Menu
Posted on August 7, 2023 | 82 Comments
I mentioned in my last post that I think we’re heading into new arenas of class conflict with the unfolding polycrisis, conflicts that threaten the chance of finding a way out via agrarian localism or a small farm future. I’m going to explore some of these arenas of class conflict in this and the next couple of posts. I should probably be blogging instead about my new book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future, but I’ll get to it soon and ultimately I think this class dimension is relevant.
Still, if you’re spoiling for a bit more action in the bacterial factory food wars, this smorgasbord in the new issue of The Land Magazine should keep you entertained. If you click on the link then download the pdf and scroll down, you’ll find my article ‘Seven fantasies of manufactured food’ which trails some key arguments from my book. But have a look too at the exchange between George Monbiot, Mike Hannis and Simon Fairlie. It’s quite informative.
If, on the other hand, you’d like some reading recommendations to give you a more rounded appreciation of alternatives to the crazy world of food techno-fixes, I’m also your man. Have a look at this feature on the Shepherd site.
But let’s turn now to this business of class conflict, agrarian localism and the polycrisis. In this post, I’m going to address what’s probably the least threatening of these conflicts to a small farm future, albeit the one that raises the most interesting issues. This is the threat to agrarian localism from Marxism and the far left.
There’s some personal backstory here. Many years ago, I was taught agrarian sociology mostly by Marxists. I counted myself among their number for a while, although those days are long past. I still think you can understand a lot about history through a Marxist lens, but I consider the career of the regimes operating in the name of Marxism to have been … uninspiring as a political project, to say the least. And I consider the critiques of Marxism developed long ago by the likes of Marshall Sahlins, Jean Baudrillard and Alisdair MacIntyre pretty devastating to it as an intellectual project.
An important part of those critiques involved showing the extent to which Marxism shared with its capitalist adversary a whole series of assumptions grounded in modernist thinking. “Each of Marx’s major positions…are…revealed as mirror images of capitalist society. Marxism emerges…not as a radical critique of capitalism, but as its highest form of justification or ideology”1.
Alasdair MacIntyre wrote (apologies if this is all a bit academically abstract, I’ll try to ground it soon),
When Marxism does not become Weberian social democracy or crude tyranny, it tends to become Nietzschean fantasy …. Marxism is exhausted as a political tradition … but I believe that this exhaustion is shared by every other political tradition within our culture …. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us2
I’m with MacIntyre. While, like him, I still consider Marxism to be “one of the richest sources of ideas about modern society” (albeit partly because it’s very much of the modern society we’re leaving behind), and while I still consider myself in some sense on the left, my book A Small Farm Future was an attempt to help in that work of constructing local forms of community in the context of our new dark ages. This involved drawing on political traditions like the civic republicanism that MacIntyre explores, but it also involved putting agrarianism front and centre – something that I believe has been neglected in contemporary political debate. To do so, I drew on agrarian and agrarian populist traditions that in my opinion have a lot of important things to say about farm livelihood as a value in itself which stands against anti-agrarian ideals of modern ‘progress’. I believe it has important things to say too about property, family and household composition.
On page 267 of that book I tried to encapsulate a ‘progressive’ agrarian populist sensibility in a suitably sombre way for present sombre times. Such an agrarian populism, I said, lacks,
a utopia or a vision of an ultimately perfected political society …. It’s progressive in the sense that it believes people should be able to achieve self-realisation unlimited by gender, economic class or other political identities that might otherwise constrain them, but it doesn’t necessarily believe in progress as an intrinsic value. The ideal citizen of its imagining spends a good part of their day striving for flourishing and livelihood. The next day, they do the same again, probably in the same way. There’s no higher political purpose.
Cue a bad (in several senses of the term) review of my book by avowed Marxists Alex Heffron and Kai Heron. Quoting a part of the passage from my book I’ve just cited, they wrote, “This is an unusual definition of flourishing. A patriarchal monotony. A post-political vision of the laborer, tied to the land, constrained by market forces, indebtedness, and the individualized labor of the patriarchal family farm.”
Then at the end of their review, they characterized my book as “patriarchal disaster feudalist politics”.
That was some years back. But after my recent interview with Oli Dugmore, Alex Heffron popped up again on my Twitter timeline trailing that review and reviving the accusations of my supposed conservative, patriarchal, disaster politics. This led to a brief and sharp exchange of views on Twitter between me, Heron and Heffron before I blocked them.
So yeah I should probably have just ignored them, but in fairness they’re the first people I’ve blocked after 10 years on Twitter (to add to the one person I’ve blocked after 10 years of blogging) – which isn’t bad going, I submit.
Still, I can’t say I enjoyed the interaction. The experience gives me a vague inkling of what it must be like to have a vengeful ex turning up at a social occasion, loudly proclaiming one’s unforgivable no-goodness to the assembled group. I don’t think H&H really want a debate with me despite their claims, any more than a vengeful ex does. An opening to good faith debate might go something like “I think there are insufficient defences against patriarchy in your vision for a small farm future”, rather than bandying around labels like patriarchal disaster feudalism.
So despite the comic potential in debating patriarchy with aggressive men who insist they know what I think better than I do myself, I’m not going to further engage with people who mangle my words this badly, whose invitation to dialogue involves such a closed reading of what they think I say, and who insult so casually the lives that billions of humans have lived as mere ‘patriarchal monotony’. Antonio Roman Alcalá wrote a Twitter thread attempting to mediate between the two positions, providing more promising grounds for a debate, so perhaps something will emerge out of that.
On the upside, I posted this Twitter thread about the overlaps and dissonances I perceive between my position and ecosocialism in the aftermath of my interactions with H&H, and it led to some genuinely interesting conversations. In the rest of this post, I’m going to touch on a few points about patriarchy and property arising out of them, before closing with some thoughts on Marxist class struggle – that is, on how there may be a need in the future for good people to struggle against Marxist positions on class in the countryside.
Let’s start with this issue of ‘the patriarchal family farm’. A large part of my argument in A Small Farm Future is not that societies built around small-scale kin-based farming is what I necessarily want to see in the future (though I’m less dismissive of it than most modernists), but it’s what I think we will see in the future – therefore it’s a good idea to think about how to minimize patriarchy and other forms of domination in small farm societies. I’m happy to concede that my proposals might not be massively convincing, my only defence there being that I’m not the only person who’s failed single-handedly to think of a way to abolish patriarchy.
If I were writing A Small Farm Future again now, I’d probably frame some of my anti-patriarchal arguments about kin-based farming a little differently – as they stand in that book, I daresay they’re vulnerable to the critique of liberal individualism. But ‘liberalism’ and ‘individualism’ are not the same thing. Individualized labour on kin-based small farms has been a ubiquitous feature of livelihood-making worldwide for millennia, and efforts to mitigate the personal domination involved in forms of power like patriarchy also operate at individualized levels of inter-personal micropolitics.
As I see it, a lot of modern far left politics wishes to abolish individualism without understanding its many forms. It typically involves sweeping modernist dismissals of past societies in favour of a bourgeois collectivism that it believes will magically abolish domination because … y’know … class liberation, democratic collectivism or [insert favoured slogan here].
But if you want to talk about ‘the patriarchal family farm’, I’ll raise you ‘the patriarchal democratic collectivist farm’ where aggressive entrepreneurs of social power – men, often – hold sway. In their review, H&H mention various cooperative and collective agrarian initiatives that inspire them. Some have already folded due to internal power politics, while others that I’ve been involved in personally, believe me, offer no passports to collectivist bliss. It’s not ‘the family’ that’s the source of patriarchy. The possibilities for patriarchy and other forms of domination are latent in all human relationships, especially the intimate relationships of day-to-day life – as much in a ‘democratic collectivist’ agrarian commune as in a family farm.
The last two centuries have been littered with left-inspired efforts to abolish structures like kinship with supposedly more fair and rational collective arrangements. A lot of them have foundered under the weight of their own implicit injustices and irrationalisms, or alternatively under the weightlessness of their rationalism. But despite their best efforts (and, let me be clear, I’m not opposed to all these efforts) they haven’t shifted the needle an awful lot on kin-based motivation. It’s a big deal socially if you walk out on your family. If you walk out on your cooperative, not so much. Why? Instead of simply castigating the enduring, thick-or-thin ideology of kinship with skin-deep dismissals that leave it open to conservatives (like me?) to make hay with it, I think those on the left would do better to try to understand sympathetically its deep power, the better to channel it in benevolent directions as a long-term cultural project, not a short-term political one. On that note, I’m very much in favour of people experimenting with different ways of building larger, non-kin-based farmsteading communities (I’m involved in some such experiments myself). I’m not in favour of a politics that dictates what kind of household structures are permissible on the basis of its a priori theories about liberation.
A final observation on ‘family’. One of the interesting discussions I’ve had emerging out of my Twitter thread is (if you’ll excuse the anthropological jargon) the tendency of some traditional horticultural societies to adopt matrilineal and matrilocal kinship structures. We’ve touched on this before on this blog, but I don’t think I’ve given it the attention I should have done in thinking about kinship structures in a small farm future – something that I aim to put right as soon as I can. What’s for sure, though, is that nobody’s just going to draft up some ideal matrilineal horticultural society, press ‘Send’, and abolish patriarchy at a stroke. It can only be a matter of somehow trying to prefigure cultural change towards better social arrangements in the long-term, even as the existing ones crumble in the short. I made some point along those lines in the exchange of tweets with H&H, to which one of them asked rhetorically how the patriarchal family that he apparently believes I support could possibly contribute to such change. Sigh. It can’t. Next.
Next is the question of property, another arena of widespread and depressing leftist confusion when it comes to a small farm future. On this question, I’d commend the discussion between Frankie McCarthy and Nicholas Blomley on Adam Calo’s Landscapes podcast – partly for the clarity of their exposition about property concepts, but also for some important things I think they miss.
In brief, a regnant conception of private property in the ‘western liberal’ tradition is a depoliticized one in which a person (a man, usually) can have almost exclusive rights of disposition over a defined area of land, usually by paying for it. This draws our attention to the relationship between a (gendered) person and land. And it draws our attention away from the intensely political nature of the way that money and land tend to accumulate in particular hands in this process. But as McCarthy and Blomley neatly explain, property is always a collective political relationship. It bears on who is accorded the right by the wider community to appropriate resources from an area of land, what responsibilities they might also have in respect of the land, and what collective political processes are in place to determine these rights and responsibilities.
This political and collective understanding of property rights is the basis of my own analysis of property in A Small Farm Future. And, I’m sorry, but anyone who thinks my analysis involves support for a depoliticised monopoly landlordism just hasn’t understood what I’m saying.
What I do say in A Small Farm Future is that it’s common in agrarian societies for the right to appropriate resources from land to be accorded by the wider political community on an exclusive basis at a given time to individuals, households or families. There are good reasons for this which have to do with well understood problems about emotional load, transaction costs and commons failures (a point that, for the avoidance of doubt, has little to do with the so called ‘tragedy of the commons’).
The discussion in the Landscapes podcast focused quite rightly on critiquing the familiar private ownership model in western legal traditions, but it didn’t address the existence of widespread de facto private property rights in respect of access to land in agrarian societies outside those traditions. Blomley mentioned the expropriative and ecocidal exploitation of the tar sands in Canada – a public-private property model which surely doesn’t say a lot for the intrinsic capacity of public ownership to mitigate exploitive property regimes. He also mentioned the activism of indigenous peoples, basically around reclaiming land appropriated through colonial public-private property regimes. But he didn’t mention that the property regimes of indigenous people often themselves involve de facto private rights of appropriation.
As I see it, and as I further explain in A Small Farm Future, there isn’t one type of property regime – public, common or private – which is intrinsically better or less exploitive than every other one. It all depends on the wider collective politics installing a given regime – or, as usually happens, installing a mix of regimes. In A Small Farm Future, I argue that a regime of distributed private property (distributed private property being a very different beast to monopoly private property) set within wider regimes of common property in a political community oriented to the generation of renewable local land-based livelihoods is a good thing to aim at on the basis of what we know about past agrarian societies and about where we’re currently headed. I’ve not yet come across any convincing analyses to suggest to me why that’s wrong.
The historian Norman Cohn argued there are continuities between the revolutionary egalitarians of medieval Europe and communists of the modern period. This manifested in a practical politics geared to securing a fair share of the pie, but also in more emotionally charged political imaginaries – expressed in the former case through the medium of Christian millenarianism, and in the latter through a secular millenarianism involving “phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle” and “a perfect world from which self-seeking would be for ever banished”3.
In Cohn’s view, the practical politics of pie-sharing appealed to a wide section of working people in both the medieval and modern periods, whereas emotionally-charged millenarianisms of the medieval religious or modern secular varieties have had a more restricted appeal. In modern times, he says, mass movements organized around these ‘phantasies’ of a perfect world emerged largely within peasant societies undergoing problematic transitions to modernity, but also appealed to intellectual dissidents in wealthy industrialised countries.
This pretty much encapsulates my take on contemporary Marxism. I’m very much in favour of everybody getting their fair share of the pie, although I believe that under the pressure of climate change (the sky…), energy futures, nature loss and so forth, the overall pie is going to have to get smaller, which will sharpen distributional conflicts. But I don’t buy the ‘Nietzschean fantasies’ – or the bourgeois collectivism – of exterminatory struggles and perfect worlds without self-seeking that too easily invest Marxist political imaginaries. What H&H call my disaster feudalist politics (I don’t consider either word a remotely accurate or fair characterization of my analysis), I see as a kind of practical rearguard politics fitted to present times. The real disaster, in my opinion, would be to follow dogmatic class politics and millenarian political imaginaries of the Marxist kind in the belief that short-run collectivist pie-and-the-sky politics can liberate people from present biophysical threats and social inequities.
The chances of that kind of Marxist politics happening in contemporary Britain seem to me pretty low, which is why I said I consider the class politics of the far left unthreatening to a small farm future here (other countries may be different). But there’s possibly a danger that a vulgarized class politics emerging from a resurgent Marxism (which does, after all, provide a reasonably good general analysis of the mess we’re in) will connect with anti-‘elite’ aspects of right-wing populism in the context of present crises.
