Topsoil, by the ruralist Sara Bissen, is an essay about dispossession of soil and the reproduction of capitalistic value. It focuses on the rural condition—the basis of the pyramid on which the megamachine is founded. The destructive erosion of such a basis shows the folly of the system and its mechanism of the division of consciousness, society, nature, and body.

Topsoil’s form is deliberately disruptive.

It demands an effort to match it because the form is also a dynamic of the reality and political/analytical action.

This operation aims at: 1) becoming part of the work that is more than a mere critical essay but a political action; a methodological innovation; an essay; a science, and a poetic art—in the radical sense of poiein (doing, in Greek), and 2) denouncing the particular imposture of university debt that pretends a market that does not exist and is in part the more general imposture about never-ending growth. In turn, this is connected to the subject of the book: dispossession on the basis of value production.

—Stefano Serafini, Publisher, Artena Anarchist Press