Author of Finding Lights in a Dark Age, Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future and A Small Farm Future
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Posted on September 6, 2012 | 10 Comments
There’s more to be said about the ecological side of gardens, forest gardens and Clifford Geertz as per my previous post, but I’ll leave that for another time. Here I want to pick up on some of the economic implications of Geertz’s analysis, again on the basis that what he has to say about the Indonesian past may prove strangely relevant to the UK future.
Geertz’s concept of ‘agricultural involution’ refers to the situation in colonial Indonesia where the marginal labour productivity of sawah (see previous post if that phrase makes no sense) enabled a growing peasant population to take care of its basic subsistence needs enduringly, if barely adequately. Extra peasant labour squeezed more subsistence out of a given area of land, but without producing an additional surplus. With subsistence needs (just) met, the Dutch colonial authorities were then able to apply additional surplus-generating activities in the form of sugar cane – a cash crop that was grown in rotation with rice – and extract the proceeds. (Interestingly, the swidden cultivators did much better under the colonial regime than the sawah peasants through the former’s ability to grow coffee as a cash crop, but that’s another story). Geertz describes the resulting ‘involuted’ wet-rice peasant villages as ‘post-traditional’: “large, dense, vague, dispirited communities – the raw material of a nonindustrialized mass society”, which experienced the worst of two possible worlds, “a static economy and a burgeoning population”.
To me, that doesn’t sound a whole lot different from where many countries (including the UK) are now placed, or soon will be. Of course, we have a much more technological agriculture, and an industrial sector that historically absorbed most of our peasant refugees from a labour-shedding and capital-intensifying agriculture. In 1963, when Agricultural Involution was published, this genuinely seemed an attractive development path, and Geertz spends some time analysing the way that Japan overcame Indonesian-style involution by keeping western colonialism at bay, using peasant surplus to seed a nascent industrial sector, and then feeding some of the industrial surplus back into agriculture to increase per capita productivity, for example through providing synthetic fertilisers and the like. So in this view, in terms of marginal labour productivity, industrial agriculture is to sawah what sawah is to swidden.
But from the perspective of 2012, as far as I can see this industrialisation of agriculture has probably only bought a few generations of prosperity before landing most of us back with involution – this time in the form of moribund industrial and agro-industrial sectors, which at best will struggle to match the demands upon their productivity in the coming years, and at worst will fail dramatically to do so. That is, unless all the current deficit-slashing and export-boosting government policies we’re suffering at the moment do somehow manage to reboot the economy, including the agricultural economy (‘fat chance’, as Colin Hines argues convincingly in this interesting analysis of our misplaced obsession with free trade).
So perhaps we too will face a potentially involuted future scenario of spiralling energy prices, dense population, a dwindling and moribund industrial sector and a whole lot of neo-peasants trying to make ends meet on small-scale farms. The way that scenario will play out depends a lot on the balance of political and economic power between landowners and cultivators – which in fact has been a key force in the history of virtually everywhere since probably as far back as the Neolithic Revolution, until our brief modern interlude of merchants and moneymen. But it’s usually been a story of exploited and increasingly landless peasant labour under the thumb of landed gentries. This is why Marxists don’t have much time for peasantries as political actors, because they think that ‘the peasantry’ inevitably turns into two classes – the ‘upper peasantry’ joining the ranks of the gentry, and the ‘lower peasantry’ becoming a landless proletariat, which Marxists can then fit comfortably into their familiar schema of class struggle (Tom Brass’s book Peasants, Populism and Postmodernism is a good illustration of the genre).
There’s no doubt that that scenario has indeed played out many times historically. But are there situations where peasants – small-scale cultivators – retain their equilibrium? A.V. Chayanov argued that the Russian peasantry was one such case, before Stalin had him murdered for his unbecoming lack of Marxist orthodoxy. And Geertz argues that the Indonesian peasantry was another one: “under the pressure of increasing numbers and limited resources Javanese village society did not bifurcate…Rather it maintained a comparatively high degree of social and economic homogeneity by dividing the economic pie into a steadily increasing number of minute pieces…Rather than haves and have-nots, there were…“just enoughs” and “not-quite-enoughs”” (p.97).
