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 October 25, 2022 | 70 Comments
It’s tempting to divert from my present cycle of posts to address the latest melodrama in the ongoing dark comedy of British parliamentary politics. However, it’s a temptation I’m going to resist. There are some things I want to say about it inasmuch as it illuminates the crooked path to a small farm future, but I think they can wait for a month or two while I work my way through my present agenda. It’s possible that by then we’ll be onto our fourth prime minister of the year. But the underlying reasons for the turbulence won’t have changed, and this is the key point to consider.
So for now I’m going to continue examining questions of health and wellbeing in a small farm future, which I introduced in my last post. There, I made some general remarks about capacities for community self-care. In my next one, I’ll broach in very summary form some more specific aspects of welfare. In fact, that’s what I’d intended to do in this post but the discussion under the last one has prompted me to divert briefly into discussing the game of Monopoly, which I hope will clarify some underlying political points and lay down a few markers for future posts.
So – you know how a game of Monopoly unfolds. Everyone starts off equal, but as the game goes on some people fall behind, possibly due to bad choices but more likely due to bad luck. Fortunes can ebb and flow, and likely winners might fall by the wayside. But eventually somebody cleans up. They own everything, while nobody else owns anything. They’re out of the game.
I concede that this isn’t exactly how the capitalist economy works in real life, but for a board game with a few simple rules, it’s an impressively accurate approximation.
It’s instructive to apply the Monopoly example to the case of welfare policy. An awful lot of political attention to welfare, especially from the political right, gets devoted to the individual player at the point they’re forced out of the game. Was it their fault? In the real world, people aren’t forced out of the game of life – not directly, anyway. But if they’re deemed undeserving because of bad choices, the welfare lifeline they’re offered is often punitive, burdened with social stigma and operates in such a way that they’re unlikely ever to be fully autonomous players in the game again. If they’re deemed merely unlucky and less blameworthy, they may get an easier ride. But the line between deserving and undeserving is often thin.
As I see it, this tendency towards individualization of loser culpability in modern welfare narratives is a bad optic for two reasons. First, it only looks at one side of the deal. Somebody loses for whatever reason, and they hand over all their assets to their creditor, a creditor who’s usually no more than a bystander in the drama of the loser’s game. Why focus so much on the undeserving poor, rather than on the undeserving rich? Accounts of the undeserving rich do exist in our politics, but they’re not nearly so prominent as their counterpart. The numerous ways that the fortunes of the world’s rich people and rich countries are extracted from the poor ones go too little remarked. Out of wealth comes the power to keep writing the rules in favour of wealth, and thence the need to keep dusting its crumbs from the table in the form of stigmatizing welfare policies.
The second problem with the individualization of loser culpability is that the loss was inevitable from the start. The exact circumstances of its occurrence may have been unique, but everyone knew at the outset of the game that all but one player would eventually lose, because the rules guarantee that outcome. You can ponder the influence of luck, choices or strategic errors all you like in the details of the individual outcome, but they don’t alter that predestined fact.
This is basically the leftwing critique of capitalism, and welfare arrangements under capitalism. The rules are rigged, so instead of wrangling over the rights and wrongs of the individuals who fell foul of them, the real need is to change the rules. A rightwing counterargument is that the rules aren’t rigged, and the game of Monopoly isn’t a good analogy for real-life capitalism where a rising tide floats all boats. I think that’s a hard argument to pull off, especially when the richest twenty or so people worldwide own equivalent assets to the poorest 4 billion or so. So many bad choices, and so few good ones? I don’t think so.
Actually, as historians of Monopoly (it’s a thing) know, the game developed from the earlier ‘Landlord’s Game’ devised by Elizabeth Magie, a proponent of Georgist land value tax, with the aim of showing the ruinous consequences of monopolism generated by economic rent and untrammeled private property rights, contrasted with the general social benefits of shared value creation.
I’m not going to get into the details of land value tax – I wrote a post expressing my misgivings about it a while back, to the ire of some Georgists who responded. All I want to do here is make a few general points about welfare in a small farm future emerging from my Monopoly example to prepare the ground for more detailed future discussions. Six general points, to be precise.
First, in the game of life I think it’s a good idea for societies to set people up to succeed as self-directing players within the broad rules of their local community. So communities need to find rules that, unlike Monopoly, keep people in circulation wherever possible as full participants in the game.
Second, people who outwardly appear to be the same, with identical initial chances of winning the game as they stand ready and waiting at ‘Go’ with an (inflation-adjusted) £1,500 in their hand, may not in fact be the same and may not in fact have the same chance of winning. This is due to numerous possible underlying differences in their capability to play the game and make their initial endowment work for them as a self-directing player. So if a community is to succeed in keeping people in play, it needs a subtle and constructive rather than a monolithic and judgmental approach to the characters on the board. This is basically Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach that I mentioned under my previous post.
Third, beyond even Sen’s capabilities approach, I would argue there is a place for an ethical framework of the kind suggested by Christianity and other religious traditions: charity, forgiveness, second chances, there but for the grace of God go I, and so on – the sort of things, in fact, that the rules of Monopoly largely forbid. I struggle to understand the mindset of professed Christians who take an instinctively punitive attitude to other people’s difficulties or welfare claims.
Fourth, however, I do have misgivings about societies with welfare institutions overly reliant upon individual charity, because this establishes patron-client relationships which too easily corrupt the wider common good. In real-life local welfare games, I would prefer most of the charity afforded struggling players to come, metaphorically, from the Bank rather than a winning player. But this in turn may set up the problem of an over-mighty Bank, which terminates in the logic of a centralized state and its associated welfare bureaucracies, with an inbuilt interest in growing its power and crushing its rivals.
Fifth, in small farm societies – in fact, in all societies – the capacity of the Bank to step in and furnish welfare is not limitless. The Bank must draw, so to speak, from the community chest, which has many calls on its limited resources. So while most or all of the preceding points probably fit within a broadly leftwing case for community provision of welfare, I also find power in the possibly more rightwing view that people need to take some personal responsibility around their welfare – providing as much of it as they can for themselves without exploitatively taking from others, and having realistic expectations about what others can provide for them when they need to call upon their help. One advantage of this is that it can safeguard against the over-mightiness of patrons or Banks in dictating what they are prepared to give and what they insist on taking. It also safeguards against the problematic consequences for people and nature of the urge to accumulate value, especially abstract capital.
Finally, building on the previous point, when it comes to the questions of distribution and redistribution broached in the Distributist movement that I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I do have some sympathy for the argument of conservative Distributists that ‘distributism doesn’t mean re-distributism’. The point of distributism isn’t to immediately recreate a cumbersome welfare bureaucracy oriented to social levelling. But, frankly, in a world where twenty-odd people own equivalent assets to four billion-odd, my sympathy with this argument is limited. Against the background of our present global capitalist society and its local manifestations, if it’s to mean anything at all distributism most definitely does have to involve re-distribution until everyone’s genuinely in the game and continues to have a fighting chance of staying in it. The trickier questions revolve around how best to make this happen.
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In the US the best predictor of you becoming wealthy is wealthy parents.
The middle class has be shrinking, In 1970 over 60% of citizens were considered middle class. Now it is less than 50%. Systems work the way they are designed.
Chris, do you think you could use a larger font? I always want to read your blogs immediately before I can get up and get my iPad, then it is mega eye strain on my 12 mini.
The world may need re-distribution, but it should be the inverse of distributing goods and services. What needs to distributed is scarcity. Those 4 billion people getting more of what the twenty wealthy have is not what the world needs, even if they get it at the expense of the twenty.
What the world needs is the destruction of the assets of the twenty, not their distribution to the poor. We need a negative-sum game, not a zero-sum game, even if the zero-sum game could be made far more just. Degrowthers often get stuck trying to make decreasing affluence attractive to the affluent somehow. They rarely, if ever, succeed.
