hundred years after the birth of the organic movement, whose visions of the future are being included at ORFC?”
On another point of detail, ORFC has never accepted corporate sponsorship. “Those who fund it” are all simpatico. As for ORFC’s “visions of the future”: at the 2025 ORFC there were more than 300 speakers, and in the 16 annual gatherings since the first ORFC (which was in 2010, not 2009 as GKW tell us) there must have been at least 1000 and probably more than 2000 speakers. Several MPs have spoken both from the ruling party and the opposing parties, but only one of them, Gove, was a government minister. It is and always has been ORFC policy never to allow representatives of corporates to speak. So we have a ratio of at least 1000 speakers from across the board, to one government minister. I will leave GKW to weigh the odds.
It would of course have been very difficult for GKW to interview the principal targets of their opprobrium, all of whom are long since dead. But everyone involved in organising the ORFC is very much alive and would have been happy to put GKW right on the facts. But none was approached for comment.
But GKW have one final argument up their collective sleeve:
4: There are too few non-whites in farming!
Indeed:
“A report by Policy Exchange has found that the farming and environment sectors are the two that have less racial diversity in England and Wales than any other.”
GKW manage to imply that there is a parallel here with the Enclosures in England and the Highland Clearances of the 18th-19th centuries — as if non-white farmers were being excluded just as peasants and Gaelic speakers were excluded in past centuries. But again this is spurious. The prime cause is that land-ownership is deeply conservative for all kinds of reasons and black and Asian people did not arrive in Britain in large numbers until the 1950s when virtually all the land was already spoken for; and nowadays it is very hard for anyone who is not rich to get a foothold because land is now treated as a commodity like everything else and has become prohibitively expensive. In other words the reasons why there is so little racial diversity in British farming are multifarious and lie deep in world history. Racial prejudice doubtless plays a part as alas it seems to do in all human affairs. But it cannot reasonably be seen as a primary cause. Specifically, the allegedly dark undercurrents of the organicist and organic movements seem to have little or nothing to do with the case.
ORFC itself is at pains to address the issue of diversity. In 2020 the black American farmer Leah Penniman was a keynote speaker. Leah runs Soul Fire Farm in Petersburgh, US — “an Afro-Indigenous centered community farm committed to uprooting racism and seeding sovereignty in the food system”. More broadly, ORFC has now introduced a “justice strand” – again specifically intended to counter racism and other forms of prejudice in agriculture throughout the world. This year the justice strand was hosted by Solidarity Across Land Trades, aka SALT, “a grassroots trade union organising for fairer conditions, solidarity, care and justice”; by Shared Assets, a think tank “working to create a socially just future through practical projects that build new relationships between people and the land”; and by Seeding Reparations!
Reflections
Taken all in all, then, this is not the scholarly and revelatory exposee of deep and dark undercurrents that the authors claim it is, and which they presumably intended. It is, rather, an elaborate exercise in conspiracy theory. The simple truth is that all big ideas and all the movements based on them are highly diverse, with widely ramifying roots that draw from many sources, and with endless off-shoots and implications. Thus in structure, big ideas and movements are like forest trees – drawing from many sources and branching in all directions. The twigs of trees that share time and space are bound to overlap — and so it is that the ideas of organicism and fascism in places may indeed “intertwine”, at least according to GKW.
But such connections as there are between these very different ideas are not essential, meaning “of the essence”. Such interaction as may be perceived is “accidental” (as philosophers say). Neither organic farming, nor the related concept of organicism, depend on right-wing ideas, and right-wing ideas do not necessarily or usually induce their adherents to farm organically. To be sure, there is some historical and philosophic connection between the two, since both may be said to have derived in part from German Romanticism, which was at its height at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th centuries. So it was that in the 1930s the arch-propagandist Joseph Goebbels contrived to sell Nazism to the German people with images of Junoesque young women swaying in unison in an imaginary breeze, and of bare-chested and muscular young men hand-springing over the vaulting horse. But the point holds nonetheless: Nazism is not essentially bucolic, and a love of the outdoors does not of itself imply any felt need for a Fuhrer. It can indeed imply the precise opposite.
But just as a squirrel may leap from tree to tree in a forest, and so might cross entire counties or even hop from state to state, so conspiracy theorists leap from idea to idea, and ideology to ideology. There’s a cartoon character in the northern periodical Viz called Grassy Knollington (inspired name!) who illustrates the method beautifully. In one episode he contrives to demonstrate that Marilyn Munroe was a double agent, spying both for the CIA and the KGB. In more scholarly vein many a philosopher has found close parallels between Communism in its less doctrinaire forms, and Christianity; while the American Christian Right, who tend to be Far Right, claim Jesus as one of their own. Jesus, surely, would not have been thrilled.
Truly the world is sick. But before we rush in with the poultice and the leeches, the purgatives and salves, we surely should make sure we have the right diagnosis, and indeed that we are treating the right patient.
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