Reclaiming Our Sovereignty: The Great Refusal
By Colin Todhunter
[This article by Colin Todhunter was originally published by Global Research. You can read it here.]
The following article tries to answer a simple question. If state-corporate power now shapes so much of modern life, where do we begin to reclaim our sovereignty?
This power increasingly relies on an emerging digital control grid.
This grid is built from cashless transactions, biometric ID and ubiquitous surveillance, fusing payment systems, identity systems and monitoring into a single architecture of compliance. It is sold to the public by turning convenience into fate.
First, it offers speed. Then it offers ease. Then it makes those things feel indispensable. Before long, dependence passes for common sense. The environment reshapes the inhabitant until the habitat feels like the only reality.
The answer lies not just in saying ‘no’ but in building a parallel way of living, already visible in fragments across allotments, co-operatives, farms, kitchens, village halls and local markets. It is already being lived wherever people still grow, share, repair and eat outside the scripts of the supermarket and the platform.
Ivan Illich argued that tools must serve people. In Britain, allotments still carry that truth in the soil. They are working places of sovereignty where people grow, save, compost, swap and learn in public, with knowledge shared by word of mouth.
The same spirit lives in seed swaps and seed libraries, where open-pollinated seed stays in circulation and the power to reproduce food remains with those who grow it. It lives in places such as Transition Town Totnes and in co-operatives like Suma, which have shown for decades that food distribution does not have to follow supermarket logic. Beyond Britain, similar principles appear wherever communities preserve local seed, rebuild soils or organise food production around cooperation rather than dependency.
James C Scott understood what states and corporations dislike most: people who cannot be fully mapped. Cash still matters for that reason. In farmers’ markets, village shops, roadside stalls and countless everyday exchanges, it keeps trade direct and local. It allows producers and buyers to deal with one another without every transaction becoming another stream of data to be processed, monitored and controlled.
Allotments demonstrate the point. Seed, advice, timing, pest control and experience circulate informally. There is power in that autonomy. It is an ordinary form of cooperation that, on the surface at least, does not even resemble resistance.
Guy Debord wrote about the Spectacle, where people are trained to watch life instead of live it. Community-supported agriculture bucks the trend and is a practical form of refusal. Farms such as Tablehurst and Stroud Community Agriculture have built direct relationships between growers and eaters. Food becomes part of a living relationship. The same principle can be seen in buying groups, food co-operatives, farmers’ markets and neighbourhood veg-box schemes. You stop being a customer and become part of a food culture.
A parallel system does not need a majority to survive. It only needs enough committed people to make it real. We see it in community-owned shops, repair cafés, tool libraries and local bakehouses, where competence is rebuilt simply by doing things together.
At the biological level, the same principle holds. Heritage breeds, open-pollinated seed, local ferments, artisanal cheeses, traditional processing and microbial diversity all resist the standardisation on which corporate-controlled systems depend. They remind us that life is healthiest when diversity is allowed to flourish rather than be engineered into uniformity.
There is a different reality in plain view, built from the ground up. Meanwhile, the emerging order promises convenience by eliminating the friction of existence while drawing us ever more deeply into systems that monitor, predict and control behaviour. We become users of a pre-scripted reality, encouraged to mistake efficiency or the trap of convenience for freedom.
The new open access (free) book The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power traces how enclosure has evolved from the initial concept of enclosing common land to encompass almost every aspect of modern life. From land, food cultivation and culture to public space, digital infrastructure, data harvesting and biological resources, the push to enclose, homogenise (flatten) and commodify every aspect of life has become the defining political economy of our time.
This is wrapped in an ideology of ‘there is no alternative’ whereby even thinking and the imagination become enclosed. But the response is not necessarily found in grand political gestures. It begins wherever people recover the capacity to grow food, repair tools, exchange knowledge, save seed, support local producers and organise collectively.
These are not retreats from modern life, nor gestures of nostalgia. As the book shows, they are the living groundwork of sovereignty: practical, collective and already here in ordinary acts that refuse dependence. The question is not whether such forms can exist but whether enough of us will choose to strengthen them before the surrounding system makes itself feel totally inevitable.