Of course, keeping poor people poor and also making affluent/rich people poor is not an easy sell. But when circumstances come about, like now, when even if everyone lived like the poorest subsistence farmers in sub-Saharan Africa it would still be too much of drain on the earth’s ecosystem, it’s hard to find a economic and political paradigm that makes sense. Universal poverty is a good start, but I have to admit my more-than-a-little-bit hypocritical need to paraphrase Augustine, “Make me poor, but not yet”.
Universal poverty is coming eventually and I’ll take it with stoicism when it comes, but I can’t say I’m looking forward to it. I don’t think there are many people that are. Most people won’t want to be small farmers until they have to, until the alternative is starving to death. Of course there will be lots of that coming too.
What the world needs is the destruction of the assets of the twenty, not their distribution to the poor. We need a negative-sum game, not a zero-sum game, even if the zero-sum game could be made far more just.
Outlawing the charging of rents on property (perhaps only above a certain amount) would go a long way toward doing this, but I can’t see it being politically popular.
the game of Monopoly isn’t a good analogy for real-life capitalism where a rising tide floats all boats.
Surely, though, the “rising tide” has to be interventions of (potentially small) increases in income for the poor and middle classes, preferably with some protection against that being used immediately for rents, rather than interventions that make the rich richer at direct expense of the poor. Twenty boats getting heavier isn’t a rising tide. Housing benefit payments that go direct to buy-to-let landlords isn’t a rising tide. A higher minimum wage is a rising tide.
I would argue there is a place for an ethical framework of the kind suggested by Christianity and other religious traditions: charity, forgiveness, second chances, there but for the grace of God go I, and so on
Against the background of our present global capitalist society and its local manifestations, if it’s to mean anything at all distributism most definitely does have to involve re-distribution until everyone’s genuinely in the game and continues to have a fighting chance of staying in it. The trickier questions revolve around how best to make this happen.
I mean, there is a scriptural frame for redistribution, too, in the form of Jubilee years. It isn’t all that helpful in that the initial conditions that the Jubilee returns too aren’t specified, and it isn’t discussed in practical terms in the New Testament (probably because the Jewish community, and so by extension the Christian community, was at that time living under a political occupation by a military power), but the concept of “All that wealth you/your family has built up? Now you get to give it back and start over!” certainly exists, and it exists in the same framework that specifies tithing, leaving some corners of your fields standing, making provision for gleaners, being obliged to marry your widowed sister-in-law if you can (and therefore support her and her children rather than them.bdcoming destitute), and so on.
Forty years of Thatcherism and the Reagan Revolution has shown that the idea that a rising (economic) tide lifts all boats is a cruel joke at best and more likely cynical exploitation of the undereducated or thinking impared.
Around here it looks like all this recent inflation has been good for corporate profits. Not so much for anyone else.
My point is that making the rich richer is not, in fact, a rising tide.
40 years… since 1980 global population rose from 4.5 to almost 7 billion (apparently Europe saw a rise of around 50 million during this time).
In my Eurocentric viewpoint this period has been accompanied by a slight rise in people’s material standards of living (buy, and large) even if the material itself appears a tsunami of bigger screens, bigger cars, infantile ephemera and junk food. Our leaders(!) take credit for this as a rising tide with no end to speak of. In buying into this reality, the tide is indeed on the rise.
“We are just one big conversation”
I came across this article link on Gunnar Rundgren’s Garden Earth blogspot (Gunnar also has an interesting new post there)… it does glossily mention health care (and even monopoly!), but aside from that it’s a positive piece with some seemingly workable ideas from a South American community coop.
https://www.bollier.org/blog/cecosesola-venezuela-wins-right-livelihood-award
Other than for increased government assistance, the poverty rate in the US has increased slightly in the past 40 years. The ‘growing’ economy has done nothing.
Tax cuts for the rich and corporations has only increased the amount of wealth disparity and national debt.
Thanks for the comments. I’m going to be offline for a couple of days now, so I’ll pick this up at the weekend.
Re Pam’s comment, it’s probably about time I overhauled the nuts & bolts of this site. Any other suggesions welcome.
Add a “Distributism” header/landing page to the navigation bar!
I would second the larger font request, though I usually read the initial post from an RSS reader, so it affects me less.
I don’t really look at parts of the site other than the blog.
I have seen several requests for a resources page of some description, mostly from those of us who skew to the more practical end of things. I think maybe a list of external links would be good — curating this would be a lot of work, but maybe when someone posts a link to a bike-powered thresher it could go in the list, or whatever else. I don’t really document my own growing experiments at Geek Meets Nature very regularly or reliably, so it probably isn’t a good example of something to include, but it’s worth thinking about whether that’s something you would want to include if it were updated more frequently. On the one hand, I think you are right to state that you can’t give an exact practical blueprint for every context. On the other hand, one of the things I appreciate about reading and commenting here is the mix of practical and philosophical approaches, and genuine space to discuss how they relate to one another.
I think a reading list, or at least a list of books you have reviewed already (with links to those posts), would be interesting. I wouldn’t necessarily keep up with reading such a list. (I’ll confess I haven’t checked whether this list already exists as a tag.)
I second the “links of books reviewed,” since it came up. I sent your excellent review of A People GND to a friend recently
I would like it to be mobile-friendly. And also, I want to be able to like comments.
Oh. I have asked in the past if you could have the Reader View, which is disabled on your site for some reason.
I think many of the comments are circling around the fact that your site does not adjust to a person’s personal settings; it seems locked at type size and page width, which makes it hard to read on anything but a desktop.
I used to believe that “a rising tide floats all boats” because that is what my (Conservative) parents believed and told me. And if it was true, it would be a logical justification for capitalism: if a rising tide benefits everyone, and there is an abundance of tide to share out, why shouldn’t some people have more than others? But as I grew older, I realised that the world is not like a rising tide: this is the wrong analogy. It is more like a pie of limited size. As the population grows, the pie is divided into smaller and smaller slices, and if a few people get massive slices of the pie, that means even less for everyone else. However, I haven’t seen this analogy getting much traction in capitalist circles.
In a growth economy, the pie is getting bigger, so each individual slice is also getting bigger. (Not every slice however, is necessarily growing at the same rate)
The problem comes, when growth stops and goes into reverse. Which is where we are now.
Holding the “Ctrl” key and tapping the “+” key will make the font bigger, and can be repeated to your prefered size – or at least it does on my out-of-the-box windows setup. Don’t know about smartphones (don’t have one) – so apologies if this doesn’t work for you.
So simple – never knew that!
“people need to take some personal responsibility around their welfare – providing as much of it as they can for themselves…”
This seems reasonable, since the future will probably include further constraints on government funding for social security, welfare, healthcare, schools, etc.
While some aspects of their society may be unappealing, the Amish demonstrate how to manage without government assistance (no Social Security benefits; no Medicare, unemployment, or welfare benefits; no use of public schools).
Regarding healthcare, I’ve read about “Amish Birthing Centers” built without any government funding, staffed by nurse midwifes and physicians, with parking for horses and buggies, and barns for overnight lodging of the horses.
“Fees for the use of the New Eden Care Center cover current expenses, repairs, and maintenance of this facility. A flat fee is charged for the birth itself and 72 hours of care starting from the time of admission. There are additional fees for extra supplies such as PKU screening, intravenous solutions, and medications. The nurse midwives and physicians fees are separate from the birthing center fees. At times the fees are bartered for. For example, one of the nurse midwives had a new front porch put on her home to cover for her fee. In addition meats have been given for payments.”
https://nursinganswers.net/essays/health-care-in-amish-culture-health-and-social-care-essay.php
That all sounds very expensive compared to the NHS!