Geertz shows that the way this happened centred less on landownership than on land-working, with an extraordinarily complex set of arrangements by which people agreed who would work which land – often leasing out parts of their own land and taking on leases with somebody else’s in order to optimise subsistence requirements with family employment. To the modern agricultural mind it all looks hopelessly inefficient and piecemeal. But to a mind attentive to micro-climate, ecological niche, energy constraint and preserving agrarian livelihood it looks like a model that might repay further study, for it’s a road we may soon be travelling ourselves.
It seems to me that if we are to create an agrarian society that can ride future environmental shocks and still prosper, it will probably have to be one of “just-enough-and-then-a-little-bit-mores”. In other words, it will need to create a surplus that, instead of being exported as with the Dutch colonists in Indonesia – is appropriately reinvested into agrarian society itself, for example in health care, education, social security and in appropriate agricultural investment. But it will have to keep the surplus under control to avoid the kind of spiralling economic and ecological rent that disfigures our contemporary global society with its ecocide and its extremes of wealth and poverty. To do so, it will have to place a lot of emphasis on ‘just enough’ and avoid the all too common bifurcation of cultivators into the haves and have nots, which again will ultimately fuel spiralling economic and ecological rent. There’s a fine line to tread between involution, labour coercion and unsustainable ‘development’, and it’s not immediately obvious to me how our present society, with all its screaming inequality and short-term rent-seeking, could generate such a sage and just successor society. But it’s something I’d like to consider further, against the backdrop of other agrarian societies that have made some progress down this path. And if anyone has any ideas…
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Is it possible to have a sage and just agrarian society? After all by definition an agrarian must seek to control a piece of land and therein we find the root of a shed load of problems. May be the situation in the Finland of my grandfathers generation was close. He was able to cut his farm from virgin forest without much affecting anyone else. May be the Russian peasants of Cheyanov’s studies who were self reliant and therefore existed outside of the “economy” were also candidates? But I suspect low population density and therefore abundant land availability were at play here, as it they were in your swidden example, and therefore not applicable in our world today.
I completely agree that the agricultural should not be expected to support a large non-agricultural section of society and to that end would encourage you to encourage your citizens to try to do without health care, education and social security. Surely these are the services required in an industrial society where people are made ill by their diet and their work, are educated to work and rendered unable to provide for themselves if no work is available.
Well here we come back to an old debate on which perhaps we’re destined to disagree forever. I don’t accept that there is a hard and fast line between agriculture and hunting/foraging with ecological destruction on the one side and ecological preservation on the other, and I don’t think the evidence supports it. I think we need more farmers, but I think a society comprised of only farmers wouldn’t be optimal. And though I agree that the way we now organise health, education and social security reflects the various dysfunctions of modern society, to my mind that doesn’t mean that there is no role for them in non-industrial societies: people get ill in non-industrial societies, suffer from famines or other personal and local misfortunes, and benefit from wider communication and knowledge, and it’s difficult to address any of that if you’re not producing a surplus – which I think is why energy-averaging systems have been so ubiquitous historically. But I agree with you that they can very easily lead you into trouble.
So what shape does an “optimal” agrarian society take? I believe that Nicki and I can feed our selves and provide the necessary fuel for heating and cooking all for the expenditure of 4 hours a day each. We still have to clothe our selves so perhaps a surplus must be generated for that process but we should still have time left over should you need any doctoring or education.
But surely you’re neglecting a whole lot of other people’s labour inputs here that make it so easy for you – clean water, tools, glass, bricks, metal, plastics, seeds, roads, peace and order etc., plus the fossil fuels that make them all so cheaply available. There are certainly some down sides to many of the items on that list, but if you had to produce them all or relevant substitutes yourself I think things would look less rosy. And if your crops failed, or worse all your neighbours’ crops failed too…
Your question as to what shape an optimal agrarian society takes is critical though. Certainly one where more than 1% of the population are full-time farmers I would think, but perhaps also one where considerably less than 100% are full-time farmers, and where we draw the line has enormous implications for all sorts of other things. It would be great to start thinking through those implications, but unfortunately we’re so hooked on the assumption of a labour-shedding and high energy input farming that it’s just not on the public agenda at all. So I’m glad that you’re nailing your colours so boldly to the mast of subsistence, even if I’m a little further back on the shoreline myself.
I was being a bit simplistic I’ll admit but I could make a case against the requirement for most of your examples. The ones that interest me most are bricks and water but this is not the place to go into a discussion about that.