This could generate a latter-day purge of local agrarian property-owning kulaks in favour of agricultural collectives under the thumb of abrasive commissars and their highly theoretical ideas about the benefits of their ‘democratic collectivism’ for the production of food and other forms of human wellbeing. I think this would probably turn out even worse than its predecessors in communist history, foisted as they were upon people who at least knew how to farm, and were probably better versed in collective organisation than the ‘democratic collectivists’ of today. So the challenge is to defend distributed property, commons, kinship, human neighbourliness and renewable local agrarianism against the blank certainties of new-old Marxist categories of class struggle. Unlike Marxist millenarianism, I think this agrarian populist-inspired vision offers some glimmer of hope for constructing local forms of community and civility to sustain us through the new dark ages.
If you like my writing, please help me keep the blog going by donating!
Subscribe via RSS
Chris, due to a recent policy change (in the past month or so), your threads at Twitter/X are no longer viewable there (beyond the first tweet) for people like me who don’t want to open accounts and log in.
I suggest that you make liberal use of the Thread Reader app to provide non-Twitter/X links to your threads.
Someone evidently used Thread Reader to archive the same thread you linked above, with all 27 of your tweets in that thread now visible to everyone:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1685665447704715264.html
I mean, I don’t think there is sufficient (or perhaps just not sufficiently articulated) protection against patriarchy in your vision of a small farm future, but I also don’t think there’s sufficient protection against patriarchy in the modern globalised industrial present. H&H don’t seem intent on an honest or careful reading of your work, in any case. It was clear enough to me on a first reading that acknowledging some of the ways agrarian patriarchy has played out in the past is not the same as advocating for said patriarchy.
My understanding is that some of the disaster of the collective farms in the USSR was due to Lysenko and his… rather strange and inconsistent ideas about hereditary biology. It wasn’t just that the farms were taken over; it was that plant spacings, for example, were all wrong, because Lysenko believed that plants in the same class couldn’t compete against one another for resources and so, if seed was spaced very closely, some of them would die and form a protective mulch for the remaining ones. But everyone who has ever planted anything knows that if you sow seed too close together and it germinates well, the plants don’t thrive. And if you sow at the spacings recommended on the seed packet, approximately two thirds of the seedlings will be devoured by slugs, mice or birds. 😉
To me the risk of this “bad anti-scientific rules from above with serious practical repercussions” situation doesn’t seem much different in Marxism than the risk of same in any centralised system; that doesn’t have to come from some sort of Marxist-informed populist takeover with the deranged power dynamics that so often accompany revolution. It can come from corporate short-termism. (I wonder how many lives would have been saved if guidance about ventilation had come into law for schools, hospitals, and eventually pubs and restaurants, for example. I wonder how many lives might be saved even now by stronger public health messaging about opening the windows.)
Meanwhile all this talk of pre-figurative politics is parallel to some (rather vague) thoughts on pre-figurative eschatology. There are aspects of this that are preparatory — “we’re going to have to get a much higher proportion of our resources locally, better start practicing now” — and elements of it that are communicative or even prophetic — “if we start living a small farm future now, we are showing both that it can be done and how it can be done” and “we believe the Kingdom of God is like such-and-such; how do we live our lives in ways that make that true for more people now?” That will not always be easy. It gets easier in community, hence my use of “we” in these examples, though there is still a place for individual discernment of how to relate to community.
For me, I think, one is not complete without the other. That is, pre-figuring or making known the Kingdom of God is not possible while furthering the demands and purposes of a capitalist system that makes humans objects rather than subjects, and some kind of distributed agrarian localism looks like a viable alternative (maybe the only viable alternative longer term), in a way Marxist communism is not (at least… not in a situation of energy decline, I think, though arguably it is the cheapness of fossil fuels to substitute for certain types of labour that meant proletarian political organising failed). But agrarian localism *without* a strong sense of the value and worth of each person (and indeed of all Creation) also runs the risk of making people (and the more-than-human world) objects rather than subjects. For me that sense of the value, worth, and even sacredness of all creation derives clearly from my sense of the God-createdness of all things, and being a good keystone species is consonant with the commandment to steward the world; but I am sure there are non-Christian derivations of humanism and/or of an attitude of humility and responsibility toward the world which work.
Nevertheless, it’s no good asking the likes of H&H to simply trust that I am not interested in making people into objects, and I am particularly aware that the history of Christianity is very tangled up with modes of colonialism which did just that. Rather, if people decide to trust me it will be because they have had the opportunity to observe what I say and what I do and how I relate to the world. Pre-figurative action on a small scale makes that much more likely, too. It also opens up a space for supportive critique: for people who share my goals to say “hey, what you’re doing just there looks like it makes people into objects,” though that language might not be the language chosen.
Meant to say “it gets both easier and harder in community” above.
@Kathryn
I find this guy has some interesting thoughts on the origins patriarchy.
He’s done a critique of The Dawn of Everything.
(I don’t agree with lots of what he says, bit it’s all interesting thought provoking stuff)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UNr6XpdRHOk
Looks interesting but very long!
@Kathryn
He does an interesting one on the causes/reasons for the creation Patriachy Lineal communities and why this is bad news for women.
If I can find it, I’ll put a link to it.
“For me that sense of the value, worth, and even sacredness of all creation derives clearly from my sense of the God-createdness of all things, and being a good keystone species is consonant with the commandment to steward the world; but I am sure there are non-Christian derivations of humanism and/or of an attitude of humility and responsibility toward the world which work.”
I grew up in a non-religious family. Both of my parents were raised within religious households, but gave it up before I was born. And I, too, never became religious in the typical sense. But that which some folks call “spirituality” is at the heart and core of my life, and I have a very profound experience of sacredness which doesn’t ground in beliefs, ideas, words, concepts… but which grounds in direct experience of the natural world, of which (of course) I am a part.
I should also say that while I do not believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, magically produced loaves and fishes, and other supernatural tales of his life (and I don’t believe in hell or a supernatural heaven), it isn’t entirely clear to me that I’m not a Christian, as I am a totally devoted adherent to what many regard as the principal doctrine of Christianity, the love of one’s neighbor (our fellow humans … and non-humans — life, that is). I didn’t arrive in this devotion through doctrine, but mainly by coming to passionately love life and the living world. Earth.
I’m not a theist, but if I were I’d be a pantheist.
I suppose my point is simply this: people like me are not “believers,” but we’re not as different from one another as we might imagine. For me, the sacred derives not from words in a book, or the teachings of any religion, but emerges from utterly within what is — “thisness” as some Buddhist writers have put it. It’s the ultimate intimacy, since it is not apart from anything and is itself.
I suppose I’m really just an old-fashioned nature mystic. And when Christian mystics talk I feel I know the essence of what they mean.
Christians have been arguing about who is or isn’t Christian (or the “right” flavour of Christian) since Christianity started; I think this is just part of human nature. We like to know who we are; we like to know where we stand with regard to others.
I tend toward holding two definitions, one a “broad” definition of Christianity as those who attempt to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, and a more specific “creedal-sacramental” definition as those who are baptised in the name of the Trinity and subscribe in some form to the Apostles’ Creed. The latter definition is more important in how the Christian community I am part of relates to itself and to other Christian communities than in how we relate to the rest of the world.
I also perceive sacredness in creation, and I suppose you could say that the “trappings” of Christianity — scripture, tradition, defined sacraments, church attendance and so on — are to me, at least sometimes, more a way of talking about that divinity and what it means than the source of it; our human understanding of the divine is always incomplete. Of course, scripture is a selected-by-humans collection of texts (whatever one might believe about the workings of the Holy Spirit in making those selections), and can itself be framed and understood in multiple ways. There are Christians who are quite uncomfortable with some of my views on this, but then, there are Christians who are quite uncomfortable with most of my views on one thing or another (and not all of them are right wing trad conservatives, either). In general I am interested not only in what people believe but in how they behave.
I do attempt to follow the teachings of Christ. I fall short much of the time.
I have to admit that I haven’t read much Marx but…………
Marx’s writing may be useful in understanding/explaining power relations in industrial societies but how relevent is it to a society that is de-industrialising?
I enjoy the abstract in political debate but it does seem to remove “people” from the narrative.
What does Marx say about the role of jealousy for example?
That’s why I really like the writing of David Graeber and Graeber/Wengrow.
The Dawn of Everything, Bullshit Jobs, Debt: The First 5000Years. They play with the crazyness of human nature.
Coming from an anthropology position, the books deal more with the interpersonal. Probably more relevant in a SFF?
It sounds to me that you are locking horns with H&H in the same way that you are with Monbiot. Potentially a fruitless/pointless/draining activity.
Concerning The Dawn of Everything…, I highly recommend that fans of this book watch/listen to the series of critical reviews of this book found here: https://www.youtube.com/@WHATISPOLITICS69
Unfortunately, the presentation of the series doesn’t make it entirely clear which of the videos were first, second and third, and I do encourage you to begin with the first if you can somehow find it.
ps –
I think this was the first in the video series I mentioned.
https://www.youtube.com/@WHATISPOLITICS69
@James.
The critique is very interesting. The comments sections below each video are a really good read as well.
However his replies to comments from people who don’t agree with him are quite abusive.
I have some fundamental disagreements with some of his claims and was going to post them on the site. But on reflection I decided there probably wasn’t any point. He didn’t seem like he was up for debate and life is too short.
I’m glad you took some time to listen to some of this material.
I have the book on my shelves, but haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I found the videos quite … informative.
@James
It’s been a while since I read TDOE or watched the What Is Politics critique.
I came across What Is Politics a little while after reading TDOE (twice), so I couldn’t remember everything to make a judgement on the book or critique.
Maybe I should read it again for the third time whilst watching the videos. I haven’t found a rebuttal from Wengrow anywhere on the internet????
When I was young I worked with an elderly guy who jumped ship in Aberdeen circa 1937 A Soviet ship , he said that Russia just exchanged one tzar for another in the revolution .
So we have discussed Karl, what about Groucho?
Thanks for the comments. I’m not too sure what an adequate defence against patriarchy & domination in normative politics looks like other than generic recognition of the importance of creating mechanisms for non-domination and recognizing humans as ends, which I acknowledge in ASFF, since I think the potential for them is latent in all human relationships. H&H talk about ‘the patriarchal family’ as if the origin of patriarchy lies in kinship and kinship is intrinsically patriarchal – very old-fashioned Marxism IMO. Another feature of old-fashioned Marxism indeed is its tendency to treat people as objects, not subjects – part of its modernist governmentalizing apparatus.
Understanding the status aspects of interpersonal relations indeed is a weakness of Marxism.
Generally, I think people on the left avoid talking about family & kinship – other than to be dismissive about it – for fear of provoking the kind of reaction I’ve got from H&H. To my mind, that simply shows the left’s present intellectual limitations, while leaving the concept of ‘the family’ an open field for right-wing appropriations.
Thanks for other comments – including Steve’s info on the dreaded X/Twitter. Analysis of Groucho Marxism coming here … soon. Ish.
As suggested in The Dawn of Everything, the ultimate form of freedom from oppression is the ability to walk away.
Difficult to achieve if people’s livelyhoods are tied to a specific geographical location as in a SFF.
Also difficult to achieve if people’s livelihoods are tied to a specific corporation or a specific nation or a specific currency…
Yes, difficult to acieve.
Seems to me that most of the difficulty lies in the fact that in our current situation there is no “away” to walk to.
Find a place where the land(sea?)scape will support a living, and it will have already been taken by some extractive society. Or at the very least, the gentle folk living in that tiny vestigal Eden will be under seige by various would-be conquerors.
The system is truly global.
I know Chris likes to avoid this issue, but the ratio of human population vs. habitable acres is a key factor in this.
Not sure I’d say I like to avoid the issue. My basic take on it is this:
1. High population levels are a result not a cause of the forces driving the poly crisis
2. High fertility populations are generally low environmental impact ones
3. Despite disagreements on population impacts, most people agree on the best policies in respect of fertility control, namely empowerment of people (women, especially) over their own fertility choices
4. Increased longevity is also driving high population levels
5. It may be possible in theory to feed existing population levels sustainably…
6. …but it will probably be difficult in practice, which indeed could lead to heightened conflict, hunger and a lack of ‘awayness’…
7. …although there’s been a lack of ‘awayness’ in the past in respect of much lower population numbers. ‘Awayness’ is a function of social forces, technologies and local geographies and geopolitics, not just a function of raw population density
Thanks Chris.
Yes, perhaps it wasn’t fair to say that you like to avoid the population issue.
And I actually agree with your 7 points more or less completely.
But human population is an uncomfortable issue, and it makes a huge difference.
I’m certainly in agreement that the poly-crisis is not the fault of poor people having too many children.
Anyone who cannot see that rich people are the main cause of the crisis are either ignorant or have an agenda.
You succinctly state the point I was getting at:
“7. …although there’s been a lack of ‘awayness’ in the past in respect of much lower population numbers. ‘Awayness’ is a function of social forces, technologies and local geographies and geopolitics, not just a function of raw population density”
Exactly.
But the social forces that have produced the symptom of increased population are the same ones that have otherwise shrunk the ‘away’ spaces. They have done it intentionally.
This is precisely the story of my home state of Kansas. And the rest of the U.S, Brazil, Mesopotamia…
What I was trying to say was that as the system expands to failure, there is less space to escape and build alternatives. Effectively diminished to nearly zero, as I see it. There are areas of lower oppression density, if you are careful (and lucky), but my point is that whatever we do will be done with the force of the current system pressing against it.
And those people who put forward their ‘simple’ solutions about fixing our population problem are clearly wrong. They are only trying to put themselves at the top of the current system that created the problem.
But it is silly and dangerous to pretend that our population is not a problem.
It is a very difficult problem and it will require nearly all of we ‘moderns’ to change the way we see ourselves in relation to all the rest of the species on the planet. And not just the living things, the minerals and air and the water too.
We need to completely change the way our dominant society works, and I don’t believe we have the capacity to do it intentionally.
Our larger society certainly doesn’t even have the will to make the necessary changes.
So we go to catastrophe.
Or more directly to my point about the importance of population numbers: here in Kansas there was a human social and ecological regime that kept in stable balance with the local environment, and it lasted for thousands of years.
That stable balance featured a much smaller human population and a much larger non-human population than what currently exist.
We know the prior regime worked. And that regime is no longer possible.
Any other stable regime that can accomodate current human population numbers here is purely theoretical.
I would add to Chris’s comment that the ratio of living human beings to habitable acres would be considerably different if we were to stop, then reverse, the actions that contribute to making places uninhabitable.