When I was a kid the elderly family members were looked after by their married daughters , they as usual in that age did not work but stayed home looking after kids and the elderly , but things change at that time the husbands wage could keep an entire family then the GOV decided that women needed a career to secure this they made sure ( by inflation ) one wage was not enough , it needed two wages to keep a family together and taxes increased as the state took over ” caring ” for the elderly , infirm and children , nice little con job there and finding more taxable workers in the process .
Some women wanted to go to work , some did not but the nots were forced into work out of poverty . As a family member told me ,exchanging drugery for wage slavery .
And all of that also had a knock-on effect for childcare too of course.
At the risk of derailing your argument entirely, I would suggest rewording it slightly.
Try using the term ‘Social Security’ instead of ‘Welfare’, for a whole day.
This reframes the discussion away from a weighted term implying handouts and haphazard assistance, and into the unfamiliar frame of strategic policy, an intent that our society is structured to ensure that there is a ‘floor’, a minimuim standard of housing and living and health.
Further: an economic design, from top to bottom, succeeding in its intent that ‘losing’ does not exclude anyone from economic opportunity. No destitution, no human landfilll, no hopeless grind of subsistence and ‘precarity’, a monopoly board where there is always a way to keep going ’round the board and keep contributing to the game in a productive playing-out of life’s ups and downs.
Because ‘going round the board’ in real-world Social Security economics, means participating, being productive and creating value. Contributing, not consuming ‘welfare’ handouts that are framed as a confiscation from productive players rather than a stabilising contribution to value that keeps the economy going, instead being a ‘last man standing’ Hunger Games monopoly board.
Which is to say: not an alleviating intervention in an all-too-familiar system; rather, a system designed with stabilising structures.
Social Security, not welfare.
All five points seem very reasonable to me. I’d draw slightly different conclusions around Points 4 and 5, I think.
I agree that charity is not ultimately a beneficent way of producing welfare, for the reason you state, but I don’t think the alternative has to be framed as a Bank (although I get that this keeps the Monopoly analogy alive!), or rather, given that the Bank is reliant on the Community Chest (in Point 5), I think it would be more beneficial to side-line the Bank and start thinking more creatively about what effective re-distributing agents might look like.
Point 5 restates your case for a balance or ‘Goldilocks’ zone based on a balance between selfish tendencies within individuals and over-mighty tendencies within social authorities. In response, I’ll restate my feeling that ‘personal responsibility’ is all well and good, but I don’t think it should apply to the basics. I think I once framed this as Universal Basic Sustenance in a comment under a previous post. The point being that nobody should be shamed for drawing on others to keep them in a sufficient state of life. I make no claim to the essential superiority of any and all collective agencies in this; only that collective responsibility for the welfare of all should be a principal around which society is organised.
To the extent that some may claim that such collective responsibility is exploitative on those who have more, I would say they have no case. But there is still a great range of situations in which personal responsibility remains important – what one does with one’s life, suitably buttressed against poverty, becomes the key issue.
I’d also echo commenters above emphasising the importance of land. Whatever form the redistributive authority takes, however institutional or centralised it does or doesn’t become, it will need to provide everyone with a direct connection to the land in some way if it’s going to create a more just society.
Thanks for the responses.
On redistributive questions, I basically agree with Joe – I’m not suggesting that it’s simply a question of spreading the cash around more evenly. I’ve written at length previously about the need for (and inevitability of) a reduction in fluid capital, and the qualitatively different kind of society that must be created. But the fact that it’s qualitatively different means that it may not be ‘poorer’ for most people except in a rather technical sense. Joe has a point that degrowthers struggle to make a decrease in affluence seem attractive to the affluent, or at least to the super-affluent. I guess that points to the need to make it attractive to the less affluent majority – which isn’t so easy, especially since humans often opt for status emulation, and the rich have better access to PR. But I think it’s the door to push at – which is one reason why I identify with populism.
In case there’s any doubt, I don’t subscribe to the idea that the ‘rising tide floats all boats’. But I would say that economic growth isn’t *necessarily* a zero sum game. Growth is attractive to political leaders because even if the people at the top of the wealth or income distributions usually do better out of it than the people at the bottom, if the people at the bottom are doing better than they were (which is sometimes the case), then everyone is likely to be happy and the political class reaps the benefits. But it’s a regressive kind of increase, involving unsustainable capital, energetic, material and nature costs. So a different way must be found. And, as Greg points out, often there is no increase at all, or a negative one, for the poor.
The different way I mention has many smaller paths leading to it. We’ve already talked here recently about land access, death taxes and so on, so I won’t go over that again here. Kathyrn’s points about jubilees and economic rent – basically preventing unearned capital from accumulating – are on track IMO. The difficulty is in creating societies with enough collective buy in to make such ideas attractive. There may be an unfortunate circularity here. I’m hoping to say a bit more about that soon.
To Nile’s points, well I agree that ‘going round the board’ means participating, being productive, creating value and contributing and that the point is for everyone to keep going around, which was exactly my argument in the OP. I’m less persuaded by the semantics of ‘social security’ over ‘welfare’ on the grounds of the stigma associated with the latter term. ‘Social security’ doesn’t capture the full meaning of human wellbeing or welfare (health, education, connection etc.), and inasmuch as ‘security’ implies a floor or minimum, then there’s every reason to suppose that the floor will be set as low as possible, and will be stigmatizing. I don’t think it’s the terminology itself that’s the fundamental problem, so I’d rather reclaim the term ‘welfare’ from the stigma associated with it, than use a worse term with similar associations.
Another issue here is that ‘security’ in all senses of the term is something that governments and their policymakers are increasingly unable to offer. It would be nice to think there could be a small farm future – or any kind of future, really – where people could expect secure wellbeing and systemic rather than haphazard sources of support. But with welfare services becoming more rather than less haphazard for systemic reasons, this is going to be a profound challenge. Perhaps it’s worth discussing how to design an economic system from top to bottom with stabilising structures in a world-historical situation of systemic unravelling – or even whether this is desirable, or may risk conjuring its own demons of who does and doesn’t deserve wellbeing?
Finally, to Andrew’s points – no major points of ‘in principle’ difference, although I don’t agree that producing one’s own welfare is ‘selfish’ (refusing to care about anybody else’s is a different matter). I agree that “nobody should be shamed for drawing on others to keep them in a sufficient state of life” and that “collective responsibility for the welfare of all should be a principal around which society is organised” in principle, but this leads to the same questions of detail that I posed under my last post, viz:
“A basic definition of a commons is a resource plus a community plus a set of usage protocols. In the case of care, the resource is people’s time, capacity, skill and commitment to care for others. The community is … what? Maybe the immediate household or family of the person needing care, or wider family, or friends, neighbours, church congregations or other local groups? Does it include strangers who live nearby, professional service organisations, or distant taxpayers? And then there’s the protocols – who has a duty of care to me, in what ways and to what extent? I could say that people have a duty of care to each other, or that my community has a duty of care to me, but that’s too general. Suppose I badly injure myself on the farm this afternoon (which is quite likely – I’m going to be cutting blackthorn with my chainsaw), who *specifically* is going to care for me and under what terms? And would that look different in a small farm future?”
So – I’d be interested to get into a more fine-grained discussion of what ‘collective responsibility for the welfare of all’ might actually look like in small farm societies.
Andrew’s point that ‘nobody should be shamed’ is especially interesting. I agree, but … People regularly and inherently *feel* shame within the larger collectivities they inhabit, and they also spend a lot of time gossiping about each other’s behaviour, choices and moral standing within those collectivities. In families, local communities and other small collectivities this stuff matters, and local reputation matters – which has its negative side, but also its positive one. As I said above, I support ideas of forgiveness and second chances. But where resources are tight, there may be limited local enthusiasm for third chances. It might be interesting to discuss where that takes us.
Thanks for the response Chris. To your question of detail, I suppose we would need to start teasing apart the various elements of care and considering them one by one.