I was simply looking at your question from another perspective. Rather than starting from the present agricultural base and asking if more labour could produce more food. I have gone directly to an extremely productive (per unit area) and low fuel using method of food production and asked how much time is left over for doing the other stuff required to sustain a reasonable way of life. When you come at it from this direction ones focus falls on other aspects of our culture which need sorting out as much as agriculture.
If your wider conclusion includes for the provision of more bricks and mine concludes that we need to stop making more building materials but relearn how to reuse existing materials or grow some more then I’ll gladly give up my free time to do some construction work and I’ll still have plenty left over.
It’s an interesting debate. I’m not sure how easy it is to extrapolate judgements about time inputs to a fully fledged smallholder society because it’s very difficult to absent ourselves from many of the little shortcuts available in modern life. The other side of it of course is that historically most small farmers get comprehensively ripped off by their landlords, so we’d need to be talking about a situation with a kind of Jeffersonian class of freehold proprietors – not necessarily a bad thing in my opinion, but hard to achieve politically. I suspect you may be right that agricultural intensification isn’t as difficult to achieve as I’ve been implying if people are genuinely focused on independent self-provisioning – the question is what happens when expectations of the food system slowly come under pressure as a result of population and resource pressures, while political surplus-extracting mechanisms continue to turn the screw. It would be good if people of influence started debating these issues properly instead of glibly assuming that global trade and technical innovation will get us out of the hole.
I completely agree with you. One further point though. It is tempting to look on the advantages of modern life as making it possible to undertake experiments in self provisioning such as my own. I have however found that much of my effort goes into reversing the trends of so called progress the most difficult of which being the mental straight jacket of my education and upbringing. Having found it so difficult to struggle out from my straight jacket I understand why “people of influence” are unlikely to do the same. The best I can do is to try to sort my own life out while gently encouraging green thinkers such as yourself to throw of their own mental straight jackets which are partly tailored from economic analysis!
Another interesting point that rings true – I’m sure that unlearning the habits of overdevelopment is important (case in point: my spellchecker has just rejected ‘overdevelopment’ but is quite happy with ‘underdevelopment’…though to be fair it didn’t like ‘spellchecker’ either). But is it a case of either/or? Can we keep some aspects of ‘progress’ and reject others? That would be an interesting way of raising the issues – a TV game in which panellists had to specify one thing they’d like to abandon from the high energy economy and one thing they’d like to keep, explaining how the latter could be funded from the limited surplus and what effects their choices would have on society overall. I suppose it would have to be Radio 4 really, wouldn’t it?
There are those who would argue that technology or at least the networked world that it potentiates now has its own dynamic that can’t be controlled by human intentions. I’m not sure that’s true, but it’s an intriguing thought. And your point about economics is another interesting one – the formalists have always argued that economic categories (like diminishing productivity) are implicit in everything, eg. optimal foraging theory applied to hunter-gatherers (oops, sorry!), whereas others have argued that these categories only reflect the Homo economicus assumptions of modern western thought. Who’s right? Both, I think. So I’m glad that you’re continuing to prod people from a critical, anti-economics position. But I think there’s also a value in prodding green anti-economic thought from the other direction, which was partly my aim in these Geertz postings.
I am not against progress in fact we need a load more of it to sort out the mess caused by the first lot of progress. I do object to its trajectory which happens to be the result of steering by economics.
Another issue with economic thinking is that much of what I find to be important in life, take nature or beauty as examples, is not measurable in economic terms. I can see that economic thinking provides a pleasing clarity and a simple way of understanding the world which is just what our left brains want. The problem comes when that clarity is mistaken for truth, a totality. I am not suggesting that you are doing this but economic thought is like a jar of sweets – you know you shouldn’t, the results are unhealthy, but it does feel good. I guess we can agree that there is no harm in a bit of economics as long as its just a bit and the result is put in its proper place. You might like to guess where I think that would be?
“The problem comes when that clarity is mistaken for truth”. Agreed – or as the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu put it, the problem comes when you “slip from the model of reality to the reality of the model”. A lot of contemporary policy-making seems to be about trying to make the actual world conform as closely as possible to the model of the world described by economic theory, with pretty disastrous results. Still, it’s impossible to make sense of anything without constructing models, so I think taking a few sweets from the jar of economic theory isn’t unreasonable, especially after a main course of ecology.