While hermits did exist, they didn’t generally do so without at least some community support. The idea of melting away into the wilderness and surviving there in a self-sufficient manner without speaking to or interacting with anyone else is largely fantasy, and for the large majority of humans that kind of social isolation is itself extremely deleterious. There is a reason we use solitary confinement as a punishment within our prison systems. Now, time alone in the woods is quite a bit nicer than solitary confinement, and if I learned anything in 2020 it’s that I really am more of an introvert than I thought; but personally if I am going to be dealing with bears or wolves or wildcats, I don’t want to be doing it alone.
More often, I suspect, “away” meant going two or three towns or villages over, or perhaps further, and having to start over there. And there were at least some social mechanisms in place to prevent this being abused by bad actors, including, for example, the practice of reading “banns of marriage” publicly in churches to ensure that people could, in fact, legally marry (and were not e.g. already married to someone else). There were also laws around vagrancy and around parishes supporting their own poor and destitute.
Unfortunately one of the very common patterns in abuse is the abuser convincing the survivor that they are in some way shameful or contaminated, that nobody will believe them about the abuse or that it is their fault. The abusers isolate their targets, intentionally or not, and this prevents people from seeking help or leaving. This isn’t something we have much of a handle on today either. (And it’s also true, even now, that the highest danger of physical violence is actually when the target has left the control of their abuser. Sometimes survivors stay because leaving feels too dangerous; a lot of the time, they are actually correct.)
I think one of the best protections against abuse is having norms around community participation that allow real friendships to form, outside of households and outside of families of origin, so that people experiencing abuse have safe places to talk through their feelings and their opinions. That then forms the basis for “away”. That doesn’t necessarily fit in with a small farm future, but it certainly could.
Options not opinions! Rascally autocarrot.
Family and kinship are difficult topics, and somewhat emotionally charged for me personally, but I’ll bite and float a grab bag of examples/ideas/whatever:
– kinship-based care and solidarity is important, but a number of nominally middle class people my age and younger in the rich West/North/whatever have spent our entire lives watching our livelihoods get more and more precarious while the generation of our parents live relatively easy lives, alongside the repeatedly-stated expectation that when pensions for our parents turn out to be not as good as those of our grandparents, we’ll pick up the slack. This can be a real wedge between generations, and it takes considerable understanding and interrogation of the surrounding social and economic context to overcome it. I don’t always succeed in this (in fairness, I have internal issues with my family of origin too).
– the social norm of not living near blood relatives also makes certain types of kinship-based care and solidarity harder. When my maternal grandfather moved from Kent to Ontario in the early 20th century (to learn more about the state-of-the-art high-tech dairy farming practices of the time, as I understand it), it was absolutely understood that this meant he might see his family of origin once or twice again in his life, and that’s basically what happened. Thankfully the welfare state was around in some form by the time his mother reached her old age, and there were other kin around anyway; but the expectations on me as someone who moved from Canada to the UK at the age of 19 are that I am supposed to somehow make frequent visits work, to essentially maintain a life (or at least part of one) on two continents. This was never actually realistic for me, but the expectation that because some people manage it, I should, is part of why my family of origin told themselves they could “let” me go…
– but that social norm in turn is related to my own upbringing, where my parents’ divorce when I was four years old and my mother’s fairly quick remarriage to my stepdad (who turned to serving in the Canadian armed forces when his previous job imploded, and was posted far away from his own family from his previous marriage) meant I immediately moved several thousand kilometers from my father and paternal grandparents. My father fought quite hard and ended up with a rather more generous custody arrangement than was often the case at the time, but from then on I saw him for several weeks in summer, a week at my birthday (when he would travel to where I lived so I could continue attending school during the visit), and about a week at alternate Christmas and Easter breaks. On visits to my father, I had little or no contact with my mother. This is not healthy for a four-year-old. My father considered moving but his own employment was very place-based and it was hard to see how he could build up a new clientele in a new location every two or three years.
– my mother moved from Ontario to Saskatchewan after marrying my father because that’s where he could find work at the time, and had very little contact with her family of origin for several years. This is likely partly due to the death of her own mother, who possibly would have been the person who took on the role of making sure everyone kept in touch appropriately, but in her absence, and with my step-grandmother having at best strained relationships with her husband’s bereaved children, it didn’t happen.
– I have an uncle who likes to talk big about family values, and who is quite wealthy compared to the rest of the family and somewhat charismatic, but who I feel hasn’t ever really made an effort to get to know me as a person and who has sometimes responded badly when I set boundaries around my own involvement in various family gatherings. If I thought I could actually rely on his support, then I might ask for his help with getting more secure access to some land, to start to build a life that is less reliant on my spouse working in the spreadsheet factories, but we don’t have the kind of relationship where I even know where to start. I don’t know how much of this is because I was always going back and forth between cities as a child.
– my relationship with my younger half-brother was similarly disrupted, though not as badly (I did live with him for most of the year for the first ten years of his life)
– my current household consists of me and my spouse, and our housemate, who I have known for 22 years and who has been living with us since before we married. I basically consider him kin. Housemate’s financial situation is not great (for some pretty good reasons), and the fact that three of us are sharing extremely low rent for the area is a financial help to him. But that means the financial situation if my spouse does not find another contract after a certain amount of time is difficult, not only for us as a couple, but also for our housemate and for the household as a whole. His relationship to us is not legally recognised or sanctioned in any way (I think technically he is a lodger), but it still exists and so do the consequences, not least that if we were to move countries he couldn’t come with us.
– I know of at least one engagement that ended because one party was forced to go back to working in a situation with insufficient COVID safety protocols (in September 2020, before we even had so much as a vaccine) and the other was unhappy about it; it’s more complicated than that (relationships always are), but it could so easily have been different.
– I don’t deal with half the nonsense around immigration, visas, citizenship etc that some of our soup kitchen guests do; I know several people dealing with serious violations of their right to family life. And all of it costs money, of course.
It would be nice to see more left(-ish) voices challenging the ways that crapitalism strains kinship relations and divides families. My experience has been pretty overwhelmingly of financial constraints and the associated expectation of geographical mobility of certain types of labour having a huge impact on my own family of origin. If my parents had divorced and then remarried, but all stayed in the same small city the whole thing started in, my life and my relationships with my family would have been very different. And if I sometimes react strongly against a narrative of prioritising “family” it is partly because my own experience of being on the receiving end of kinship care and solidarity has always been contingent and conditional, in the ways I’ve detailed here and in other ways.
I don’t regret my own choices, because I have a spouse I adore and a housemate who has my back. But I wonder how much of the pushback against patriarchal family structures is informed by that kind of chaos and conditionality, of being expected to perform certain culturally-approved kinship roles in an economic context where the practical advantages of kinship are so severely degraded.
That isn’t to say that kinship structures “done right” will solve problems around interpersonal power differentials or whatever else, even if I might like to fantasize about what my young life could have been like in the magical world of If Only. People have had crappy childhoods for a variety of reasons for as long as people have been people, and that won’t go away with a small farm future or with universal basic income or with any other scheme we can dream up. Abuse will continue to exist and we will continue to need to mitigate against it and sometimes we will fail.
But I’m not willing to lay all of my crappy childhood at the feet of patriarchy, either, because so many of the things that made it so hard were the result of human beings fitting themselves into a capitalist system as objects in return for survival, without even the ability to call attention to the externalities, human or environmental.
The need to fit into a system for survival won’t go away either. We are subject to limits. But there is something about destroying kinship connections in order to function as an object in an overly financialised system that is also destroying the ability of human beings to survive on this planet that feels like a double insult, somehow, especially given that (I believe) we could instead behave in an ecologically sane way as subjects rather than objects.
Kathryn, thanks for those thought-provoking observations. Only time for a few brief responses, but hopefully we’ll come back to this again.
– agreed, many features of modernity & capitalism have been undermining of kinship as a social organising principle. And yet it endures.
– one of those features was the globalizing power of colonialism, which enabled or forced people to leave kin behind and cross continents, often with disastrous effects on the pre-existing inhabitants of destination places. Much of contemporary life, including kin systems, is still dealing with the consequences of that
– inter-generational issues are always important, but especially now as modernity’s unkeepable promise of constant social improvement from generation to generation palpably fails
– the social relationships demanded by kinship can bear unevenly and unfairly on people, both in terms of enduring social factors like gender and class but also in more individualised and random ways.
– good politics (of which kinship structures themselves are an example) can mitigate the worst excesses of the uneven and unfair demands created in kinship systems. However, politics that tries to undo kin relations entirely and make people generic rather than situated actors (as, for example, with certain kinds of Marxist anti-kinship ideology) generates other kinds of excesses (making people objects rather than subjects?)
– there are unstable boundaries to kinship and friendship. The friend who is like kin. The kinfolk who are like strangers. Kin and political systems find (imperfect) ways to mediate these. They prompt interesting and surprisingly difficult questions about what kinship actually is.
– conservative politics often makes an insincere play around ‘family values’ while pursuing policies that undermine or corrupt kin relations. Radical left-wing politics makes a probably sincere but flawed play against ‘family values’ in its secular millenarian commitment to a society of generic equality, with similar consequences.
R.e., the discussion of kin and kinship…
In very many places throughout the contemporary USA, where I live, (but I live on Turtle Island more primarily — that is, the land more than the nation), the experience of belonging within a local community context has virtually disappeared — is basically non-existent. Folks mostly don’t know their neighbors names in many or most suburban and urban places. Sharing meals, tasks, childcare, projects… together with neighbors tends to be quite rare.
It has sometimes been proposed that this lack of feeling and fact of belonging in local community results in an untenable amount of ‘pressure’ within romantic pairings, which too often carry the burden of meeting all–or nearly all–of one’s needs for belonging. The same has been said with regard to kinship — mainly in the form of “the nuclear family”.
The need we all have for belonging within a broader local context than the nuclear family, or even kinship more broadly, goes generally unacknowledged and unrecognized here, but the need for it is still there — unrecognized and unnamed. Because it is unrecognized and unnamed, folks suffering from this unmet need often try to fill the vacuum in various (usually socially approved) ways, as for example shopping, status seeking, workaholism, sex, drugs and rock and roll. (Okay, maybe not rock and roll.)
We tend to have forgotten that only very recently in all of human history have so many people been almost entirely without a sense of community belonging at the neighborhood or village scale. And this is no small thing! It’s a big thing!
Re: friends that are like kin, and kin who are like strangers — in some of my social circles I see the term “found family” or “chosen family” and it is a concept that has been at least somewhat helpful to me in giving some clarity around who I consider to be kin and how that works. And it isn’t necessarily a flat thing, either. Our housemate may well be someone I consider family in some way, but I did actually marry my spouse, which (to us at least) is a much more long term commitment, with a different type of mutuality. Maybe our housemate will be with us in another decade or two,maybe not; but while I know that marriages do split up, I have every reason to trust that my spouse and I really will be together until death us do part. That is a very different expectation.
Another concept that has been helpful to me is the idea within Christianity of being siblings in Christ. Of course, in such a very large family I may not get on well with or feel affinity to everyone; and not everyone I would put into a “close friend” or “chosen family” category is even Christian (neither my spouse nor my housemate are, for starters). But there are people in my spiritual life who are also close friends and mentors and who it makes sense to think of in terms of some kind of family relationship, and as those relationships are not in any way acknowledged or validated by wider legal (and therefore social) systems the way, say, marriages or parentage are, it offers me some consolation to think of those relationships as recognised by God.
That will be somewhat cold comfort if, for example, someone I love dearly is in hospital and I am not on the list of people allowed to visit. But it isn’t very sensible for the apparatus of the state to recognise all possible permutations and combinations of relationships, at least not in terms of serving up default legal forms for them. My understanding from the “marriage is patriarchy!” crowd is that historically those legal distinctions had more to do with property and inheritance than with who could visit you in hospital or make decisions around end-of-life care; maybe that is in fact still the case.
It feels to me as if there is some tension in this between form and content, perhaps, or the ideal of family (regardless of who defines the ideal) and how it actually shakes out in practice.
Regardless of whether our ‘family’ group is a network of kin, or churchgoers, or friends and associates from school, or compatible people who somehow found each other, for me it comes down to what we are willing to do to support others in the group, and what support we can expect to receive from the group.
And the size of the group, the extent of the network, seems really important for coping with major issues. In the examples from Brazil (below), the settlement with kin networks limited mostly to nuclear families and adult siblings was a rather weak community, while the settlement with ‘interlinked extended kin groups’ was a strong community.
So in addition to what the group members are actually willing to do for each other, it seems that ‘interlinked’ and ‘extended’ are important qualities to make the network effective, whether the network is kin-based or otherwise.
On a slight tangent…….
Have you ever heard of this guy Chris?
https://youtu.be/XSKSxLHMv9k
Further follow ups –
Agree with G&W about the ability to walk away – something previously discussed at some length on this blog. An aspect of modern society is that that’s easy for rich city-dwellers, but usually at the expense of poorer people who can’t walk away, or at least can’t walk away from the need to earn a living. At the same time, the ease of walking away is what makes it hard to build community self-reliance in rich places. It’s harder to walk away in self-reliant agrarian communities, which is why I believe it’s important to try to build good mixed property regimes of distributed private and common ownership, with just the right amount of walkawayability, but not too much. Something that both communist and capitalist regimes have signally failed to do.
Thanks for the link to Mr What Is Politics. Who actually is he? I had a brief look … seemed quite interesting and I might follow up more, although yes his super-negative responses to comments are a bit offputting. I think Christopher Boehm’s writing on human hierarchy is pretty good – G&W gave him disappointingly short shrift in their book, and I agree their framing is a little bit too voluntaristic.
Fukuoka – yes, his One Straw Revolution is one of the classics that inspired the permaculture movement, which is how I got into all this mess of living on a smallholding and trying to figure out why the world was so crazy in the first place.
Mr What is Politics is French Canadian if I remember correctly. I can’t actually remember his name.
It’s been a while since I delved into his input.
His critique of TDOE was very thought provoking. What I really missed was Wengrow’s counter arguments. Maybe they are out there on the web now.
But, as I said, he gets very “caustic” if anyone challenges his viewpoint.
(Unlike your good self Chris).
I had particular disagreement with his idea that palaeolithic hunter gatheres were “immediate return” and by definition the “original” social form of humans.
Christopher Boehm gets a mention by Mr W.I.P if I remember correctly.
Re: Masanobu Fukuoka;
The first interesting factoid might be that he lived in a place called Fukuoka. His family was (is?) very deeply rooted there.
