Governments and big business promote large scale agriculture and it is undoubtedly true that since the Second World War the people of large parts of the planet have enjoyed a food security unheard of in the history of mankind.
In Spain, in the years following the Civil War many people went hungry. Large parts of Spain were dotted with villages and farms, largely unmechanized, using the same techniques that had been used for centuries.
In areas such as Galicia over half the population worked the land less than fifty years ago.
But since that time, villages have been abandoned and people have emigrated to the great cities on the coast, or to the centres of capital abroad.
The emigrants were looking for a better lifestyle - fitted kitchens, indoor bathrooms, running water, shops, bars, a social life instead of rural isolation.
Today Spain has mass unemployment and the politics of resentment, hate and blame are rearing their ugly head again - in a society that has never known doctrines of the gift economy, merely the moral prostitution of the Roman Church and the moral destitution of the atheists.
Yet the Spanish are not poor, not in a material sense. They have full bellies and they are well dressed, if rather dowdily, in my opinion.
But they are far removed from the sources of their wealth.
They are pursued by their uselessness, haunted by their powerlessness, as everything is handed to them on a plate.
Concepts of work and achievement slip away, as the connection between effort and material success is lost somewhere on the superhighways where the lorries run that provide their necessities and their treats.
But at the end of the day, not only in Spain, but in America, Africa and Asia too, we are all surplus to requirements, beggars, dependants at the administrative whim of Central Authority, the inevitable consequence of the numbering of all things, the extortion of the hierarchy, the Imperative of Power that drives the Hierarch ever onwards to the widening and the deepening of his Empire.
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