Each generation rediscovers agrarian revolution as “…a genuine revolutionary moment in British politics.” This rejection of urban life, an attachment to a sort of bucolic, rose-spectacled agrarian ideal is captured in the latest, post-Brexit version by Aris Roussinos - “…a radical agrarian populism is developing among a network of thoughtful smallholder-writers which seeks to utterly transform Britain’s relationship with the land, and with the food we eat.”
This idolising of an agrarian, peasant society – three acres and a cow as Eli Hamshire wrote to 19th century land reformer and MP (and urban industrialist), Jesse Collings – traces its roots back into ancient times where the nobility of the smallholding subsistence farmer is held up as a social ideal.
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds. As long, therefore, as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.”
Thomas Jefferson there presenting his idealistic views on the (presumably slave-owning) agrarian world he wanted to see in the new America. This didn’t come to pass because subsistence agriculture, even in a slave-owning society, is a dead end. People walked away from the land because the reality, that thing Jesse Collings brought down the government over in 1886, was that working on the land, peasant farming, is the meanest and poorest livelihood. We’ve forgotten that poverty is often far worse, and still is today, in places dominated by bare subsistence and marginal agriculture.
This doesn’t stop a new set of reactionary intellectuals embracing ‘back to the land’, that ‘radical agrarian populism’ as a desirable political end rather than a repeated romantic delusion.
“…as a result of the collapse of the neoliberal economic model and a growing awareness of the looming threat of environmental disaster “a contemporary agrarian movement has arisen which has a lot in common with the agrarian populist and neo-populist movements of a century ago, emphasising self-reliant, low impact, low energy, land-based lifestyles, a fair distribution of resources, greater political autonomy and so on.”
Leaving aside that the collapsing neoliberal model is another one of those romantic delusions, it’s hard to see how promoting a low technology, peasant farming future is either sensible or remotely populist. What these new back to the land campaigners want is to recruit a million new farmers from people “…who are currently driving taxis or checking income tax or working in call centres, if they have a job at all.” Presumably, each to be given threeacres and a cow with which they will create “…widely-dispersed networks of small producers.”
What the proponents of this new peasantry (many of them, while claiming to be some sort of farmer, are more sustained by writing or academia than agriculture) seem to believe is that we can replace a mostly efficient, if over-protected, agriculture with what amounts to little more than a million people running allotments. Worse still our agrarian radicals step back into the single most discredited idea in economics and social science – protectionism and autarky:
“…all nations should strive for self-reliance in food — at least producing enough of the basics to get by on — and exporting food only when the home population is well fed, and importing only what is truly desirable and cannot reasonably be grown at home.”
Two hundred years of enlightenment snuffed out by a deluded and romantic idea of self-sufficiency. Everywhere else in the world, and through history, “…producing enough of the basics to get by on…” is known as bare subsistence. It’s just about tolerable until the harvest fails. Saying peasant farming is, in any way, a sustainable response to (another romantic and oft-repeated myth) “…capitalism in its final crisis…” strikes me as an argument more worthy of the Khmer Rouge than any sort of conservative. And it doesn’t matter how many folk festivals you organise to celebrate this agrarian populism, it remains merely trying to move poor people from one form of precarious existence to another – turning an Uber-driver into a smallholder doesn’t represent a response to neoliberalism's (fictional) collapse but is just a return to the mythic romanticism of Jefferson, Cobbett, Borsodi and Snyder.
Through most of history subsistence agriculture has been incredibly hard, back-breaking work done by people with little choice and characterised more by poverty, famine, disease, and death than by sturdy, noble, horny-handed sons of toil. It isn’t a failure of British agriculture that it employs less than 2% of the workforce, this is a success because it means the way we do what agriculture does – feed the population – is more efficient and effective than in the times when most of the population slaved away in mostly subsistence poverty.
This supposed agrarian populism is nothing of the sort, there is no demand for, no need for and no economic justification for making millions of workers return to the land. This isn’t the recipe for some sort of post-capitalist Elysium but simply a return to the pain, suffering and exploitation from which we were released by free markets and free trade. Giving every man three acres and a cow may sound revolutionary and make for good songs but, in truth, it’s either trying to turn allotment gardening into farming or else the sort of year zero that leads to the dead end of food shortages, poverty and economic suffering.
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1 comment:
It works in some countries. All you need is good CAP or similar, paid by real workers, and another real job - well another source of income, like an MP.
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