Certainly I think there’s a place for more general awareness of the everyday requirements of care so that members of the same household can look out for each other at a granular level. At the end of the day, if someone wants to be cared for in their own household and their other household members are happy to undertake whatever ‘caring’ requires in that instance, then fair enough. I would hope that a small farm future guaranteed everyone sufficiency in food and shelter in any case, so that wouldn’t be a problem in households that needed to draw a little more on whatever redistributive mechanisms were in place (Universal Basic Sustenance, or perhaps Universal Basic Sufficiency is a better term).
But you’re thinking along lines where more is required – in which more ‘professional’ healthcare is needed (if you’d had a dramatic accident with the chainsaw, for example). Clearly there is a need for healthcare beyond the resources or expertise of any one household, and thus could be extended into all sorts of situations in which more specialist knowledge or expertise was required, or longer term intensive care was needed.
Perhaps we need to see hospitals and other care and health ‘hubs’ as specialised settlement types that it would be worth tying into local networks of resource provision and support, with ‘staff’ who lived lives shuttling backwards and forwards between hubs and households. Thinking of Steve L’s Amish example, perhaps we should view healthcare personnel as a ‘committed’ community in and of themselves, bound together by some version of the Hippocratic oath, who want to live their lives focused on the provision of healthcare and require the redistributive mechanisms of a UBS to a much greater degree than other households in return.
I’m not sure you’re final thought experiment leads anywhere good. In particular, I’m not sure it’s healthy to focus on a hypothetical crunch point where the food has all but run out and standing before you is a person whose previous misdemeanours might have pushed them beyond the last drop of good will. The point is that if you build a society around ensuring sufficient care for all, that moment never comes, because you keep finding new ways of keeping everyone safe. I don’t think this discussion needs to go down the route of what impossible choices you may or may not have to make under disaster conditions.
On a more sunny note, if we were to consider what one element of larger-scale organisation in societies we wanted to preserve in the future, I think I would point to the web of healthcare provision that entities like the NHS are intended to provide. It would even be possible to improve that provision in many ways in the future (not especially difficult right now!), and certainly that would involve a decentralisation of many organisational functions to local hubs, leaving larger-scale elements focused on the sharing of knowledge and expertise over long distances.
More broadly, healthcare as a wider field is, I think, something that benefits from a ‘public’ ethos, in the sense that standards of life and ways of living with impairments should be in ‘public’ view and the subject of discussion in whatever counts for the public sphere – not so that everyone can take a view on who ‘deserves’ certain levels of care, but because these sorts of question are very much about the human condition and what kind of society we want to create.
I don’t think this discussion needs to go down the route of what impossible choices you may or may not have to make under disaster conditions.
I think your preference gets to the core purpose of Chris’s blog, which he says is, “(small farming) is the most likely way for humanity to see itself through the numerous crises we currently face both in the richer and poorer countries. This blog is my attempt to address why. The posts are sometimes practical but mostly political, as I try to wrestle with how to make the world a more welcoming place for the smallholder”.
Is SFF a forum for the design of some kind of utopian small farm future that, when completed, will be presented to the public at large as an enticing vision, which they may then choose in preference to their existing place in modern industrial society? Do we expect or hope that this vision will “go viral” and sweep away all of contemporary industrial culture? I don’t see it happening, no matter how wonderful that would be. Given a choice between lifestyle memes, the vast majority of people in richer countries will choose modernity over peasantry.
But we really don’t have a choice, do we? In my view, a small farm future is a given (in the long run) and while we can discuss our preferences regarding the culture of that inevitable small farm society endlessly, I see the transition from where we are now, a modern industrial civilization, to any kind of small farm future as our biggest challenge.
We are soon to be faced with a situation where almost every decision made will involve “impossible choices you may or may not have to make under disaster conditions” (the “crises” Chris alludes to). The disaster will be greatest for urban folk, but it will greatly affect small farmers and would-be small farmers too. More lives depend on crisis/disaster preparedness than any other topic, except perhaps the avoidance of nuclear war.
This is Chris’s blog, of course, and he can do what he wants, but I would ecourage him and others to explore ways of easing the transition to the small farm future and mitigating the crises that the history of modernity and the impending disintegration of modernity have and will produce. In other words, explore how to facilitate a small farm future, not just why it’s better than other choices.
A few examples of subjects to explore:
1. Small farmer adaptions to climate change.
2. How to get the flood of nutrients going into cities back out and onto the land as cleanly as possible. How do we build soil fertility now, no matter who is using it and what the economic structure is?
3. What kinds of infrastructure investments can have dual purposes so that they are attractive to conventional farmers now and would also be useful to small farmers of the future? One example might be gravity irrigation canals. Surely there are others.
4. What kinds of community organizing really work to re-localize food production/consumption and increase food security?
5. No matter how much discussion has been devoted to access to land, it hasn’t been nearly enough and never will be.
6. What kinds of steps can individuals and families take to prepare for the multitude of disasters they are about to face, from empty store shelves, to power outages, to social unrest and many more?
There are many models of small farm culture. Any of them would be a better tool of anthropocene crisis management than business as usual. Rather than try and search for the sharpest tool in the shed, let’s figure out how to get as many of them out of the shed and deployed as rapidly as possible.
Good points, Joe. I’m especially fond of number 3. Watermeadows were a common feature where I grew up, and a few have since been brought back into operation elsewhere in England, though most if not all of those in the Midlands have been affected by subsidence from coal mining negatively affecting the dynamics of the above ground riverine land.
I forgot to add:
(1) It’d be interesting to calculate the costs of self-generated services like the Amish maternity care versus formal providers like the NHS – I’m not convinced the latter would be cheapest (though it’d probably be cheaper than formal private providers). You’d need to figure in costs like nurse/physician training. Though the big issue there is knowledge transfer, perhaps?
(2) Thanks for the suggestions about website style & structure. With font size, I’d have thought this is modifiable at the user end, as Martin suggests? But any advice appreciated. I’ll ponder the other points. There is a category ‘Reading List’ that you can search on, which brings up posts themed around a particular book – but not necessarily reviews, exclusively. Perhaps I’ll add a review tag.
On my computer I can easily increase font size. On my mobile phone it is tiny and when I zoom in to make it bigger I end up having to scroll from side to side. Other sites have readable size text when I use my phone, so I haven’t tried to figure out how to change the settings because that would potentially make the text in other sites huge; my initial read is usually in an RSS reader anyway, so it is far from a deal-breaker for me.
Ah. I said above that I would like the site to be mobiel-friendly, and this is why. I wonder how many of the people who want larger font are actually on their phones, and need a responsive site design that will be displayed with their settings.
Another concept worth thinking about is ‘National Insurance’ is the community insures its members against certain risks
An obvious example would have been (In the UK) the furlough and Self employed Income Support payments
To the extent that a post fossil fuel society’s evolution can be managed, one would hope that hospitals and other associated care facilities will be the last ones to have to turn out the lights.
Closer to my Eastern European home, it seems a fairly high proportion of people die at home, cared for by family (many houses house three generations or else immediate family live close by).
The way professional healthcare works here is similar to the UK (National Insurance payments automatically deducted from earnings) with an (at least to me) odd and supposedly ‘unofficial’ culture whereby patients slip attending medical staff cold hard cash as an additional thank you for services rendered. I’ve heard some tales of patients offering doctors home-made schnapps in lieu of or in addition to cash, so we’re not a million miles away from the Amish example here. It is hoped that the biggest tippers get the best preferential treatment. The service and equipment itself is modern, if reputedly falling apart, with doctor shortages, run-down surgeries, and the attendant moans from the populace. My personal brief experience, receiving treatment for Lyme disease, was good. How healthcare will pan out in the future is a big and daunting question.
Some figures I heard recently – it may have been on Radio 4’s Farming Today – stated how Wales, Ireland and Scotland are estimated to be at 100% ecological carrying capacity for humans, while England stands at 400%. Where land is scarce and populations full to bursting, future shocks bear thinking about perhaps most urgently of all. A less manageable decline in healthcare might see people reliant on regular medicine faring the worst. Imagine insulin going the way of something like synthetic fertiliser today. Cities might become tempted by a nudge to eat studge. But where ever there is a little land, one way I’ve considered of slightly improving local resilience is getting more people involved with producing local seeds. Community-based seed production for a few of the annuals could literally become child’s play. Some of the biennials that require slightly more care and attention (fruit cages, isolation to avoid undesirable cross-breeding etc) might require a more seasoned hand. One thing that has struck me about growing for seed is how just a little space can bring forth an inundation. I think it entirely feasible for a village, a street even, to supply its own locally adapted seeds, provided we don’t starve in the meantime. Chiefly food should be thy medicine, possibly with a specialist or two working on botanical medicaments. A bit of a diversion from the main topic perhaps, but seeds is about as fine-grained as I can get this evening. The pandemic is still with us, with no guarantee that the future mutations won’t become more deadly. The last time we had lockdowns, seed companies were soon overwhelmed. There’s also a kind of guilty pleasure to be had in letting your garden go to seed, followed by a more genuine pleasure when you’re able to give seed away.
Support for individual welfare in the future may depend more and more upon committed membership status of some sort.
I’d like to make a distinction between types of membership, such as being a member of society just by being born into it (or relocating there), versus being an adult member of a functional family, or a household, or a religious community (such as the Amish). Simply being a member of the larger society typically implies a relatively low level of commitment to the group (society), while there can be a relatively high level of commitment expected from members of other groups (such as a religious community).
Support given to low-commitment members, such as “free” NHS medical care for any resident of the UK, may be contingent upon economic prosperity in the larger society (with major cutbacks during hard times), while group support for high-commitment members, such as the members of an Amish congregation, seems to be more solid. The level of commitment between a group and its members seems to work in both directions.
I’ve been reading more about the Amish and found that there is no central Amish authority or hierarchy above the local congregations, which are headed by unpaid bishops. People aren’t born into the Amish congregation as members, they choose to become members (or not) as adults, and becoming a member involves certain commitments.
“The Amish stress personal responsibility, not individual rights. The young adult who joins the community signifies his or her willingness to share responsibility for the group… In the area of health care, this means that the family, assisted by the community, cares for the sick and feeble… When medical expenses loom too large for a single family, the community shares the cost. On a deeper level, the community accepts responsibility for the health of its members…”
“An Amish baby ‘born at home’ may actually be born in the parents’ home or at the home of a lay midwife. Most Amish midwives are unknown outside the Amish communities… Amish midwives have families of their own, and some find it more convenient for the laboring mother to come to the midwife’s home for delivery. The midwife may have one or two rooms on the first floor of her home specially equipped as a labor room, delivery room, and nursery. Usually the Amish midwife has an informal relationship with a sympathetic doctor who assists in emergencies…”
“[One Amish midwife] assisted birthing Amish women for over thirty years [until the early 1980s]… Since [she] accepted donations but did not charge any fees, her home was clearly not a hospital. In fact, she frequently was paid nothing and very often received little– perhaps only one hundred dollars for the three-day stay, during which the mother was well fed, had all her laundry done, and received twenty-four-hour nursing care…”
“[A non-Amish midwife, an RN, opened her practice in 1989 where] the bulk of her patients were conservative Mennonites. [She] practiced in a rural area where family incomes were generally about fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, and it was not unusual for a family to have ten children. Hospital deliveries cost at least thirty-five hundred dollars, not including lab fees and various extras. [She] charged fifteen hundred dollars for prenatal care, delivery assistance, lab fees, and the six-week checkup — unless the family was unable to meet the payment. In her words, she preferred to receive nothing than to “take bread off their table.” Without the services of a midwife, many women would have delivered with only family members in attendance.”
From “The Amish and the State”, edited by Donald B. Kraybill, 2003
Chapter 9 — Health Care, by Gertrude Enders Huntington
https://books.google.com/books?id=_9WTtr8EL74C&pg=PA163#v=onepage&q&f=false
Midwifery must be an important aspect of our low energy future. I have had 4 midwife-attended home births. We initially chose this partly because of costs (far less). The midwives had worked for Amish mothers and also had a “sympathetic doctor, in case” so were very much like those you mention. The experience was highly preferable to my one hospital birth. The midwives used Castor Oil three times to induce labor past due date which many main-stream articles/studies call dangerous. Don’t get me started on the dangers of the interventions my friends and sisters endured at the hospitals! We have been so trained to believe that it’s terribly risky out beyond this current system, and as a nurse myself I understand the real risks surrounding childbirth, but lots of our fears are exaggerated.
Salient points from Andrew. In some kind of salaried SFF situation, perhaps a disciplinary along the lines of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ may remain customary, but as resources get tighter, I think it becomes increasingly essential to keep everyone in play, come what may.
I’m in a very tight-knit and fairly ‘breadline’ community and what has surprised me again and again over the years is how, despite our fair share of miscreants who serially abuse the bounds of what’s generally agreed as proper and decent, the community’s door never closes on them. If that were to happen – what form it might take here I can’t really imagine – I would expect one result would be rise in mental ill health. That’s not to say people don’t voice their displeasure at others’ behaviour, or that there aren’t frosty spells, or that some don’t get sent to jail or disappear to rehab, or that we’re all doormats, or that tolerance isn’t pushed and tried. We’re as dysfunctional as everywhere else, but in our own special way, and to my knowledge the interconnectivity has not been decidedly rent asunder. It no doubt helps that many community members are often in some way related, though that trend is slowly drifting away.
Your six points seem reasonable to me. Of course, as societies will have to adapt to local circumstances also how “welfare” is organized will probably differ. I am more concerned about what Andrew also mentions: how can specialised professional health care be upheld, if at all? This has two aspects (at least). First it is about if there will be sufficient surplus value created to develop and maintain such a system and secondly how this can be organized. To the first point, there are clearly limits.Also in the current situation there are treatments that simply are too expensive to be used, and with a shrinking economy many more treatments will become to costly or require infrastructure – and knowledge perhaps – that we will not afford. While it may not be much of a real problem once you are there, the knowledge that the future may not allow you to do some of the things you can do today will put many people off.
Linked to this is of course how you will organize and finance this. Will that be the state financed by taxes or some monastery like societies being paid in cheese?
Thanks for the new responses – some really great comments here. I’ll try to reply soon, but just now I’m burdened/blessed with some family caring responsibilities which are hindering/informing my efforts to keep up with this discussion.
So hopefully I’ll come back to this in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I just want to say that while my point about third chances was made a bit too crudely, it at least seems to have succeeded in eliciting the more granular discussion I was calling for. Andrew, I appreciate your motivations behind finding new ways to keep everyone safe, but I think you’re being a bit too idealistic – the moment of exhausted goodwill does come often enough in contemporary society (I’m thinking for example of family responses to substance addiction) and I think it will come in a small farm future too. I’m not arguing for a final washing of hands. Simon’s fascinating account of his local situation gives some great ‘thick description’ of how this can work (noting also here the importance of family, or ‘fictive’ family) in terms of open-ended flexibility at the local level (at the bureaucratic level, perhaps not so much). But IMO it’s a flexibility that does require ultimate recourse to sanctions of some kind. People f*cking up is a feature, not a bug.
Anyway, I’ll come back to this in more detail when I can. Meanwhile, thanks all for your thoughts.
Thanks also to Joe for the suggestions about future focus – if anyone else would care to add their thoughts about future topics, I’d welcome it. At the moment, I’m quite engaged with the high level political stuff I’ve been talking about, and I want to work through some more of that. But I can foresee a time when I’ve got that out of my system and will want to get grounded again in questions of practical transition. Especially because I’m hoping to get stuck into a bit more practical transitioning myself.
Thanks Chris, I look forward to your further thoughts. But if you’re not arguing for a final washing of hands then you are arguing for another chance. Good will runs out at the personal level of course, but if there is some kind of institutional safeguard that’s not necessarily a problem. Substance addiction is a good example of where extra-household provision can be very useful – Simon also mentioned rehab!
On idealism, I’m wary of a contrast with a more grounded, real-world situation. When crises are forcing changes and transformations, any new approach is better founded in explicitly stated ideals. More importantly of course, everybody acts idealistically (or rather, ideologically) much of the time, whether they admit it or not. Joe’s point that we won’t change the future by handing out utopian pamphlets is fair enough, but we’ve all just enjoyed several blogposts here that emphasised the importance of founding principles. There are many ways to try to change the future, and perhaps a better framing is the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, which will be common to all of them in one way or another.
There was a show on Netflix about a British dairyman, called Moo Man. I often say I wish there was a 24 hour Moo Man channel, because I could just watch it all day long.
Similarly, I would love a 24 hour Peasant Wessex channel.
A thick description, eh? I’ll take that as a compliment 🙂
I forgot to add above that, not only the skein of familial relations that threads through the village, but also the practice churchgoing and regular Bible study, particularly among the elders, perhaps also helps in some way to keep things together (I’ve never witnessed or heard of any physical violence here, despite hard drinking). And on further reflection there have of course been several members of this small village who took a wayward route despite it all. At those few times it has always caused me to wonder if and how the community failed the afflicted in some way. In a hamlet-type setting, even a relative stranger’s absence can be felt more keenly than if subsumed within a larger society, fleeting though that feeling may be. But enough from me! I’d hate to lay it on too thick. I have however just discovered footage of our village, should anyone be curious of its topography and higgledy-piggledy nature. This one’s a flyover from the approach road over small farmland, the linear settlement itself, people’s gardens (quarter acres), Catholic and Protestant churches, surrounding deer and boar territory, etc. We’re on a cul-de-sac, and the village name roughly (poetically) translates in the guidebooks as ‘nook in the woods’, szög meaning corner/cranny, liget meaning copse or grove.
The link via
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K–o-Gk5WFc
Looks nice! It reminds me of the Willamette Valley where I grew up. The straightness of the streets does surprise me. It looks like a more recently built village than an ancient one.
I wonder if most people work in Kosice or commute all the way to Budapest?
I’ll have to check out the Willamette Valley.
The straight streets, referred to locally as the new row(s), got started around the 60s. The older part of the village is further up towards the hills, but even there the oldest houses date from late 1800s, tops. The Wiki entry for the village’s history states “In the second half of the 13th century, the village was listed as a settlement with a Hungarian population in the documents, the village was created together with Szádvár, its inhabitants were serfs of the castle. The castle was demolished in 1686 on the orders of the Viennese court. Then the manorial center was transferred to Bódvaszilas. The Derenk cart road used for trade passed under the castle.”
The oldest buildings are from stone, and I heard recently that earlier houses were built from wood and thatched.
Just outside the village today are a few industrial units, comprising a farm/micro-dairy, lumber yard, and a place where, among other things, organic elderflower cordial gets made and transported to England, where it is sold in nice green bottles. Many work at one of these enterprises. The village’s school, nursery, canteen, doctor’s surgery, shops, bar, council offices, post office, or nearby national park and forestry employ others. Another small group works in the village doing various jobs like gardening, litter picking, general maintenance work, or meals-on-wheels type arrangements for the elderly, all of which is paid for by the state at a low rate.
I know of no one who commutes 50km to Kosice, except perhaps a self-employed electrician occasionally, though people from Kosice come to the village, some buying property, for a respite from city life. Budapest is 240km away, so anyone working there usually moves away.
Thanks Simon – it’s nice to see your environs. It prompts lots of questions! Interested to know what the process of repopulation in the 19th century was. And the species/usage/history of all the trees in people’s gardens. Who’s farming the surrounding arable lands, and what’s the history there. Similarly with the forested hills. Religious history in terms of the Protestant/Catholic churches. Orientation to contemporary national politics in Hungary. Just to get you started…
Coffee mug down, I’m on it!
I confess history is my blind spot, though I do have an A-level in sociology (my only ‘ology), so I kind of knew where you were coming from with the Geertz reference (I also looked it up to enlighten myself further). It was popularised by Geertz, you’re right, though interestingly a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle coined the term, along with the expression ‘ghost in the machine’.
OK, I’ll try to respond to some of the comments above – thanks as ever to everyone for a fine crop of thoughts.
1. To whom the spoils? The main thing I want to emphasize with reference to my Monopoly example is the importance of keeping people in the game as far as possible. Most commenters here seem to be agreed on that, so no need to labour the point. Whereas rightwing welfare thinking often emphasizes the culpability of those in need of economic support, I think it’s more illuminating to look critically at the people who win in these circumstances rather than those who lose – to emphasize systemic rather than individual failure.
2. The crooked timber of humanity. People’s needs for support from others are complex, multifaceted and potentially large. I agree with commenters here who say that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but I’m not especially sympathetic to the broadly leftwing view that social needs can always be met by better collective design of political systems. I agree with Andrew’s point that it’s good to be ‘idealistic’ in grounding politics in explicitly stated ideals, but IMO wise political systems recognize that people are ornery souls and some of them will sometimes test the system beyond its limits.
3. Communities of commitment. Steve makes a good observation about levels of commitment in different communities. The key model of the high commitment community (‘here for you, no matter what’) is the family, which is not to say that all families are high commitment or that all high commitment communities are families, as conventionally understood. The wider the model of the family ramifies, the more problematic, unresponsive and stereotyped its capacity to commit is likely to be (eg. the nation as family). Co-residential families set mostly within local communities seem to me to be the most appropriate level for high commitment communities (John B’s and also Nile’s comments about social security as community insurance fit here, I think). These high commitment communities can cope with a lot of the needs and the stresses placed on them by their members, as per Simon’s ‘thick description’ – which, yes, is definitely a compliment (it stems from the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, I think – ‘thick’ in the sense of detailed, rich and nuanced, not in the sense of ‘stupid’. A thick broth rather than a thin gruel.)
4. Communities and publics. But they can’t cope with everything. Hence, I agree with Andrew on the need for a public ethos around social welfare as, among other things, a higher level of coping. ‘Higher’, but not ‘better’ – in fact, often probably worse and less responsive to specific contexts, which is why families and communities are often reluctant to cede responsibilities for their members to them. I will say more about publics and communities later in this blog cycle. It’s hot button stuff, since I will be (drumroll) disagreeing with Wendell Berry.
5. Past and future. There is a past history to the relationship between publics and communities and there will be a future history to it which I suspect will be quite different. Typical past models involved the relatively ‘thin’ institutions of elite public culture (civil bureaucrats, churches, intellectuals, doctors) extending themselves into the ‘thick’ institutions of community life. I think the future model will more likely involve the atrophy of existing thick public institutions, and thence the need to reinvent thick local communities and to invent new, thin public cultures overarching them. That’s not going to be easy.
6. Elite professionalism. Elite public institutions are double-edged – as nicely illustrated in Clara’s point. In some ways, it’s great for communities to be able to call on high-end expert knowledges, such as medicine. But experts are also members of professions with a self-interest in closing ranks and extending their ambit. I’m interested in Andrew’s suggestion of occupationally-specific care-providing communities tied by reciprocal relationships into other occupational communities, such as food-providing ones, which could be a way around this. It sounds like the basis of a caste system, which to me is not *necessarily* a dirty word as it is for some, but I think it might be hard in practice for the care-givers not to become higher-ranking than the food-givers. Some hard political work around defining the public would be needed to avoid this. On the more specific points about healthcare raised by Gunnar, Clara and others, I will try to say a bit more in my next post.
7. Expansionary ‘thick’ communities. There’s been a bit of talk here about the Amish – a ‘thick’ community from whom I agree there’s much to learn – so I thought for discussion I might mention the negative view of them expressed by Neal Clark (BoiltOwl on Twitter), as a somewhat predatory closed expansionary community with a multigenerational economic strategy involving buying up cheap farmland in parts of the US emptied out by the thinning of local community worked by capitalist public culture – in his view, another form of gentrification. Or maybe a modern form of the segmentary patrilineal systems associated with predatory pastoralists much discussed by anthropologists of old. I don’t always agree with Neal, to put it mildly, and I don’t necessarily agree with him here, but I find his thinking interesting.
8. Easing the transition. Finally, circling around again to Joe’s points about the tools to ease the transition into a small farm future, on reflection I’d want to make a stronger defence of the current political focus of this blog. As I see it, this political stuff isn’t really about creating a utopian vision of a small farm future in the hope of persuading people to join in (though some urge that approach) so much as being another kind of tool preparation, along the lines of how to develop those strong, high-commitment local communities I’ve been talking about as contemporary public culture fails. As I see it, knowing how to make civic republicanism and related ideas work in a localizing future is going to be just as important as knowing how to harvest wheat and related operations, or whatever other practical tasks. That said, Joe’s suggestions are good ones, so perhaps I’ll explore some of that once this blog cycle is done. Joe, when you say “No matter how much discussion has been devoted to access to land, it hasn’t been nearly enough and never will be” I’m not sure what you mean by ‘hasn’t been enough and never will be’ – you mean the discussion or the land access? The issue of land access is certainly something I want to come back to, but with this and some of the other issues you raise I think it’s hard to pre-empt them with firm blueprints – the responses will emerge out of crisis or at best from benign neglect. The responsibility now, I think, is to facilitate them by providing the best possible tools, practical and political, to fashion them.
About discussions of land access – since access to land is key to any kind of sustainable life (and always has been), we can’t stop discussing it, considering and debating the myriad ways of facilitating access to land, until everyone has access to enough land to support a basic livelihood. This one topic alone, “providing the best possible tools, practical and political” to allow access to land, is broad enough to be the sole topic of multiple blogs.
And in my view, worrying and pondering about how to get people out of cities and on the land is far more important than worrying about how they will organize themselves once they are there. Once people have their land we can let “crisis or benign neglect” do the organizing if necessary.
Land access depends on being able to hold on to what you have got , major landholders depend on the law to stop encroachment , and there is the crux of the matter , in a collapse who will be able to hold on , the giant corporate ” farms ” will be difficult / impossible to control . Rome’s state farms collapsed and were took over by the peasants , it’s happens many times in the past it must have we are still here .
Regarding ways to ease the transition and Joe’s focus on “how to get people out of cities and on the land”, I think that a cultural attitude adjustment may be necessary.
For example, to lessen the common aversion to hard work (not just physical work, as meetings and organizing can also be difficult), and to move further away from self-centered individualism.
Whether or not some Amish practices can be seen as expansionary and opportunistic, the Amish in general are demonstrating certain attitudes and values which would be beneficial for people in the larger society to have during a transition to a small farm future:
Hard work is expected and normal and highly valued.
Giving and helping are also highly valued.
Commitment to others in their community is the norm.
the Amish […] as a somewhat predatory closed expansionary community with a multigenerational economic strategy involving buying up cheap farmland in parts of the US emptied out by the thinning of local community worked by capitalist public culture
While I think it’s probably true that the Amish have benefitted to some extent from cheap farmland as a result of the “thinning of local community” etc (though the reasons for that are complex), I am more interested in what happens after that: do they perpetuate the injustices that brought them these advantages, or do something else? I think given their comparatively low use of fossil fuels, and the way fossil energy is tied up in all kinds of capitalist shenanigans, the Amish are probably on balance doing more good than harm. I also suspect that Amish communities stand a better chance than most of us of surviving a transition to a small farm future; Joe’s frequent point that even if his farm doesn’t benefit his descendants, it will surely benefit someone, seems applicable here.
It is easy enough, though, to see this as gentrification, if one sees land as a pie to be consumed or perhaps capital to be financialised, rather than a monopoly board which, with good governance and stewardship, allows everyone to “keep going around”.
(As an aside it is always weird to see white people of presumably European descent wringing their hands about the erosion of community in North America, given that the colonisation and colonialism of America destroyed many, many communities and lives, both during settlement and also through much of the 20th century, and was in turn the result of enclosures and destruction of communities in Europe. Some of the talk in certain circles about “traditional” American community reads to me like mythology, and I can’t help wondering what that is in aid of.)
Good points – in fact, you’ve slightly stolen my thunder from a post I’ve got planned a little way down the line. But anyway, it’s good to have the message reinforced.
Regarding the Amish, I lack the local knowledge to have any opinion on these land politics. Still, it strikes me that there’s a more general point here that’s likely to become an increasing flashpoint in many places and referencing many different kinds of groups and communities – how do we square widening access to productive land with local claims to priority (especially ones invoking concepts of indigeneity), particularly in the face of relatively closed/endogamous groups playing multigenerational games of land consolidation?
I suppose it depends whether we run out of labour faster than we run out of land, or the other way around. Land left to itself rarely stays as productive (for products that meet human needs) as it would with good stewardship.
I had sortof been assuming we’d run of land sooner, but given the realities of the pandemic (still ongoing) and the likelihood of future pandemics (especially with the immune damage from the current one), I’m not so sure. That doesn’t mean there won’t be problems, but it changes the shape of them to an extent.
Another thing to think about here is to look at the price of land in, say, Canada Vs the US. I think (I don’t have stats to hand) there is a *lot* more Crown land in Canada than whatever the US equivalent of that is, to the point that prices are very different for private individuals who want to purchase a small farm or patch of woodland or whatever.
I don’t know how to find a good balance regarding claims of priority; my instinct here is that artificially tightening the supply of land (by holding large amounts of essentially untended land) puts groups in conflict with one another who might otherwise find ways to negotiate local landholding and commons in mutually beneficial ways. So maybe subsidiarity is part of one pathway — but telling that to whichever large bodies currently control supply is fraught, for sure. Supersedure state capacity for enforcement of who is allowed to live in which woods may be rather smaller, but it will take quite a lot of collapse before it goes away completely.
Canada is a big place but 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of the U.S.border , there’s a reason for that , it’s too damn inhospitable to live there , Canada like the USA has huge amounts of land that’s little use for anything accept growing trees soil to thin for crops , the USA has millions of acres of alkali desert , all the good land is all ready taken and used .
Sir John Glub
https://www.invisiblethemepark.com/2018/01/fate-empires-search-survival-sir-john-glubb/
Our discussion must have been held many times in the past , Clubs thesis is that empires last around 250 years before they collapse from their own hubris . Each empire had its overarching power and control systems that led to their demise , Russia’s central planning failed with one size fits all approach , western slash and burn approach is failing as the soil is depleted and too many relying on the toil of the few , how land will be redistributed is the main question and how the communities join forces to wrest sustenance from the soil , relying on Each other is really in the learning stage but shortages of just about everything especially parts for Ag machines ( six months for some parts ) is forcing farmers to borrow machines that do work , relying on neighbours is becoming a regular occurrence .
Truck farms are making a comeback farmers markets are opening up in near every town small scale production is making a come back as the ” big boys ” are no longer dominating the markets , local produce costs a lot less than the ” thousand mile salad ” and entrepreneur ‘s are beginning to collect from multiple gardeners collecting their excess production and taking it to the farmers markets , so things are changing slowly for the better , things are beginning to localize filling the vacuum left by the failure of ” the system ” .
Similar changes here too, between farms, with favours taking the place of cash increasingly.
Just to add, for sure I agree with Joe that land access is the key single issue. I should probably also have clarified that I see land as a fundamental source of welfare (another resonance with the Monopoly example, perhaps) – so one question is how much can a small farm society provide for people’s welfare beyond giving them access to land, the skills to tend it and social connection?
But I guess I’d also say that creating widespread access to land is fundamentally a question of political organization. It parallels creating access to welfare or wellbeing, and it needs to be worked out before people get onto land, so that they can in fact get onto it. So possibly I’d draw different bounds to Joe around the question of what we should be worrying about politically right now in order to facilitate a small farm future.
Still, I agree that it’s wise to rein in on overly detailed blueprints. Along the lines of my ‘Least worst politics’ post from a while back, I see the issue as how to make the best of what’s likely to happen in order to make the inevitable small farm future as congenial as possible.
Another point I omitted to pick up on earlier is Simon’s figure from Farming Today about England being at 400% of carrying capacity. Seems a bit odd to me – carrying capacity is a tricky concept because so much depends on parameter definition, but IMO England could pretty easily feed itself right now if that was a policy goal. I discuss this in Chapter 11 of my book.
Agree with Steve on lessons to be learned from the Amish. And, re Diogenes, three cheers for truck farms!
I’ll try to dig that reference out, as there are different kinds of carrying capacities, though I’ll likely be stuck in the annals of local history this weekend.
About half the world’s population could be supported without the use of fossil fertilizers.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-with-and-without-fertilizer
It does not surprise me that England is 400% of carrying capacity. Most of the developed world is probably in the same boat. As Diogenes often notes, diesel fuel is also an important factor in carrying capacity.
I’d take Our World In Data stats with a pinch of salt. They do some good data presentations, but they have a strong ecomodernist/tech progress bias grounded in business-as-usual assumptions. Which is probably what’s at issue in the 400% figure. If the question is can current British populations feed themselves exactly in the way they do now from purely local/national resources, the answer is absolutely not. If the question is can current British populations feed themselves an adequate/nutritious diet without any external inputs of food or energy, the answer is almost certainly yes in principle.
The issue of synthetic nitrogen reliance is something I’ve written about before but I’ll come back to it again soon when I review Glenn Davis Stones book ‘The Agricultural Dilemma’. The way I’d frame it is that it’s unlikely the global population would have grown to its present extent without synthetic N, but nevertheless it would most likely be possible in principle to feed it without synthetic N. It’ll get easier within a couple of generations.
If the question is can current British populations feed themselves an adequate/nutritious diet without any external inputs of food or energy, the answer is almost certainly yes in principle.
In any case I think (limited, expensive) trade will continue. I might not be able to get bananas or avocados but I’ll probably still be able to get cinnamon or black pepper, though at rather higher cost than I can now. Vanilla looks more iffy. I’m definitely closer to “we should produce as much of our own food as we can” than to “don’t worry, trade will sort it all out” but I don’t think there’s much point in being absolutist about it.
The way I’d frame it is that it’s unlikely the global population would have grown to its present extent without synthetic N, but nevertheless it would most likely be possible in principle to feed it without synthetic N.
I mean, surely most of what we have to do to deal with soil nitrogen deficiency is stop flushing (using drinking water, no less) all the nitrogen we actually produce away to sewage treatment plants? You could argue that it’s easier said than done, that we don’t have appropriate infrastructure, and so on and so forth, but on a very basic level every single human being poops.
Almost all the nitrogen is excreted in urine, which is easier to collect and redistribute than poop. I highly recommend it for all your plants. Proper dilution with water is important, though, and plenty of carbon-rich mulch helps a lot to buffer urine applications.
The main problem with our excreta collecting infrastructure is that we allow industrial chemicals to use it to some extent, which contaminates the goodies. I’m not so worried about pharmaceutical contaminants, but lots of other bad stuff gets into the sewers, too. But, in theory, if the uncontaminated excreta of one person were returned to a patch of soil, that soil could grow all the food that person needs to eat.
A sensible civilization would therefore recycle all nutrients properly, which would solve the N problem, but even if it did that, cities still need to be fed with a high-energy mechanized agriculture and transportation network. We have used synthetic nitrogen as a shortcut for proper nutrient cycling, which is foolish, but the bigger problem is that an industrial civilization needs far too much exosomatic energy to be compatible with a healthy ecosystem, no matter where we get our N and no matter the energy source (though fossil fuels are the worst of the choices).
We need a low energy human culture to keep the natural world safe and since energy = wealth, a low energy world is one in which the vast majority are poor.
But a world of poor people is far less miserable if those people are living in the country. I suspect poor people would have never moved to cities unless they were forced to by a combination farm mechanization and a city life made more bearable by energy from fossil fuels. Take the energy away and a almost every city, especially a modern city, is unliveable. Thus, a small farm future is the best of all sustainable worlds.
Cities existed and grew even before the industrial revolution, though at slower rates than afterward. I expect cities to be pretty miserable in a small farm future, but I do think they will still exist.
In all honesty we need distributism and small farm futures now. While I agree with Joe’s point about the problem is that the wealthy have far too much, I am not sure that the solution is to make everyone poor. I read this survey by the big issue and atrociously about one third of all 16 to 25 year olds are going hungry. If access to land was indeed fair then there is already a group (large and growing by the day) that can at least start providing the basics for themselves. And I can’t think of anything more basic then food
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This is very interesting thanks Chris and all the contributors. It seems like we are getting on to marketing, which is a reality that we have been bumping up against on our modest endeavours to invite the ‘public’ into community through various talks and crafts around textiles. Our answer has been to create a pedal powered over locker (sewing machine) where we offer to make sweatshirts for free – you pedal, we sew – called SweatShop. Its mobile (pedal powered) and we take it mostly round London and do it on the streets. It gets a crowd, people love being able to take part, and understand how to make their own clothes – they want to know if we do workshops and where to do it. Unfortunately we don’t have a permanent home. We went to a local initiative, they had a problem with audience, we said well, we can get you an audience… but no, they create their own workshops, call in Alice after and 2 people turn up!
Again, another ask us to create an event, no marketing strategy, the event has to be cancelled. My point is that there are lots of good ideas but nearly noone is hearing them, the audience has not been engaged, let alone a community formed from it.
There is a flaw in the ‘SFF will make you poorer’ which I think is impactful but deeply troubling. We all know how chronically impoverished the modern world is on literally every measure making that statement a fantastic untruth worthy of a World Economic Forum think tank. Yet a dedicated small farm advocate can just lay it out. A small farm future will make everyone wealthier. The homesteaders, doomer optimists and small farm future folks are an ornery bunch but they sure tug the forelock to the masters rules.
My experience is people do want to respond, they are hard working and proud of it, they need strong independent empathetic people to help show them the processes to go against the literal tide the times. I agree with Chris, we need to learn and communicate the ways to organise the politics of these functioning communities – Douglas Rushkoff at the end of his interview on Nate Hagens’ The Great Simplification says if he could do anything, it would be to give every town a box with how to set up and run a Commons. Where is that box?
Chris always lays down the commons as the base for discussion and it always gets lost but is literally how people held and kept the land, it is the basis of the negotiation. Without that knowledge embodied in the process of ‘moving onto the land’ we will get lost.
Also! This is joyful process of becoming the land animals we are, this is the real heroes journey and the coolest, sexiest thing out there. It is based in a moral right, which we all now know is a real thing! Every one is a literally a real gazillionaire, although some times they will get cold, wet and pissed off.
So, we need to market this better and create a commons literacy even within this blog to better, communicate to others (and crucially understand our own relationships and trauma around the demands of a functioning commons community).
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