I have learned something from my reading of his work, and from attempting to apply his principles to grain farming (mostly winter wheat and summer cow peas).
What I have learned is that Eastern Kansas is not Southern Japan.
It’s complicated.
And unlike Southern Japan, none of the usual grain crops are native here.
But I’ll keep trying.
Thanks
@ Chris –
“Thanks for the link to Mr What Is Politics. Who actually is he?”
By now, I’ve listened to and watched most of his videos, and I’ve found them generally helpful and useful. So, naturally, I also wondered what his name was … early on in my acquaintance. And I found that he doesn’t really use his name in association with his rather excellent YouTube videos / channel. Which is weird, but whatever. …. I did eventually go searching to see if I could find out his name. And the only part I can remember is is first name … if even this memory is accurate now over a year later. His first name, I think, is Daniel. Not sure why his face is in his videos but his name is not.
I like how he defines the word “politics” — basically “anything to do with decision-making in groups”. I like this definition because it helps me to conceive of of politics in a very expanded and inclusive framing — as something which needn’t involve any of the nested scales of government, e.g., municipal, county, state/province …, federal/central government.
I’m trying to encourage folks to consider the many ways governments tend to constrain our political engagement (and imagination), so that we can get more politically engaged, and more effectively (at times) outside of government, per se.
I’m not super happy with this article, which reveals my laziness borne of so many years of rope-pushing, but it hints at the basic shape of my thought about politics these days.:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-08-08/nonviolent-revolutionary-prefigurative-direct-action-a-school-of-praxis/
I’m curious to know how folks here respond to the notion of “radical ecology” as described here.:
https://www.ecodharma.com/articles-influences-audio/radical-ecology
For my part, I strongly resonate with this orientation. And I think it is a good fit with the SFF (localist agrarian) agenda we here tend to share.
I’m probably going to be offline for a couple of days, so just a few follow ups to points above.
Agreement has broken out between me and Eric on population! Eric, I like your point about oppression density. Indeed I think this is a key issue – part of what I was trying to get at in A Small Farm Future regarding the supersedure state & the possibilities for agrarian localism in zones of state withdrawal. Whether it leverages major change or proves to be just a small upbeat footnote to an unfolding catastrophe is anybody’s guess, but quite possibly the latter. I agree that we’ve stacked the decks against ourselves in the experiment.
Regarding James’s points, I guess I think of myself at the shallow end of the deep ecology pool. Yes to radical political critiques of deep ecology, per Murray Bookchin. Yes to spiritual/cultural deep ecology critiques of radical politics (see OP). Also, I agree with your comment about the atrophy of community & neighbourhood and the loading on marital relationships. But I tend to look at all these things from the perspective of farming, food/fibre production and their histories – so how do you mobilise nature spirituality to make a farmed livelihood, and how do you actually organise day-to-day provisioning? On the latter point at least there’s a long history of kin-based household self-production, albeit set within wider collective structures. It seems to be my role in life to keep banging on about the kin-based household self-production bit, despite the opprobrium of the likes of H&H, because I think we tend to forget it these days, at our peril. At the same time, I agree that the wider collective structures are also critical.
@ Chris –
My tendency is to conceive of the health of things and beings in relation to some sort of a ‘nesting’ model. That is, kinship relationships tend to be much healthier when they are nested within healthy neighborhoods. Neighborhoods tend to be healthier when nested within healthy towns or cities … or villages. (Of course, a village could be at a neighborhood scale, and probably many traditional villages were just this.) Individuals tend to be healthy when set within healthy families…, and so on.
I’m all for healthy kinship patterns, but can this occur when neighborhoods don’t function as neighborhoods … because the neighbors have nothing whatsoever to do with one another? I rather doubt it.
There is some sort of ecosystem-like pattern which connects spiritual and psychological well-being (health) as much as the physical, functional and structural health of an ecosystem. And, as I see it, the spiritual / psychological well-being factor mainly relates to patterns of caring for one another — which is to say sharing, giving, offering kindness and support, being present and accountable….
That’s almost entirely gone in the USA now, as it seems to me, insofar as local communities go. One see’s it most clearly when closely observing how most neighborhoods lack neighborliness in any meaningful way.
It’s a f**king disaster.
(But, of course, there are exceptions to the rule in some neighborhoods. I’m generalizing here.)
PS –
At about six minutes into this video, Charles Eisenstein talks about the role of gift / giving in healthy, functioning local communities. I’m in basic agreement with most of his points, though my own perspective comes at these questions from a slightly different angle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEZkQv25uEs
Speaking of moving ‘away’, kin groups, and land reform, all in the context of what a small farm future might look like…
A recent paper describes a couple examples of smallholder settlements in Brazil and provides valuable insights (seemingly more valuable than Marxist theory) for understanding some present-day issues and realities regarding land reform, collective holdings, community cohesion and organization, etc.
The community organization of two settlements are examined. One of these communities is functional and effective, while the other is a dysfunctional failure in comparison. The successful community has less outmigration (because there is essentially nowhere else for them to go, ‘an inability to move away when conflicts, both external and internal, emerge’) and more social coherence and trust.
Punch line:
‘The reasons for the [successful community’s] social coherence and trust is that it formed around interlinked extended kin groups’… while ‘the migratory background of the settlers [in the other settlement]… hinder[ed] the creation of extended kin networks, intermarriages between kin groups, as well as other forms of long-term networks of cooperation.’
From the Abstract:
‘Using two cases, Anapu and São Manoel, located in the Brazilian Amazonian, this paper discusses the relationships between smallholders’ capacity for collective action, smallholders’ potential to unite and defend their territories, and the role of the state… A large reason for the lack [in Anapu] of a functioning social network, reciprocal interactions and social trust is the migratory background of the settlers, which hinder the creation of extended kin networks, intermarriages between kin groups, as well as other forms of long-term networks of cooperation. This becomes clear when comparing Anapu to the social organization of the settlement of São Manoel in central Maranhão, which has been strong and functional for several decades. The reasons for the latter’s social coherence and trust is that it formed around interlinked extended kin groups. Collective resistance against a predatory large landowner in the 1980s contributed to forging trust and cohesion that could effectively be used to acquire and maintain collectively owned fields and cattle, to formalize an association and a cooperative and to negotiate social tensions within the community. The reciprocal network of São Manoel has made it possible for its settlers to use its more restricted natural resources to a sustainable extent, without negatively affecting the eco-system of their habitat.’
More quotes from the paper:
‘In this paper we will argue that it is the gradual development of interpersonal networks over decades, in combination with common projects, a common adversary and an inability to move away when conflicts, both external and internal, emerge, which are the major factors that enable organizations of settlers in the Brazilian Amazon to pursue successful collective action over time…’
‘[In Anapu,] Many of the settlers either lacked or had few relatives in the settlement. The dominant kin network consisted of nuclear families, siblings and sometimes parents. The lack of extended kin networks limited the reciprocal labor exchange and economic support that often was common in the rural areas of their states of origin…’
‘The smallholders of São Manoel have been able to organize themselves in order to defend the territory of their community and form a strong cooperative, which contributes greatly to the households’ economy. There might occur social tensions within the community, but they have been solved amiably, without leading to major threats and violence. This is a huge contrast to the PDS VJ [in Anapu] where threats and resorts to violence occur frequently. It is important to note that the settlers of São Manuel founded the community themselves; the community was not created through a top-down political decision, as was the case of the PDS VJ, and the settlers maintained a large communal land where they kept cattle, while a commons for joint production or cattle grazing does not exist in the PDS VJ…’
‘The low level of outmigration and long-term dependence on production of the land makes the small community of São Manoel preserve ecosystem services and practice sustainable rotation of the land. If the social organization and collective action of the community was weak and haphazard, their mode of production would be threatened.’
Seeking One’s Fortune Elsewhere: The Social Breakdown of a Smallholder Settlement in the Brazilian Eastern Amazon and the Consequences for Its Rainforest Reserve
Örjan Bartholdson, Roberto Porro & Adam Pain (2022)
Forum for Development Studies, 49:1, 107-127
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08039410.2021.1998213
I find it a real source of regret that the possibility of an explicitly ‘ecosocialist’ consideration of the case for a small farm future has become dominated by H&H’s review of your book Chris. Looking at Twitter, I understand why you blocked them – they repeatedly hamstring the possibility for open exploration and discussion of issues by setting up rhetorical ‘accusations’ and ‘cases’, as if a court-room debate was the best model for persuing insight and clarifying or even resolving disagreements. It’s infuriating from my perspective, as I view what you style ‘agrarian populism’ and ecosolialism as two intellectual currents with a grear deal to offer one another. For what it’s worth, I appreciated Antonio Roman Alcalá’s thread in response to the exchange.
I must admit to a recent trend while reading your posts of agreeing wholeheartedly most of the time but coming away feeling slightly bemused – in part, I think that’s because I’m missing some of the intellectual background to your own thinking. In particular, I need to get to grips with Alsadair MacIntyre I think, as he seems to be looming larger. From what I’ve read so far (in a totally inadequate skip-to-the-end fashion) he’s not someone I can see myself finding fundamental agreement with – but clearly I need to read him properly.
One thing that has always seemed crucial to me, and in which I’m in total agreement with you, is the point you make very succinctly in Tweet 8 of your thread:
‘the household as a unit of production and consumption on land it controls is important so that it gets ecological feedback about the consequences of its actions and economic feedback about the burdens of its production and consumption.’
This gets to the heart of why ‘small is beautiful’ – it justifies an essential need for a ‘bottom-up’ politics and society, and outlines the scope of a meaningful ‘autonomy’.
The quote also uses the word ‘control’ with respect to land, rather than ‘ownership’ or similar. I think this is also crucial, because ‘private property’ is a term that is likely to sow division by its very presence (because of the heavy baggae of associations is trails around with it). You are very careful above to talk always of ‘de facto’ provate property when writing of your own ideals, defined carefully as ‘the right to appropriate resources from land to be accorded by the wider political community on an exclusive basis at a given time to individuals, households or families’. I’ve always appreciated this analysis, in particular because the role of ‘the wider political community’ within it opens up a lot of potential common ground with ecosocialists – here, surely, is a point at which we can start to talk about how households and ‘communes’ (‘hand-wavy’ word, I know) offer mutually constitutive possibilities.
I think I understand why you continue to use the term ‘private property’ – it has a rhetorical value in contrasting the significance of local ‘control’ with control at highter levels – but I also wonder if productive discussion in the future will benefit from leaning into ways in which you hedge around the term, making it a very different beast from the kind of thing ‘private property’ conjures in many minds today.
So I happily nodded along to the section on property. The family section was slightly more of a mixed bag for me. I think you’re right about the ways in which ‘patriarchy’, as general term for gender-based domination, can be found in all sorts of social structures, and I’ve no doubt that’s as true of attempted ‘collective’ projects as it is of the many family situations people have found themsleves in. It’s also not a reason simply to discard the family as such as hopelessly compromised, although at this point we might start to ask which family? What are we assigning to the concept of ‘family’ as the foundational qualities that make the term applicable to a whole host of different situations? Everyday relations of care? Once on this ground, are we always talking about family of some kind? If so where does ‘family’ end and ‘commune’ begin?
There is need for clarity here, and I found myself wishing that you had explcitly applied the same analysis to the ‘patriarchal family’ as you had to ‘private property’, because there is also hierarchical implication in family (as in any other social structure) that cannot simply be sidelined by objecting to patriarchy. An explicit paraphrase of your analysis could look like this (replacement text in square brackets):
‘In brief, a regnant conception of the [patriarchal family] in the ‘western liberal’ tradition is a depoliticized one in which a person (a man, usually) can have almost exclusive rights of disposition over a defined [group of people], usually by [biologically-mediated superiority to them]. This draws our attention to the relationship between a (gendered) person and [their family]. And it draws our attention away from the intensely political nature of the way that [biological primacy] tend[s] to accumulate in particular hands in this process. But … [family] is always a collective political relationship. It bears on who is accorded the right by the wider community to appropriate [authority within a group of people], what responsibilities they might also have in respect of [that group], and what collective political processes are in place to determine these rights and responsibilities.’
I imagine you would probably agree with much of this paraphrase, and I take your point that you cannot be expected to single-handedly abolish patriarchy (!), but I think the fundamentally political form of the family needs to remain front and centre. My bemusement relates to the same distinction you raised in another recent post, where you contrast politics with culture. Here, ridding family of patriarchy is ‘a long-term cultural project, not a short-term political one’, but my objection isn’t simply that politics is part of culture anyway, but that culture is fundamentally political – so again, I’m not sure what the contrast is intended to convey.
In my view, accepting that everyday, local political organisation will continue to possess a ‘familial’ quality across much of the globe (fair enough) requries us to think seriously about how to act politically against patriarchal tendencies in the family (which, so we’re clear, does not mean simply abolishing the family entirely, and might certainly be a long-term project – Raymond Williams’s ‘long revolution’ comes to mind). It’s not clear to me what ‘deep power’ the ‘family’ possesses outside these considerations, and I wonder here if this is where MacIntyre comes in. When Macintyre sets ‘local forms of community’ against ‘politics’, he seems to me to be obscuring the latter in the former. This, I think, is what his Aristotelian virtue ethics does – obscures the contingent and negotiable in notions of essentialised (‘authentic’?) substance, and I think it’s where I’ll find myself disagreeing with him as I read his book.
I’ve probably written far too much on this, as ever, but I hope you don’t mind indulging me as I work out what I find dischordant in your writing – it bothers me because I find you one of the most insightful and exciting writers on these issues. Needless to say, it doesn’t need to bother you, but hopefully its of some interest.
“…we can start to talk about how households and ‘communes’ (‘hand-wavy’ word, I know) offer mutually constitutive possibilities.”
Why would this be worthwhile, when communes are already comprised of households (with at least one household per commune)?
It seems that Chris already provides plenty of flexibility related to this, and also addresses why the definition of ‘family’ doesn’t really need to be nailed down, in parts 9-12 of his Twitter thread (repeated below):
‘I don’t much care about the size or composition of the household, provided it’s the primary unit of production & consumption. I don’t have a normative/conservative view of what ‘the family’ should be. I’m fine with large intentional communities comprising non-kin 9/27
But in practice I think a lot of farm households will be small, close-kin groups, and I’m fine with that too. Despite much modern mythologising to the contrary, this has been a ubiquitous historic form 10/27
Successful farm households require people who are invested long-term in each other as economic & moral actors. If you want to pull apart existing kin relations & invent some other way of doing that in your own household, fine by me… 11/27
…but if it works long-term I think it’ll end up looking a lot like the kin relations & affective ties you laboriously deconstructed, only to reinvent 12/27’
It seems quite feasible for communes to provide the affective ties and long-term relations which Chris says are required for successful farm households. But in the wider spheres (and across the larger distances) of towns and supersedure states, it doesn’t seem as feasible, without a major reprogramming of the larger culture, for networks of communes to replicate the extended and interlinked networks of supportive and enduring connections which can occur with kin groups.
Steve, I think it’s worthwhile for the same kinds of reason that reading the paper you linked to was worthwhile!
That a commune might be made up of several households is the beginning, not the end, of what we might explore. I think it’s important to see the household not as a foundational unit, which might aggregate into larger entities but is otherwise fine on its own, but instead as a unit of production and consumption suspended in a larger communal matrix, which is defined by the kinds of connection that bind the whole thing together – household and commune are mutually reliant on each other for their functions and forms.
The paper you linked made clear that family connections (wider kin-based networks) were significant in maintaining community cohesion – and they are perhaps the most obvious connections to point to when trying to illustrate the way in which the community hangs together. But the authors also points to the significance of a pastoral commons, of community work days and labour exchanges, of the state (!) in supporting (or not) the frameworks of forest reserves, and of common experiences of struggle against an ‘external’ or disruptive force. They even make an approving comparison to E P Thompson’s class-making practices.
What we are looking at is a whole host of different strategies by which the members of the community seek to maintain its cohesion, of which the cultivation of extended family ties is just one. Indeed, if it were the only one, we would probably end up with a situation in which marriages were contracted primarily for the benefit of community cohesion rather than mutual affection between partners. While I’m interested in critique of G&W’s suggestion that the ability to walk away should be considered a fundamental ‘freedom’, it seems to me that it should indeed be regarded as such in marital situations.
So I think there’s lots to explore around the ways in which community cohesion strategies cut across and between households while equally (and as a result) contributing to the cohesion of those households. The example of PDS VJ shows that households by themselves are not enough. The success or failure of individual households can be our primary yardstick, but it relies on the bigger communal context.
I also think some things the authors highlight can’t really be used as models for success. Noting that ethnic homogeneity or the presence of family ties from the beginning were contributive to cohesion is fair enough as an observation, but given the rather atomised nature of societies in the global core today and the significance of migration, both historical and in the face of global crises today, we don’t really have the luxury of choosing all the parameters of where we begin, and need to think about how cohesion might be created in less promising contexts.
All this seems germane to James’s ‘third sphere’. I’m with Chris on the impossibility of setting out a perfect blueprint for the ‘ideal’ household or, by extension, the ‘ideal’ commune, but what we need, I think, is a sense of the scope of available strategies towards creating cohesive and mutually constitutive versions of them in the future. So I think we’re still at the beginning of productive discussions around them. The kinds of relevant examples that you seem to be good at hunting down online are an important part of that in my view.
Thanks, Andrew, for further explaining your views. I took your ‘mutually constitutive possibilities’ to mean more than ‘the ways in which community cohesion strategies cut across and between households while equally (and as a result) contributing to the cohesion of those households.’
Still, I’m skeptical that ‘community cohesion strategies’ can be successfully imposed if there is not already a certain level of trust, solidarity, and mutuality among community members. The initial cohesion may need to evolve locally, out of necessity.
Perhaps kin networks could provide a known model to improve upon, starting with family members and expanding the concept of ‘family’ to include unrelated folks who are somehow ‘related’ and committed to the group.
@ Andrew –
“I think I understand why you continue to use the term ‘private property’ – it has a rhetorical value in contrasting the significance of local ‘control’ with control at higher levels – but I also wonder if productive discussion in the future will benefit from leaning into ways in which you hedge around the term, making it a very different beast from the kind of thing ‘private property’ conjures in many minds today.”
You have plenty of useful, and somewhat incipient, insights on offer in this post, Andrew. The incipience aspect is not a complaint or a put down. It’s just where we’re ALL at in this moment in history as we begin to re-imagine leftist politics, I think.
My own primarty contribution to inquiry into this incipience can be found here — https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-24/on-commoning/ — and here — https://rword.substack.com/p/more-on-public-and-private .
What I’m up to here, slowly and with great challenges and difficulties, is to imagine a “third sphere” which is neither quite “public” nor “private” but “communal” … and to wonder at (aloud) what “politics” looks like when it is neither public nor private under the auspices provided to us by the conceptual schemas of these two terms.
Nither the “traditional left” nor the mainstream of politics anywhere, is (apparently) seeking to find a space of politics which is not constrained by the terms “private” and “public”. It’s a difficult and convoluted terrain for opening up, I think. And it’s difficult to know how to state the tacit understandings which certain visions of “the communal domain” might open up for us to explore.
Almost all political thought appears to me to be captured by what I named as “the dyad” — the division of the political realm into public and private, with no third alternative which weds parts of each while transcending both. So it’s quite natural that the “social imaginary” of the present is reluctant to consider suchlike as kin relationships as divided by a chasm from larger schemas in which kin and “community” (of larger scales) are wedded by a shared ethos. Instead, there is a tendency to fall into now outworn habits of thought and perception which divides local inhabitants into the familiar old “dyad”.
I may be entirely wrong here, but I think it may be useful to open up the space of inquiry to include what has long been excluded by traditional leftism, Marxism, Anarchism, etc. I’m personally not much of a fan of the old divisions at all.
PS – Something new from the What Is Politics Guy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1cOCegTlG0
Thanks for the further comments, Steve, Andrew & James. Andrew, your comments are definitely of interest to me – and I especially appreciate your positive remarks about my writing in a period when I’ve been dismissed as a conservative by Marxists, a Marxist by liberals, and have become ever more keenly aware of the creeping victory of ecomodernism’s false solutionism in the face of an indifferent public who buy any damned message about the evils of meat and the coming world of limitless clean energy and rewilded Edens. So … I will try to respond more fully to your various interesting contributions, but it may not be for a few days.
I think the thing that gets to me about eco-modernism is that it so often makes one of the same mistakes of industrial capitalism: not counting externalities.
Something well over 90% of electricity in British Columbia, Canada comes from hydroelectric power, but this has devastated salmon numbers on the Columbia and Peace river systems. The First Nations people who once relied on these watersheds for their livelihood receive zero profit from the hydro dams and also, now, zero salmon.
Hindsight, of course, renders effects like this more obvious. In a sufficiently complex system, every action will have unforseen and unforeseeable consequences. But hindsight is too late. While the urgency of our situation makes sweeping changes seem attractive, the graveness of it means there is something to be said for prudence.
I cleared two carrot beds yesterday and was surprised at just how much better the carrots were from the raised bed filled with homemade compost, as opposed to the one mostly filled with heavy clay with a bit of our homemade compost on top. The clay bed had many more forked roots, which is somewhat expected, but also many more split carrots and more pest damage.
@Kathryn –
Nate Hagens, in a recent podcast episode, matter-of-factly said that no modern industries could be profitable without negative external costs. And I’m utterly convinced that this is so, which basically means that the modern economy is an externalizing machine. That is, it depends on drawing down value measured holistically. That is, it’s basically more harmful than ‘productive’.
I would go so far as to say that modern economic cost externalities have long far exceeded what we could call “real production” — or the value of economic production minus negative externalties. What this means is that the present global economy is net negative in terms of producing value.
The Externalizing Machine, by James R. Martin, Resilience
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-11/the-externalizing-machine/
In my essay titled “On Commoning,” I said,
“The communal sphere is a social space in which giving, caring, nurturing, supporting, collaborating… on egalitarian terms is the core ethos, that which informs and inspires our aliveness, our ethos, our politics. In the communal sphere we are not set into competition with one another, but rather do quite the inverse. We seek to empower one another by distributing power centrifugally, as opposed to hoarding it and concentrating it centripetally. Our aim is to liberate ourselves by liberating one another, and to liberate one another by liberating ourselves. In short, we are not interested in hegemony. We are motivated by love.”
Later, I discovered that my way of understanding and framing the traditional notion of public and private “spheres” (per se) was importantly off kilter a bit, in that it over-emphasized one facet of the complex notions which I sought to get a handle on. I touched upon these difficulties in a follow-up article: “More on public and private” – https://rword.substack.com/p/more-on-public-and-private
My aim in these writings was to try and carve out a space for what is sometimes called a “social imaginary” for framing a discourse on egalitarian political practice, one rooted mainly in care (sharing, giving, cooperating, mutuality, etc.) rather than competition, combat and the will to hegemony (domination and hierarchy). I intended to show that real egalitarian theory and practice must be rooted in this mutualistic practice of power-sharing which ultimately grounds in caring for one another within our political communities. The “communal sphere,” as I originally called it (but which could be called “the communal domain”), is a space in which an ethos dwells and is deliberately cultivated and nurtured. That ethos is a politics. “All politics are the politics of an ethos,” I said. And the communal ethos and politics is characterized by caring, giving, sharing, cooperating, kindness, belonging, mutuality … as contrasted with self-seeking as if one were radically separate from one’s neighbors and set into competition and combat with them.
Please contrast the communalist ethos and politics, then, with the one described here.:
“There is now one dominant global culture, an ever expansionist and predatory industrial capitalism, valuing profit above life. It is a system which reduces the entire natural world – mountains, forests, oceans; plants and animal species (including human beings) – into resources to be ordered and controlled, used and exploited in the pursuit of material growth and economic development – this ever more suffocating technocratic system, is destroying the ecology of life.”
(from -https://www.ecodharma.com/articles-influences-audio/radical-ecology )
We here in this Small Farm Future blog space have been talking about a set of topics which relate to the notion of scales of what we could call micro-polities of the private sphere (or domain) — e.g., households, localized kinship clusters, the nuclear family…. I sometimes seek to re-embed these micro-polities within the context of neighborhoods and villages, then to embed neighborhoods and villages within bioregions…, not because I think the micro-polities of the household isn’t an important thing or topic, but because my systems orientation keeps me thinking of households and such as part of a larger local community (ideally). I say “ideally” because very isolated households are possible. They’re just not at all desirable, in my view, and especially not in the sort of “times” which seem to be ahead for us. If we need one another now, we’re going to need one another all the more as we try and help millions or billions of people transition to the SFF.
Dare I say, “It takes a village”? I don’t mean it the way Hillary Clinton did. I’m being much more sincere than she was. Sincerity is a key feature of the communalist ethos.
It takes a village — idiom origin and meaning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_takes_a_village
Okay, long reply coming up to various comments posted above, for which many thanks. But I wrote it before seeing further comments from Kathryn, Steve, Andrew & James, so apologies for not incorporating further updates.
Anyway, first, it’s been suggested to me that I should encourage anyone who’s read my new book and who happens to be in possession of an Amazon account and might be minded to write a (positive) review of my book on Amazon (or elsewhere) to do so. So please hereby consider yourself encouraged.
And so on to the comments, focused especially on the matter of kin relations, with the caveat that I don’t think I have any great answers.
First, Steve – thanks for another good bit of evidence-finding. I will read that paper with interest. Sounds up my street!
@James – yes much to agree with there. Although I’d make the point that kin relations are ‘nested’ relations par excellence, and in situations where other kinds of collective structures are weak or missing they can loom large, not necessarily in good ways – e.g. the origins of the mafia in Sicily as a kind of patrimonial politics in the context of a weak state.
The ecosystem metaphor is an interesting one – do ecosystems involve tightly integrated and functionally interrelated subsystems like the body of an individual organism, or are they a looser and more random assemblage of components? A bit of both no doubt, but I incline somewhat to the latter view. From the perspective of a given organism in an ecosystem, certain other kinds of organisms may want to eat me, and I in turn may want to eat other kinds, while remaining indifferent to various other ones and perhaps having symbiotic relationships with yet others. So I might have a view (conscious or otherwise) about which organisms or assemblages I’d like to see more of and less of in my ecosystem. I wonder how that metaphor might play out in terms of human political structures? Possibly not in terms of smoothly nested hierarchies, but something a bit more lumpy … and contested.
Household units aren’t historically prior to political society. At the same time I think they might be more fundamental structurally – in a small farm future at least, if not in the present day. The idea of subsidiarity bears on this point. How might we form a good society, comprised of good households and good supporting institutions?
@Andrew – Thanks for a typically constructive and thought-provoking comment. First, I’m interested in your remark that H&H’s review has dominated ecosocialist consideration of a small farm future. It suggests that their review has been influential among ecosocialists – do you think that’s so? To me, their positions seem little more than dogmatic sloganeering, so if their writing plays well in ecosocialist circles it doesn’t suggest to me a body of thinking worthy of much attention. However, I believe you’re right that there’s potential for mutual enrichment between ecosocialism of some kind & my own politics. H&H’s intellectual shallowness and shoehorning of my arguments into the butt of vulgar Marxist critique have considerably dented any interest on my part in engaging with ecosocialism, but I’m sure there are other people working within that tradition with whom I can engage constructively and from whom I could learn – like you perhaps!
Anyway, it sounds like we’re more or less on the same page vis-à-vis the question of property. If there’s a way of talking about the need for BOTH exclusive individual/household rights AND collective/common rights without being labelled simultaneously as a conservative and a communist by dogmatists on either side of the tiresome modernist individual-collective duality, I’d jump at the chance. One for further discussion, perhaps? Some key issues around exclusive rights of appropriation are transaction costs and free rider problems (which can and must be detached from their associations with capitalist economics) and mental load.
Regarding kin relations, I enjoyed your rewrite of my property analysis in kinship terms, and I do pretty much agree with it in that framing. There are some differences between property (as land) & kin relations, though – a key one being that unlike land people are ends in themselves with the potential to choose independently to exit the political relationship (as I understand it, some of this stuff about property was worked out in Roman law in respect of slavery, where precisely people are *not* ends in themselves in legal theory, but retain an unshakeable ability to act thus in human practice). Another difference is that people tend to beget other people, who initially are dependent upon their begetters.
So historically kin relations in agrarian societies are trying to mediate a lot of pretty complex things – how to comprehend physical relatedness of parent and child, sister and brother, and radiations therefrom? How to manage the day to day practice of livelihood-making on a piece of land efficiently? How to orchestrate care of the farm and care of those farming it over the long haul by building conceptions of long haul relatedness? How to educate, raise up generations and hand on property and other accumulated necessities? How to defuse power imbalances within and beyond family and household units and how to link them to other units? How to honour people and the gods?