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author’s substack, https://substack.com/@colintodhunter.
A false feeling of safety. I do not need to carry cash with me, I will use my card. But the card reader enters into your privacy. I can pay online without having to send a check, which could go lost. In all the 20 years I used checks not one went lost - although with the postal changes, one arrived way late. This is how the drawstring closes. Now all my payments are done online because you have no choice. Even your taxes have to be paid online.
Yes.
Taking this further, what are the true seed thoughts holding and expressing sovereignty or wholeness of life? Are they not of of a connected wholeness of and thus identification in life as the freedom and responsibility of an integrative spirit?
The proclivity to ego-centric imbalance, polarisation and factions can be seen to be contained and checked and to some degree educated by the framework of law and civilising structure.
It can be seen easily enough that human beings express the terrain that shapes their thought, which is not merely the physical environmental factors, but the psychic, social and economic factors.
To put it another way, we are beneficiaries or expression of structural containments that we might assume to be moral right or even a freedom from moral responsibility.
The 'Liberal' mindset came or was induced to think itself free to remake a human society free of a catastrophic, sinful, evil past under rational oversight whose systems dictated moral responsibility in terms of reframing moral accusation as intellectual claim to superior knowledge coupled with technological advantage - set in the systematic usurp of Law, Science, Economics, as the leverage by which to shape the framing of human society.
That this results in humanity as a laboratory for those who set and operate the parameters of the cage is a direct result of the mapping and inducement of an egocentric response to 'carrot and stick' of incentivisations. Toward a state in which 'comply or die!' becomes the social normal'. Such a perversion of Law is itself a diabolic egotism in those who suffer the addictive-compusive lack of moral restraint in the face of open temptations to engage in loveless appetites, that are this 'normalised' as lifestyle choices as a ratcheting revelation of a blind and hollow or meaningless mechanism that demands control to the point of destruction or complete functional breakdown.
"if you were to remove certain subtle safeguards in society many
men who had been respectable all their lives would be trans-
formed by the discovery of the things which it was now
possible to do with impunity; weak men would apparently take
to crime who had previously been kept on the rails by a
certain balance existing in society; and you can produce
a certain condition of affairs in which people go plundering
and stealing though hitherto throughout their lives it had
never occurred to them even to want to steal. A great and
prolonged police-strike, the existence of a revolutionary situation
in a capital city, and the exhilaration of conquest in an
enemy country are likely to show up a seamy side of human
nature amongst people who, cushioned and guided by the
influences of normal social life, have hitherto presented a
respectable figure to the world."
~ Herbert Butterworth. Chapter heading: THE PROBLEM OF MODERN BARBARISM
Butterworth posits a mind experiment by which to understand a point, but the removal of checks and balances on lawlessness or indeed egotism, is exactly the frame and intent of an agenda set into systemic 'free fall' as a race to the bottom.
But who can engage with the mind of an addict and achieve anything but a performance by which to mask and maintain the addiction, as a periodic boom and bust of broken trust whose conditions could not be kept?
Regardless if you explain the nature of their addiction, its consequences and the way out.
There has to be a breakdown of the addictive identity or bottoming out, through which a driven sense of self-lack is replaced by an awareness of wholeness, connection and shared worth. Unless we give it, we don't know we have it and are it.
In any lapse, the script and stories of a sense of self-lack and grievance seek to frame a 'self-adjusted or self-medicating' reality substitute.
So I am not talking about 'them' but of ourselves, and of us all, as seeds as well as soil.
Living thought is represented on the parable of the sower - as a teaching to the soil or our receptivity and nurture. taking the metaphor another step, the breaking of the isolation of the seed is the nature of living embodiment.
A collectivisation of self-separate 'narrative identities' or ego, can be forced by the insinuation of a false basis for living, framed in lack, scarcity. fear, conflict, pain and loss - seeking outside itself for a love or completion that is not there.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.