Prefiguring food autonomy and popular forms of care
Reclaiming the land: cultivating to become capable
Agroecology today has many faces, some of which have been co-opted or watered down. Permaculture is a prime example: often reduced to a creative hobby for middle-class people in search of meaning.
However, when placed in a communalist context, permaculture and agroecological processes regain their primary function: they are fields of popular institution.
In a project of collective autonomy, food, water, and care are neither ecological niches nor technical sectors: they form the material foundation of a rediscovered social power. No serious democracy can exist as long as the reproduction of life is delegated to the market or the state.
Understood in this way, material autonomy is not a supplement to political autonomy—it is its condition, its proof, and its first practice.
When fragile popular assemblies emerge, agroecology becomes their terrain for concrete self-organization. By cultivating together, residents discover that they are capable of acting on what seemed out of reach. In a housing development or a deserted valley, the land becomes the space where self-government is founded.
This is why sustainable communalist experiments—Chiapas, Rojava, Cooperation Jackson, Longo Maï—planted before legislating. The land is a school of politics: a place where people learn to decide, to resist, to connect.
Freedom is not learned: it is cultivated.
From democratic subsistence to the sovereignty of care
Feeding oneself is only the beginning. Where subsistence becomes collective, a health sovereignty emerges: popular herbalism, community prevention, indigenous pharmacopoeias, everyday care drawn from the environment.
Politics then regains a lost density: that of caring and recognizing that care can never be separated from the environment.
Local assemblies thus become laboratories of democratic subsistence. They identify living soils, cultivable wasteland, invisible knowledge—the long-ignored peasant, gatherer, gardener, and herbalist. They establish common lands, free orchards, and seed commons based on free and reproducible seeds.
These modest gestures are already institutions: subsistence ceases to be endured—it becomes organized.
This dynamic can be found wherever peoples are rising up: in Chiapas, indigenous corn is an archive of autonomy; in Rojava, agricultural schools and confederated assemblies are working together; in Jackson, land is being removed from speculation; in Marda, farming under occupation is a vital act of resistance.
These peoples did not wait until they were ready to farm—they farmed in order to become capable.
And where seeds go, institutions follow.
A communotechny against artificialization and green capitalism
From a communalist perspective, agroecology is not an “agricultural tool”: it is a communotechny, a way of producing techniques that are inseparable from the environment, bodies, and collective self-organization.
It stands in direct opposition to one of the most destructive forces of capitalism: the artificialization of nature.
For nearly sixty years, what Murray Bookchin anticipated in Our Synthetic Environment—the deadly mechanics of technical domination—has continued to expand its empire.
Concrete-covered soil, pumped aquifers, mega-basins privatizing water, suffocating monocultures, nitrogen fertilizers, herbicides, fungicides, photovoltaic fields on fertile soil, highways, and logistics zones: the agro-industrial megamachine is not content with occupying space—it destroys soil life.
Bacteria, fungi, mycorrhizae, worms, and microfauna are wiped out: soils are sterilized in both senses of the word—short yields, slow death of ecosystems, desertification, dependencies.
Dead soil breeds dead democracy.
Communalist agroecology is the antithesis of this. It has no need for artificialization because it starts from the idea that soil is already an intelligent organism, a commons. It infiltrates water rather than pumping it, circulates nutrients rather than imposing them, inhabits the earth rather than covering it.
Where green capitalism recodes extractivism in solar or hydraulic form, agroecological communalism deploys another material civilization—one that is sober, relational, and reproducible.
This reappropriation of subsistence inevitably comes into conflict with the existing regime:
agribusiness, patents on living organisms, water privatization, land financialization, standards that exclude local commons.
It also challenges the state’s monopoly on infrastructure and the definition of the public good.
Opposing a mega-reservoir, the concreting over of a fertile valley, or the patenting of living organisms is less a matter of ecology than of territorial self-determination: asserting that the use of the land belongs to those who inhabit it, not to those who own or plan it.
Starting over: sowing autonomy
A communalist transition therefore requires a broad reconstruction: of knowledge (fertility of living soils, popular hydrology, herbalism, regenerative farming, free seeds); of subsistence institutions (food assemblies, land use, seed banks, community kitchens, water committees); a renewed perspective (seeds as promise, land as common, concrete as dispossession); a temporality (cycles, slowness, transmission, against extractivist urgencies and the rhythm of green capitalism).
Starting today, an assembly can restore soils, stop impermeabilization, cultivate fallow land, create a seed commons, open communal orchards, reject destructive projects, and connect these actions to schools, cafeterias, festivals, and popular transmissions.
These acts are small things, but they establish the possibility of starting over.
The communalist is not a neo-rural gardener, but a peasant of history.
An order is not overthrown by naming it, but by reclaiming the material conditions of life—feeding, caring, housing, deciding—without artificializing the earth.
Placed within a communalist horizon, agroecology is not a fad: it is a political matrix, an organ of autonomy, a bulwark against the megamachine, against green capitalism, against dispossession.
There will be no popular power without living soils, free seeds, shared water, and a determined rejection of artificialization.
As the Zapatistas remind us:
“We resist by cultivating.
We cultivate by resisting.”
Rebound: