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 April 12, 2023 | 6 Comments
The clock is running down on the time available to blog about my book A Small Farm Future, so I’m going to close the, ahem, book on it in this post with some brief remarks about the last two chapters in it, respectively titled ‘Dispossessions’ and ‘Does Goldman Sachs care if you raise chickens?’
Starting with the last first, the answer to that question is: no they don’t but do it anyway. The Goldman Sachs phrasing came from a Marxist author critiquing the political traction of the localist and neo-agrarian movement. And the later part of my book is among other things a critique of Marxist approaches to agrarianism. If you want to understand how humanity got into its present predicaments, a broadly Marxist historical perspective is in my view all but indispensable. Whereas if you want to understand how it might find a way to overcome those predicaments, contemporary Marxist approaches are in my view largely an impediment, involving the fighting of old battles ill-suited to present times, and failing to learn the historical lessons from them. So I say go ahead – raise chickens, and build agrarian communities.
In the final chapters of my book I lay out an agrarian populist alternative that I’ve written copiously about in previous posts. All I’ll do here is make three overarching points about it.
First, there is no single or simple way to overcome present predicaments. My book is not one of those ones structured along the lines of ‘Well, it all looks pretty bleak, huh? But don’t worry, I can see a solution, and if the world just follows my ten-point plan, then it’ll all turn out rosy’. There is no simple solution, and there’s definitely no simple technological solution, though new technologies may of course be of assistance.
Second, there is, likewise, no single or simple class of people who hold the key to overcoming present predicaments. You will not root out all the ‘commies’ or all the ‘reactionaries’, and you will not succeed in creating a purified political identity through the revolutionary overthrow of the old ones, although you may have to fight some of the old ones, metaphorically or actually. The best course of action where possible is alliance-making and clarifying realistic shared options.
Third, it wasn’t that long ago in most places that a lot more people lived more land-based lives grounded within more local and more renewable economies than today. It’s unlikely that the future will involve faithful replication of these lifeways, but it’s well worth understanding how they worked, how they came to an end, and what aspects of them might be worth articulating in the future. And, in considering how they came to an end, it’s well worth viewing this not as dead history, but a living book in which we’re about to write another chapter.
And, talking of books, that, my friends, is my last word for now on A Small Farm Future. But I daresay I will return to many of the themes I’ve been exploring over the last couple of years here in respect of it. Meanwhile, another book is stirring…
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If enough people raise hens and build agrarian communities, Goldman Sachs will start to care.
If enough more people raise hens and build agrarian communities, Goldman Sachs will be mostly redundant.
Regarding cultural purity — for the avoidance of doubt, I’m not interested in rooting out reactionaries. It would take too long, and I will need their help in case of actual attack by actual fascists. Figuring out which of my community members are up for alliance-making is often useful, though, and people give a lot away by their willingness to (perhaps somewhat inaccurately) jump in and call me a “commie” when I ask public questions along those lines. I’m trying to focus on more physically local conversations about resilience these days, and finding it in equal measures refreshing and frustrating: there is less name-calling than has sometimes been the case on Twitter, but I am starting with people who don’t yet accept the premise of much systemic change being likely or necessary. Maybe some of them will read your next book; I hope so.
Today I’ll weed some vegetable beds at church, babysit the compost bins, then head up to what I call the Far Allotment to finish making the bean tunnel and continue turning hazel trimmings into…. anything other than a giant pile of sticks, really, I know big piles of sticks are a useful wildlife habitat but there’s already quite a lot of that in the several long-vacant plots next door. I could do with a bench or something, so maybe I’ll try to make one out of the larger pieces. A friend up there who helps on that allotment is something of a tinker and has started fishing the lithium batteries out of discarded, littered vapes for re-use in other salvage projects, so I have a bag of those to drop off. It’s my housemate’s night to cook. We still have one more winter squash to eat, and some more frozen runner beans. The herbaceous perennials are getting going so we’ll have some fresh veg through the hungry gap too, though as ever we aren’t going to be self-sufficient in calories on a tenth of an acre, especially given how much of it is in soft fruit.
Many aspects of my life are highly precarious in the current context. My spouse can support us both financially, leaving me free for near-daily efforts at horticulture and volunteer work, but… well, he works in banking. I live in a city which couldn’t feed its current population even if every household did what I do. All my growing space is rented, and over half of it is in a floodplain that has flooded every year since I took on our first half plot. Access to modern pharmaceuticals has extended my life and probably saved it a couple of times, as well as making it generally much more pleasant. Even as a non-driver I know that everything I purchase has been shipped using fossil fuels and so I am somewhat dependent on car culture. But I am spending my time learning and teaching practical skills, working together with others, and contributing to feeding my community and my household. It’s not a bad life. In a small farm future, I hope I will be doing similar, and with more company. (And both more livestock and more trees.)
Many thanks for your book, and for this blog; and to you and everyone else for all the conversation here.
“Meanwhile, another book is stirring…”
What will this book be about? I’m very curious!
Joe placed a link answering that question, over on Resilence, via which I noticed the new book’s foreword is by Sarah Langford… curious, I found this interesting interview:
https://wickedleeks.riverford.co.uk/features/rooting-for-farmers/
Thanks Chris.
“…If you want to understand how humanity got into its present predicaments, a broadly Marxist historical perspective is in my view all but indispensable.”
I think this is quite true, but interesting and useful to look at the ways that a broadly Marxist historical perspective leaves out some important things.
What I mean is that is important to examine Marx’s assumptions. He was assuming a materialist society where the living world was turned into ‘property’ and the main challenge was how to distribute the spoils. Marx was a man of his times… and ours too.
Along that same vein, (at your suggestion) I have just recently read Dougald Hine’s ‘At Work in the Ruins’. Which I highly recommend.
One cannot be sure exactly all of what Mr. Hine believes, but I find myself agreeing with just about everything that he says in the book.
And even if we ignore the organizations of people who are using ‘science’ to pursue some fraudulent ends, we are still left with the problem that science is a method for answering well defined questions, but cannot tell us which questions to ask.
Science can tell us some of the consequences of strip mining, but can’t decide whether they are worth it. Marx doesn’t seem to even address that question, just concerns himself with who gets the extracted wealth.
So if we are talking about the history of how we got ourselves in this mess, we need to go back much further. So much of it was already in place in Sumeria.
I gave a copy of Dougald Hine’s book to my friend in the Kansas state legislature. He describes his legislative colleagues as mostly nice people who routinely do evil things, mostly out of a sense of team play (and extortion) with some truly nasty leaders.
My friend’s hope for any real positive movement there is approximately zero.
Thanks for comments. Yep, agree with Eric also on the limitations of the Marxist view – although there’s quite an academic industry trying to recuperate him as the original environmentalist…
James, I’ll post soon about the new book
Gavin Meuler does a great service to Marx with ‘Breaking things at work: the Luddites are right about why you hate your job’. It is a refreshingly slim tome that traces the technophilic wrong turn by the subsequent communist movement. I loved it, especially good on the American Union movement around the turn of the century and the introduction of Taylorism.