It’s impossible to do all that perfectly. But I don’t have much truck with the kind of ecosocialism that dismisses the vast history of kin-mediated attempts to do so with the label ‘the patriarchal family’ and proposes vague alternatives like ‘democratic collectivism’. That democratic collectivism will have to do all the things kin-structured societies tried to do. As I’ve said before, I think if it succeeds in the long-term it’ll end up pretty much reinventing something that looks a lot like kinship … which involves a kind of ‘deep power’ of essentially non-negotiable (if hopefully not inescapable) relatedness – the kind of power that would make walking out on your commune as big a deal as walking out on your family, not because of the insult to naked (patriarchal) power but because of the implied insult to norms of relatedness.
As I see it, radically egalitarian millenarian movements have often succeeded in throwing off the shackles of kinship and restricted household forms in the short-term, particularly among limited groups of devotees. But rarely on a mass basis in the long term. I think most 20th century communist movements pretty much fit into that pattern of radical millenarian failure – and so do some of the recent self-consciously political collective agrarian ventures that H&H vaunt in their review, some of which have already foundered or are foundering.
Which leads to the culture-politics point. Yes, culture is political, but its politics are a longer-range affair than the kind of explicitly rationalist instrumental-power oriented cultural politics of modernist political movements like Marxism. All those failed communist attempts to suppress religion, family and property forms! The long-term politics of culture outlasting shorter term political ideologies.
Where this gets tricky for me is in kind of agreeing with you that when all is said and done culture is still (and ought to be) contingent and negotiable, while at the same time thinking that it’s exactly the non-contingent and non-negotiable aspects – the things that go more or less unchallenged, the unexamined cosmology – that need to be buttressed. As per my OP, I think Marxism falls on its face here, thinking that it alone has seen the truth, while revealing its modernist/capitalist grounding, its own unexamined cosmology. But it’s in the nature of modernism to set itself explicitly against the non-contingent and non-negotiable, and this is what in some sense needs to be transcended (e.g. “this forest is a sacred place and you cannot extract any further human value from it while offsetting the damage in an ecosystem services market … this farmland is the place where you can make your livelihood, but you cannot strip its soil, undercut your neighbours at market … and likewise perhaps with ideas of human relatedness”).
So, finally, to MacIntyre and Aristotle. I read MacIntyre’s ‘After Virtue’ twenty odd years ago and then again recently, finding it hugely thought-provoking both times. I’d be very interested to hear other people’s thoughts about it (warning: it’s quite a heavy-going monograph from an academic philosopher … but at least it’s about stuff that really matters). I found his critique of modernism and modern philosophy quite devastating, whereas his alternative formulations a bit weaker – always easier to knock down than to build, I suppose, but partly perhaps it’s because (as with ecomodernism) we have a fondness nowadays for bold singular solutions rather than multiply complex ones.
Anyway, Andrew – I’m not the best person to be expounding on Aristotle but I think your critique of Aristotle and/or MacIntyre’s Aristotelianism risks churlishness in that it’s not just a case of ideologically ossifying the contingent and negotiable into the essential as a kind of power move, but grounding a philosophy on the idea of an essential cosmic order and of human tradition (a living tradition, in argument with itself) as expressive of it. I hope to write more about this in the future – not least in relation to kin relations. I think it has its problems. But probably less so than its alternatives. Perhaps there’s scope for agreement around the concept of culture as living tradition – something that’s essential, but not unchanging or immune to challenge.
Thanks Chris, I’m enjoying trying to think through these issues.
Re H&H, I don’t know how much influence their review has had within wider ecosocialist cicles – sorry, didn’t mean to suggest I did! It usually comes up here whenever ecosocialism is raised, and I think it would be really useful to put it to one side while leaving the door open to other ecosoialist voices, especially now your thoughts on it are pretty clear! Part of the trickiness here is that people claim the ecosocialist label without necessarily signing up to a coherent position, because it’s still a live field of debate – so hopefully still worth engaging with. Given that Heffron emerged wih the link to his review after you’d appeared on a podcast and someone had expressed admiration for your ideas, I’d say you’re already doing that anyway, and reaching people.
Re property, it’s interesting that the ‘need for BOTH exclusive individual/household rights AND collective/common rights’ was pretty unexceptional even in this country before a century or two ago. I think we’re having to deal with an unhelpful polarisation in wider discourse between absolute private property and commons – I think you’ve written on that before. Anyway, I’d be interested in further writing on ‘transaction costs and free rider problems … and mental load’.
Re kin, happy to accept the differences you point out between family and property. I do think that the various elements you list as mediated by kin relations in agrarian societies were often historically mediated not only by kin relations, acknowledging that kin relations always played important roles. But I’d certainly agree they were largely LOCALLY mediated – I would stress the historical variety of structring forms around issues of child rearing, education, social life and the affirmation of commitments and obligations. The essence of my point is that ‘family’ meant many different things historically – not just as an idea, but in terms of structure; e.g. up to about a century ago many farming ‘families’ in England included live-in ‘servants in husbandry’, whose experiences as ‘members’ of those families were distinctive. We could acknowledge the ways in which they weren’t ‘really’ family members, but at an everyday level of organisation and the development of social and emotional relations, the distinction blurs.
So I agree that a polarisation between the ‘family’ and the ‘collective’ is unhelpful and unrealistic. I also think you’re right about the ‘millennarian’ quality of a lot of egalitarian movements, in the sense that the radical transformations they espoused were built on a kind of universal antagonism that could never hope to prevail. I do think that many have been effective in other ways though – falling short is not the same as having no effect whatsover. But perhaps it is worth emphasising your point about timescale – recognising that truly effective revolutions have to work at the everyday level over potentially a longer period of time. ‘Culture is ordinary’ (another Raymond Williams idea) and has to be engaged with at that level.
I think your ‘deep power’ is still something I’m struggling with. ‘Non-negotiable relatedness’, ‘norms of relatedness’, the need to buttress the ‘non-contingent and non-negotiable’. The problem you’re working with, it seems to me, is permanance, and the need to maintain cultural cohesion – at root, for people to recognise a force in their lives that commits them to something, so that they can be trusted in their wider communities to go the distance, and not just up and leave when it suits them. It’s a fair point that emphasis on contingency and negotiability is characteristic of ‘modern’ radicalisms and that it doesn’t often notably grapple with this point, especially at its most rhetorical.
I’m not clear though, how the family/household would fit into this. You’re writing about kin and family, but your examples flip back to property – and indeed I can see the use of a kind of sacred constitution around land-use the way your examples illustrate it. But relatedness – ‘and likewise perhaps with ideas of human relatedness’ – you don’t seem entirely clear what that kind of constitution would mean in the family/household context. Can you suggest any examples as straightforward as those around fields and forests? It seems possible to me that you’ll begin to stray into commandments to ‘honour thy father and mother’ and the like.
Is it actually worth changing tack slightly and thinking about strategies of commitmemt and trust, whether or not they are mediated through kinship? As you argue, family connection will continue to loom large in the structuring of groups of committed to work together, but the commitment itself might be understood more broadly, or universally. One of those ‘millenarian’ movements – Christianity – was actually quite successful at transforming societies around notions of universal siblinghood (note the family metaphor!) even if the de facto application left plenty of room for less universal relations. Promoting a universal non-contingent non-negotiable need to commit to people and place is something I could get behind if the workings out of that process on the ground were suitably flexible and hedged.
Re MacIntyre, he would no doubt have me down as a follower of Nietzsche given to ‘phantasies’ of will and power, so I don’t mind being a little churlish! We return here to the concersations we’ve had previoulsy here, about the extent to which an essential cosmic order can be said to inform human relations with each other. My own position continues to emphasise only the very outside (universal?) bounds of such an order – as human beings we are essentially implicated in each other’s lives, and therefore cannot help but find each other meaningful in some way – which leads, I think, to some form of the Golden Rule as a guide to conduct. People are capable of the worst betrayals, but these are so scandalous precisely because we can’t help but know that trust has been betrayed. Aristotelian positions typically emphasise a lot more essential human nature within these bounds, around particular kinds of relation (like particular family relations), something I think is not born out by experience, and can lead to assertions of the ‘naturalness’ of certain power relations.
As for ‘tradition’, that’s an intersting new keyword, one worth following. A living tradition as some kind of cultural form that is continually renewed through the repeated commitments of its members to something greater than themselves, but that, in the process of renewal, allows challenge and change, sounds like a promising way forward (perhaps akin to what Kathryn alluded to when discussing the church).
Thanks for that Andrew, some excellent discussion points there – which I will attempt to answer only briefly, but hope that we can come back to.
No doubt you’re right about H&H – time to move on. I find their behaviour very strange, but probably best not to dwell on it, as with any number of other blowhards on social media. Best to focus on those who engage positively in good faith. Thanks for the life hack!
Regarding transaction costs etc I’ve written about this before, for example in this article: https://www.thelandmagazine.org.uk/articles/commons-and-households-small-farm-future. But again something to come back to…
Your example of agricultural servants is an interesting one, not least because my own little farm community (comprising kin and non-kin) is a version of that model – although ‘servant’ is an anachronistic and inappropriate word. My take is different to yours, though. Generally, I’d say there’s quite a big difference between the ‘servant’ & the proprietor role, both in respect of agricultural work and human/kin relations. The former tends to involve fairly clear limits and quid pro quos with respect to responsibilities whereas the latter doesn’t. Akin to being an employee versus a sole trader, perhaps. This has been a tricky issue in our farm development that we’ve worked hard on with mixed results – something I hope to discuss in the future.
Your question about the constitution of relatedness is interesting. Can I suggest clear examples? Probably not – partly because I haven’t thought hard enough about this whole issue, but partly because maybe the (idealised) ambit of kin is, precisely, a lack of definite quid pro quos. There are many different kin ideologies worldwide, but some sense of unquantifiable flow (love?) is quite common. It all gets a bit more complicated in practice, and it gets routinised in social roles exactly of the ‘honour thy father and mother’ kind (ironically, for all my harping on about kin my own wider family relations are not that close, but I’m now spending quite a lot of time giving care to an elderly kinsperson – I have closer affective ties to other kin & non-kin, but this role feels appropriate to both of us…
I think it’s good to build in safeguards and alternatives around kin & kin roles, and to admit to ambiguities and eccentricities. Kathryn’s example of her flatmate is an interesting one. But she says that the spousal relationship still means something more or different, and you yourself make clear that advocating for the abolition of kin relations is unwise … so perhaps I might reflect the question back – what is special about kin? In a household farming situation, maybe what matters is simpler. It’s about getting jobs done without any immediate quid pro quos, because both the farm and the family are long-term projects that don’t involve short-run ‘contractual’ reward (obviously there are gender considerations here).
Good points about Christianity as a successful millenarian movement and the definite if imperfect achievements of such movements. Agree there. Again, though, much of that success lies in the achievement of metaphorizing wider collective relationships as kin relations, of God as furnishing a kind of unlimited familial care or love to humanity, and of this being a kind of sacred essence and absolutely not contingent. Which maybe brings us to Aristotle and his influence in church doctrine (Andrew, I don’t think MacIntyre would impute Nietzschean phantasies to you … certain other ecosocialists, maybe – but I’d like to come back to that another time).
Finally, I came across this passage from the libertarian socialist Gustav Landauer that bears on this: “My house, my farm and garden, my wife, my children – my world! On this feeling, on this exclusive solidarity, this voluntary union, this small and natural community, all larger organisms arise, at first the Gemeinde and the professional associations. These will then say to all others outside: leave us in peace; we are free and autonomous in what concerns us.”
(Tweeted by Jonathan Parkes Allen here: https://twitter.com/Mar_Musa/status/1691175527384588289 )
I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s interesting that somebody involved with the Munich Soviet Republic was thinking along these lines!
Andrew wrote “It seems possible to me that you’ll begin to stray into commandments to ‘honour thy father and mother’ and the like.”
How about something like this instead:
‘The group consists of people committed to the group. If someone (as an adult) is not committed to the group, they won’t be part of the group.’
This can apply to groups of kin and/or non-kin, with the group size being as small as a couple, or a household, or a tribe, or a larger network. Details concerning what ‘committed to the group’ means are up to the group to decide.
Specific quid-pro-quo arrangements don’t seem to qualify for this type of commitment, but general expectations of supportive reciprocity can be part of it. This type of commitment tends to be strong and lasting if inculcated from a young age, which is relatively easy to do in family situations in our culture (something that’s perhaps ‘special about kin’).
A few tangential (as usual) thoughts before I go water some squashes:
– I find the concept of “living” or dialogical tradition, as opposed to traditionalism (in which tradition is revered simply for being traditional, and those who hold power within that tradition reject interrogation of that tradition), quite helpful in my religious life. (I’m a high-church Anglo-Catholic who loves ‘smells and bells’ and plainchant and gets annoyed when feast days get transferred to the nearest Sunday, and who is also very liberal on matters around gender and sexuality, just for situational context in case it means anything to anyone else here; and echoing Chris’s adventures in discourse, I get called reactionary by liberal progressive Christians who don’t share my love of trad liturgy, and an abominable heretic by certain traditionalists.) I think Chesterton (but it might have been someone else) referred to tradition as “democracy with the dead” — the idea that in keeping up traditions, we continue to include in our worship those who are in God’s nearer presence. That is, if we believe in the resurrection of the dead in some real way, then they are not mere objects within our religious life but active participants and their views on liturgy also matter and should be given priority over our own. However, most of the time people arguing that we should do things exactly as the dead used to do them are in fact making objects of them.
– I think kinship is necessarily more complex than a binary distinction between kin and non-kin. I have different expectations of my spouse than of our housemate, especially for the longer-term, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a hierarchy unless there is some external practical reason for one to emerge. If I had to choose to donate a kidney to either my housemate or my spouse, and the other would die if I did not, I expect that I would be absolutely miserable with either choice. Similarly, I relate differently to my mother than to my father (and one of the pains of my childhood was being encouraged to choose one over the other, though I am pleased to report that no kidneys or deaths were involved). If I had children, I am certain that would influence my other kinship and friendship relationships quite strongly, though frankly at this stage it doesn’t look likely.
– I think perhaps the inverse of the free rider problem is the unacknowledged labour problem. Was it Hemingway or Thoreau who had his mother bring fresh bread and do his laundry while he contemplated nature in his woodland idyll? I have certainly observed groups where people (usually women) are taught to be self-sacrificing “for the good of” the family or social group and end up weary and exhausted while others, taught to be more assertive but not taught to value or do domestic or emotional labour, are effectively infantilised and de-skilled. I don’t have a good solution for this problem on a wider scale, but I do think it can be addressed (imperfectly) within households.
– regarding Joel’s comment on material and skill, while I strongly agree that spuds are spuds and material contributions to community are vitally important, I also hold that people who cannot make those types of contributions (or even the so often overlooked contributions of emotional labour, storytelling etc which are every bit as important in communities as our daily bread) are, nevertheless, fearfully and wonderfully made, beloved of God and bearing God’s image. I am extremely wary of approaches that state or imply that we cannot meet our material needs while also treating all humans, even profoundly dependent humans, as ends rather than objects. So yes, there is value and meaning in eating (and supporting others to eat!) by the sweat of your brow, and yes, Chris, your willingness to walk the walk and to speak from a place of experience is important, and probably makes your contributions more pertinent than those of some academics. Fine words butter no parsnips. We do need to pay attention to the practical utility of our actions. But we need to pay attention to the meaning of our actions even more than that, and if we start to base that meaning only on practical utility then we are, I submit, in very deep spiritual trouble, potentially heading to a place of might-makes-right and treating humans as (productive) objects rather than ends. I don’t think that’s where Joel was going, or where you are either, Chris. But perhaps situating our meaning both in local material realities and in some universal framework is one way to head off that possibility.
What is politics guy does an entertaining and persuasive episode on ‘why the Russian revolution failed’, outlining a curious episode in Marx’s life. Having told the world that the peasant had to be pulverised through the mince machine of industrialisation, the Russian peasantry was bought to his attention – to which he was so taken that he learned Russian to study them. Letters to a Russian contemporary of the time describe his dawning realisation that the mincer might not be necessary. Brilliant!
I too am well over the idea that centralised politics and shonky victoriana of all sorts holds the key to a flourishing future. I haven’t read all the stuff but it sounds like h and h fit into that category of bad faith actors, to whom we shall extend our empathy.
All to often I return to material and skill, the action of making – something useful that people can use in their lives. As a grower, this comes through your writing, beautifully outlined by Andrew above. It situates your knowledge in a radical, natural way. This stands in utter contrast to the academic ideologues, who have no living connection to these deeply human attributes of making. The seeing, experiencing, and living with the consequences of, your actions is anathema to abstracted philosophising of centralised western political thinking.
Fortunately, here in England we have a rich history of peasant thought on this subject that predates Marx’s trip around our Isles. Machan Magan, the Irish story teller, says the Goddess is coming, the root and well of every river and sea, and to which the highest Kings must make obeisance. The poverty of our language, forced to ascribe the meanings of hearts through these scrappy contested letters and signs – is frustrating! And you must make it universally understood and ascribed to all! Must I fuck! The best we can say is each family and community must work it out as best they can – as they do, as they have done and as they always will – but given land and sovereignty over their time and bodies they’ll have as good a chance as any.
Lovely comment, Joel – wonderfully put. I have a book on my shelf ‘Late Marx and the Russian road’ which I’ve skimmed but not read thoroughly concerning exactly the point you make about Marx’s turn towards peasant populism in later life. As is often the case, the originator was several steps ahead of the followers (I believe Marx reputedly said ‘whatever I am, I am not a Marxist’).
Totally agree with your views on local material practices of livelihood making. H&H’s remark about agrarian livelihood as patriarchal monotony kills their review stone dead IMO.
This stands in utter contrast to the academic ideologues, who have no living connection to these deeply human attributes of making.
Yup , in a way they have reason to push for the status quo , their income depends on it .In a small farm future there will not be enough taxation or imported foods to keep these people in the manor they have become accustomed , technoutopia needs the same political system we have now to subsidise the academics
keeping them in a “job ” or they might turn to begging as did Diogenese to keep body and soul together , I read somewhere 24% of the population of the planet get their income from farming , , Houston we have a problem , without fossil fuils that 24% can’t work hard enough to feed the rest , with luck it will be a slow decent to the point that academia can not be funded along with quangos and other froth that float on the prime necessity ,food .
In my most recent comment / reply, I immediately corrected an error (just one word!) and re-posted the entire long post again, having forgotten that I could not delete the post with the original error.
Somehow, I had put “convenience thinking” where I had meant to put “consilience thinking.” And the result is that no one could know what I meant to say with such a bad blunder.
Too bad we cannot edit our own posts, or delete them! Ack!
https://propagandainfocus.com/guy-debords-warning-of-the-role-of-the-expert-a-philosophical-perspective-on-the-rise-of-fact-checking/
Interesting read .
So the fact checkers tell us that cattle methane pollutants have to disappear ,( to save the planet ) so that goop manufacture can become the norm and profitable ( capitalism wins ) plus it’s a nice smokescreen to do nothing about other sources of of methane pollutants and therefore keep making profit for the capitalists .
Goebels would be proud !
Great comments from Kathryn, James, Steve & Diogenese. Ack, I was nearing the end of writing a lengthy response, then accidentally deleted it. Can’t bring myself to rewrite it so just some brief remarks in note form.
– James, I deleted your original. Good points. I hope to come back to ecosystems & consilience in the near future.
– Kathryn, yes to dialogical traditions and not traditionalism. Ironically, modern traditionalisms in politics of the left & right are obstructing the creation the new traditions we need. It’s easy to step away from local ‘dialogues’ where your voice is not heard (per H&H!) but often harder to exit from society-wide traditions, even if supposedly dialogic. At that level, exit is important but not necessarily desirable (Hirschman’s exit voice & loyalty framework relevant here?). Kinship is one means to institutionalise that. Steve’s comment is to the point there. A non-kinship way of framing this is to whom would you give your scarce resources unreservedly, without expectation of return? (Note ethnographies of indigenous societies with people routinely complaining about their sponging kinsfolk). There are only so many people you can do this with in the absence of quid pro quos, especially in low energy/capital societies. So yes to a non-binary appreciation of kin/non-kin but I think we need to understand what kinship does as ideology/metaphor, rather than dismissing it as modernist political positions are wont to do. Per Steve’s comment, we have enough on our plate creating viable agrarian localisms without jettisoning cultural artefacts such as restricted family households that might actually be useful!
– Unacknowledged labour problem is a good example of the free rider problem, and a practical consequence of patriarchy or power generally. I’m interested in your comment that it can be imperfectly addressed within households, which I agree with. Possibly more so than within larger groups, although you do need wider ambit. ‘The family’ as a defence against ‘the patriarchal family’? More generally, the unacknowledged labour (human & non-human) that goes into servicing modern consumer households is another example of the free rider problem, and a key issue that my arguments for self-limiting, household-based agrarian localism are directed towards.
– I agree with your point that all humans are ends in themselves, but I don’t interpret Joel’s comment or my response as opposed to that. It’s not that people involved in material production are superior as individuals, it’s that grasping the sensuous, biophysical realities of human livelihood-making in its interactions with the wider world (which you can grasp without necessarily doing it in a day-to-day hands-on way) is IMO a vital prop to any plausible political philosophy. Which potentially sounds quite Marxist … if only he’d had time to come to terms with his late-life peasant populism, I might be calling myself a Marxist too! But so much of modernist ideology revels in the alienation of humans from ecological implication, including most Marxism. Diogenes’s Debord link regarding societies of experts is closer to my intent: “everything that was once directly lived has faded into representation”. Which segues nicely into the next post that I’ll publish shortly!
Interesting developments here.
Framing the distinctiveness of the ‘family’ as a realm within which quid pro quo is not immediate or contractual in nature seems to me to assume that the society outside it IS built on contract or immediate quid pro quos, and so the family is a kind of immunity. Now, we do suffer within a contractually obsessed society here in the global core at the moment, but if we’re thinking future-directed thoughts about the different roles family might play in a small farm future, surely we can also think about the different roles wider society might play as well – directing our energies outside the household as much as within so that the household doesn’t have to act as a refuge immune from short-termist contractualism.
Chris, I would lean more heavily away from the binary kin/non-kin distinction, especially if you’re drawing distinctions between different elements within a household. Kin is not a synonym for household, but sometimes it seems to be used that way here – are you favouring the nuclear family unit as the core or kernel of any household? Or is it the distinctiveness of blood relation? In my view the ‘specialness’ of the nuclear family unit lies not in an absence of contractual expectations within it (which as Kathryn rightly says can simply hide problems of unacknowledged labour) but in the fact that monogamous cohabitation the the resulting production of children have been and will continue to be a dominant (as in regular, frequent, common) recurring phenomenon in the structuring of societies.
I suggest a different way of thinking about quod pro quos, or exchanges. Contractual exchange is one form. Gift exchange is another. The former mediates a brief relationship, necessary only for the mutual transfer of material of some kind – the people involved don’t need to know each other beyond the thin trust necessary to expect that both will obey the custom of the exchange in the moment.
Gift exchange on the other hand still involves quid pro quo, but the direction of the exchange is towards the cultivation and deepening of a relationship, or a shared long-term project. This sort of thing can function wonderfully within families, giving members the opportunity to acknowledge each other’s labour (although of course there’s nothing that says it has to function wonderfully – dysfunction is common as well). But it’s not something that’s limited to families, and can also function in the wider community, as many ethnographic and historical studies have shown.
Maybe family metaphors are prevalent in wider society because the family provides the context of much of everyday life for so many, not because there’s something special about the family that isn’t found outside it. It is perhaps a symptom of our modern mass societies that family life is experienced as so at odds with the forces and motivations that appear to drive those societies, from which the family can seem a refuge.
Gustav Landauer may well have been feeling the need for such a refuge when he wrote those words. I also liked Jonathan Parked Allan’s follow-up tweet:
‘These particular loves are indeed deeply valuable, but they cannot be absolute in themselves, and they must be linked with wider forms of solidarity and of universal ethics, and defended from capture by the state.’
Thanks for that Andrew.
It might be desirable to direct one’s energies outside the household as much as within, but it’s hard for most people to find the time to do much of that in low energy agrarian societies. And, as we agreed earlier, there’s something to be said for the self-limiting ecology of the household as a producing/consuming unit, which is one reason why I build arguments for a small farm future around households.
It’s probably true that there’s been some slippage in my writing about this between kin (affinal/consanguinal), household, economic connection and also – another point of debate between us – cultural grounding. On the one hand, I feel the need to write a more careful analysis bearing this in mind. On the other, I think this touches on part of the conceptual problem – particularly a problem in debating with ideologies like Marxism – in looking to sort ‘real’ social forces from ones considered ‘merely’ ideological like kinship. In daily social practice, all these elements are jumbled up and work as models for each other, so it gets hard sorting through what the proper basis for a survivable future society might be. Perhaps I need to be clearer about the time dimensions I’m holding in mind. But it’s conceptually tricky terrain, and while I’m broadly sympathetic to invocations of community over family, generally I think modernist biases are such that we don’t pay enough attention to kinship.
Regarding unacknowledged labour, I agree that it can be hidden within kin-based households – but I would argue probably less easily in households as agrarian units of production & consumption than in wider collective arrangements. Kathryn’s remark that it can be imperfectly dealt with in households interested me, and I think that can be true. I daresay it can also be dealt with in wider collective arrangements, but I’m not convinced less imperfectly.
Regarding gift relationships, if I might make so bold I think you’re taking quite a rosy view. The classic anthropology of the gift – for example in Indian caste relations – emphasizes the inferiority of the recipient. I’ve tried to analyse this in previous posts in relation to the gift strategies associated with the different Indian varna categories, emphasizing the give nothing/receive nothing ideology of the vaishya (farmer/householder) which I think works more broadly as a characteristic approach towards autonomy within agrarian households.
I’m not saying that in practice a refusal of any economic interchange with the wider world is a good idea, but I do think it’s important to emphasize that gift exchange is typically hedged with strong quid pro quos, even if they’re not ‘contractual’ in the modern sense. I don’t want to overplay the idea of the household or family as a haven in a heartless world, but nor do I think it should be underplayed. My reading of the historical and ethnographic literature suggests that a kind of expansive ‘everyone’s a winner’ approach to gifting only really works in the presence of a strong state, which effectively underwrites it in a quasi-contractual way. I’m not sure that’s going to be the future reality in a lot of places. Still, I think there are possibilities for more positive ‘gift’ type interactions in the local agrarian sphere of known people – again though, such spheres are shot through with kin relations and all sorts of gossip and judgments about people’s character as trustworthy or otherwise, which doesn’t always make for an easy life.
Regarding Landauer, I agree with Jonathan’s comment – especially the capture by the state point. I just thought it was an interesting take from someone of that background.
Anyway, I appreciate you pressing me on these points and providing impetus for me to try to clarify them further, which I hope to do when time allows.
Very briefly —
Pondering potlatch as a model.of gifting that is more redistributive than reciprocal
Possibly (but not always) gifts that are also parties are a good thing? Are there echoes of jubilee and carnival here? One of the reasons I grow veg in the churchyard is because I want my gift to the soup kitchen guests to be at least as good as the ingredients I would cook with at home.
I don’t think you or Joel were in any way attempting to make objects rather than ends of people, and I’m sorry I came across that way; I am just very wary of anything that might lead there. (Indeed, one of my own quibbles with Marxism as it is sometimes presented is the way “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need” is twisted into “workers are the only ones doing Real Work and so are the only ones who can legitimately make political decisions” as if children, disabled people, etc only have value insofar as they can make some kind of ‘productive’ contribution, where productivity is defined as whatever kind of work aforementioned people cannot do. I don’t *think* that’s what Marx meant, but what Marx himself meant doesn’t matter that much if discourse on the left drifts from “working class people” to “working people” and nobody bats an eyelid.)
The way I have (imperfectly) addressed lack of recognition of household labour has been something that is only really available to me because of living in a social context where it’s acceptable for women to push back on unpaid or unseen labour: when I think things are getting out of hand I stop doing that bit of the labour, and see what happens. Sometimes this means asking other people to do some of it, we have a rota now for cooking supper and this actually works pretty well even though I still do most of the planning. It helps that our needs are relatively modest as well as bounded: we have to pay our rent, we need to eat and drink and wear clothing and so on, but none of us are particularly fussed about conventional status markers like driving a posh car (none of us drive) or designer labels, and most of the time when we increase our expenditure (of money, labour or time) it is for quality improvements, rather than quantity.
@ Chris –
Ack! When you deleted the original post, the corrected version which was right under it disappeared as well. It’s too bad, because I forgot to make a copy in case that happened, and I was rather fond of that posting.
Is it possible to adjust things so that we can edit or delete our own posts?
Oh, wait. I was wrong. The original posting was not lost. I was just a bit blind when looking for it.
https://www.dictionary.com/e/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/quid-pro-quo-3.png
I appreciate the detailed biographical nature of your responses Kathryn. Your thoughts and ideas are always qualified by your experience, of care, of growing for your family and community, of holding a spiritual position.
I think this is what constitutes an experiential understanding that is lacking in centralised academic discourse, and is a better foundation for the local agrarianism we’re sketching out.
Within it is an inherent humility of its limits, an ability to hold incommensurable truths, and most importantly, to not have to know. The resilience of that position, I think, is based in your experiences of growing, caring and worshiping. I think these actions of (what i call) making allow process to be experienced above object. That actually, there are no objects, only for the ease of communication. And that those processes are deeply human, and sensuous, and bolster the compassionate empathic bonds that constitute our relationships, families and communities.
Anyone who has spun fibre to make a yarn, will know that a piece of cloth is something magical. Anyone who has cared will understand its exhaustion. This realisation is about relational value, and is something I have to keep learning because the dominant discourse is from process to objectification.
I grew up in a household I shared with cousins, aunties and uncles, one who was severely disabled, who’s care shaped our whole family. I lived on a council estate and can say that I have unique insights from that experience.
We are each in relation with the land and people now, we just have little power and no voice. The idea is to establish that from its proper place – the land, rather than from, the people. Each in turn. We will have to contend with our wonderful breadth of experiences as we converge on these coming crises in the hurly burly of life, I suggest a life based in making will help us far more than defining abstract propositions – which we can discuss whilst spinning, or planting, or churning …
Thank you for this, Joel. I am glad the experiential (embodied, even?) context of my comments comes across.
To borrow some imagery from a tradition that is not my own, we can (and must) wend our way toward right relationship — with each other, with the more than human world, with all that is sacred — while we chop wood and carry water, rather than instead of chopping wood and carrying water.
I actually spent some time spinning nettle fibre the other week, using nettles I harvested, split, peeled and dried in June. I can say that I do not recommend a drop spindle, even quite a small one, for this task, as it is rather too heavy for the quality of fibre I was able to obtain; and that I am not sure exactly what I will use the six feet or so of thread for, though I am currently leaning toward using some of the bay tree prunings to make wooden beads and construct a rosary.
It would be entirely fair to accuse me of being rather impractical, and of dabbling in skills I will never master, but for me there is value in the process.
Absolutely beautiful! Yes embodied!
Now, have you heard about the film ‘ The Nettle Dress’? By Alan Brown, and his film maker friend. Over 5 years he harvested and processed by hand enough yarn to weave a cloth, to make a dress. It’s awesome and very emotional!
Controversially, he loves a drop spindle!
I hadn’t heard about that particular film!
In fairness, I’m not actually very good at using a drop spindle for “easier” fibres, so perhaps all I lack here is skill rather than the right tools. But there is also something to be said, especially when experimenting with something I don’t intend to take on longer-term, for using the tools I already have.
@Chris –
I have no doubt that the importance of kinship often gets downplayed and misunderstood, as in the case of H&H. So I see your insight here as valid and important. But I think there is a risk, in placing a strong emphasis on kinship, of downplaying the importance of the village and neighborhood — which is at least equally downplayed in the currently dominant culture of urban technological industrialism.
Is it not true that in pre-modern (pre-capitalist, pre-industrial) times, agrarian households were typically (generally) imbedded within a larger community, often with a village or neighborhood being the next scale up from the household scale? In other words, wasn’t the next scale up from the household part of the functioning / functional whole?
I asked ChatGPT … yet again! The digital bastard is often quite helpful.
Me:
In pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, agrarian societies, were most households clustered in or very near villages?
ChatGPT:
Yes, in pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, agrarian societies, it was common for most households to be clustered in or very near villages. The structure of such societies was heavily centered around agricultural activities, and villages served as the focal points for community life, economic activities, and social interactions.
Here are a few reasons why households tended to cluster around villages:
Agricultural Convenience: Most people in these societies were engaged in agricultural activities as their primary source of livelihood. Villages were typically located near fertile land, water sources, and arable fields. Living close to the land they cultivated allowed people to easily tend to their crops and livestock.
Mutual Assistance: Living in close proximity allowed for mutual assistance among villagers. Farming and other tasks were often labor-intensive, and having neighbors nearby meant that people could collaborate on tasks like plowing, planting, and harvesting. This cooperative approach was crucial for the success of agricultural activities.
Security and Defense: Villages provided a sense of security and safety. In times of conflict, having a concentrated population made it easier to defend against external threats. Villagers could come together to protect their homes, crops, and livestock.
Resource Sharing: Villages were hubs of resource sharing. Whether it was tools, equipment, or knowledge about farming techniques, villagers could readily exchange resources and information to improve their agricultural practices.
Social and Religious Activities: Villages were not just economic units; they were also centers of social and religious life. People would gather in the village for ceremonies, festivals, and other communal events. The proximity of households facilitated participation in these activities.
Trade and Commerce: While these societies were primarily agrarian, trade and commerce still occurred. Villages often served as trading hubs where goods produced by different households could be exchanged. Being located near a village facilitated access to trade networks.
Infrastructure and Services: Villages often had basic infrastructure and services like wells, communal ovens, places of worship, and community meeting spaces. Living nearby made it easier for people to access these shared resources.
Cultural and Social Bonds: Living in close proximity allowed for the development of strong cultural and social bonds. People knew their neighbors well and relied on each other for various aspects of daily life.
It’s important to note that the specific arrangement and density of villages could vary based on factors like geography, climate, available resources, and cultural practices. However, the general trend was for households to be clustered in or near villages due to the many practical advantages this arrangement offered in an agrarian society.
Me:
Please continue your enumerated list.
ChatGPT:
Certainly, here’s the continuation of the enumerated list:
Access to Services and Markets: Villages often served as centers for essential services such as blacksmithing, milling, and pottery. These services were important for the functioning of the community, and living near the village allowed households to easily access them. Additionally, markets and trade fairs were often held in villages, providing opportunities for both local and regional exchange of goods.
Communication and Information Sharing: In a time before modern communication methods, living near a village facilitated communication and the sharing of information. Villagers could relay news, updates, and important information more effectively due to their proximity to one another.
Health and Medical Care: While medical care was rudimentary in pre-modern societies, villages were more likely to have individuals with knowledge of herbal remedies and basic medical practices. Living near the village increased the chances of accessing such care in times of illness or injury.
Social Structure and Governance: Villages often had some form of governance and social structure. Living near the village center allowed people to participate in decision-making processes and community affairs more actively.
Cultural Exchange: Villages were centers of cultural exchange, where stories, traditions, and knowledge were passed down through generations. Proximity to the village ensured that households could participate in and contribute to the cultural life of the community.
Labor Specialization: While agriculture was a primary occupation, some households might engage in specialized crafts or activities. Being near a village provided opportunities for individuals with specific skills to offer their services to the larger community.
Transportation and Travel: Villages were often located along trade routes, riverbanks, or other transportation corridors. This made it easier for households to engage in regional trade and travel, as well as to access neighboring settlements.
Education and Learning: While formal education was limited, villages were often the centers of learning where knowledge about farming techniques, traditions, and other practical skills was passed down. Proximity to the village allowed children to participate in informal learning opportunities.
Overall, the clustering of households in or near villages in pre-modern, pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, agrarian societies was a fundamental aspect of their social and economic organization. The interdependence and cooperation among households within these village communities played a vital role in supporting and sustaining the agrarian way of life.
So how do we create the village? This is something we are trying to figure out. Just as a concerned citizen has done, diligently researching and listing all the aspects of a village, generously placing it into the digital commons – now to be monetised by the latest search engine ‘cat I farted’.
We (my partner and i) are, as is probably now clear, seeing it coalesce through skills sharing – bringing people into the (joyful, life affirming, exhausting, maddening) action of making and provisioning.
We’ve got plenty of villages and families but none of them seem to be functioning in the ways listed above. This is the provisioning key. This needs land and comes up against the realities of the Irish Famine (being the closest example) – ie the establishment will starve hundreds of thousands of men, women and children before giving up ‘their’ land or way of life. This is the class conflict emerging out of the converging conclusions.
However, my partner says its not about scaring people – we have to make inter sufficient local agrarianism the new fully automated luxury communism (he he) and people will want to do it – including enlightened landowners.
@Joel –
I believe the shift toward wanting to *choose* rather than merely be forced into, SFF living by “collapse,” comes down to falling in love with Gaia.
I’m researching now for a roughly ten minute non-fiction film on Earth’s atmosphere. The art film is also a science film — or will be. I intend to reveal to the scientific and rational part of our minds, and to our artistic and soulful hearts, that we actually live not *on* Earth, but *in* Earth — or Eairth, in David Abrams spelling, a spelling putting air in the middle of the word and world.
Earth’s atmosphere is actually a layer of Earth, and I intend my film to make this palpably and cognitively obvious. When we understand that Earth’s atmosphere is proportionally thinner than the skin of an apple (considerably so), we can begin to imagine the space in which we dwell, which is roughly proportionate or coextensive with the space of the atmosphere — the thin living (most obviously alive) layer of Eairth which is our common home.
So I will be using my film to reveal Eairth as our very precious and love-worthy living home. The film will be chock full of scientific facts, but will be essentially a prose poem with images, sound and narrative voice.
I’ll make the film available for free (a gift) on Vimeo and perhaps also on YouTube and other venues.
When both heart and intellect grasp where it is we live, it’s impossible not to fall in love with our home. And, knowing it is fragile and wounded, to care for that home as a top priority. Our collective troubles come from not really quite knowing where we are.
Yesterday, Dougald Hine posted a presentation he made in Sweden which affirmed my artistic intentions. https://rword.substack.com/p/making-good-ruins-keynote-at-climate
Fully Handmade Luxury Agrariansim
Nature-immersive hand-crafted gourmet agrarianism?
Thanks for several more super-interesting comments. For now I just want to press one theme raised by James in terms of the importance of local communities/villages.
I don’t want to dispute in any way their importance. If my target audience was right-wing libertarians, I’d probably be extolling the virtues of community as against feelgood words like ‘freedom’, ‘individual’ or ‘family’. But my target audience inclines more to left-wing communitarians, so I feel the need to raise the importance of other aspects of social life in the face of feelgood blunderbuss words like ‘community’ or ‘collective’ on the left.
There’s simply no question in my mind that any viable small farm society will have local community organisation at its core. Which is not to say that most of the day-to-day work will necessarily be done collectively by the community, for reasons I’ve much discussed here in the past.
However, just as I think we’re all agreed that ‘the family’ is not a wholly benign institution, so I think it must be said that nor is ‘the village’ or the local community. I raised the issue of caste-stratified villages in India above … and while caste is a complex thing that shouldn’t just be invoked to horrify egalitarian liberal sentiment, I do believe the less than rosy nature of local power relations in agrarian societies must be considered. As John Adams put it in a comment on here recently, the difficulty is to defend against local and non-local bullies. In the absence of non-local state bullying, there’s a lot of potential for local bullies to step up.
Andrew mentioned Raymond Williams in a comment above – a very interesting writer. I haven’t read his ‘Long Revolution’ (now added to the book pile) but I have read his ‘The Country and the City’ (1973). In it, he wrote:
“A parish council, a reading room, a gymnasium, council cottages, a women’s institute: these were some of the means to a new rural independence … there is more real community in the modern village than at any period in the remembered past. The changes that came, through democratic development and through economic struggle, sweetened and purified an older order” (p.195)
So maybe there’s a sweet spot somewhere between the anomic contemporary commuter settlement that James mentioned and the ancient order ruled by local bullies or caste superiors (while acknowledging that it’s not so simple a matter as to dismiss the older order entirely in this way) which was found at an earlier point in modern rural society and is now fading away. Finding a new version of that sweet spot is surely an important aim.
I’m not sure how much choice we’re going to have in the future about the kind of local societies we’ll get, but the more we can flesh out these issues and the associated difficulties at times where there’s a choice without resorting too much to generic feelgood concepts – ‘family’, ‘community’, ‘village’, ‘individual’, ‘freedom’ etc – nthe better I think.
One of the issues with assembling agrarian labour is that the demand for it is lumpy across the calendar. A lot of the time you don’t need so much labour on the farm, then at certain critical points you need as much as you can get – and so does everyone else locally. There are no perfect solutions to this, but agrarian societies have been quite ingenious about workarounds. Kin networks are one important resource there, as are commons. So too calendrical rituals like the carnivals and potlatches Kathryn mentions. My teacher Paul Richards discusses in his work on swidden cultivators in West Africa the importance of the beer party. The farmer makes beer and, when it’s time to clear new ground, invites everyone to the party. The people who brew the best beer and host the best parties tend to get the most willing hands in their fields.
So, the more we can think of ways like that to build good community and get the work done the better.
There are academic debates about how much ‘the village’ is useful as an analytical abstraction, and the extent to which it’s an artefact of other levels – notably the state. Of course, this varies hugely across different times and places. The challenge, I think, is to build good kin networks within supportive local agrarian communities while keeping the local and non-local bullies at bay – and knowing when to work, and when to party. All I want to add to that, coming back to my usual shtick, is that we shouldn’t underestimate the amount of time in which people in small farm societies of the future will – like their counterparts from the past – need to just get on with the practical work by themselves and/or within the small group of long-term intimates with whom they share a household.
I’ll ponder on this interesting response before saying more, other than …
Crap, it always comes down to the bullies, doesn’t it?
One strategy we use on the allotment to smooth out the amount of labour required is to choose crops such that we can stagger harvests a bit. June was all about peas and strawberries, but those are now long-gone: peas followed by beans, strawberries followed by tayberries, then wineberries, and now (foraged) blackberries as the autumn-fruiting raspberries start to get themselves organised. It’s also part of why I grow winter wheat, when I do: it’s ready earlier in the summer than spring-sown varieties, so I’m less likely to be trying to harvest it at the same time as a bunch of other things.
This strategy is harder, I suspect, if you have a stronger emphasis on calorie crops.