Remembering peasants, anticipating peasants

Given my conviction that humanity’s long-term future is likely to revolve around low-energy local agrarianism, I’ve long pondered whether the example of people who’ve pursued that way of life in the past – namely peasantries – is relevant to this future scenario. The answer, I believe, is the same as the answer to many tricky social-political questions: yes and no. But I’m always interested in sources that can put a bit more nuance to it.

One such source is a recent book by the eminent historian, Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (Allen Lane, 2024). A ‘personal history’ because Joyce’s parents were born into Irish peasant families and he draws in the book on that connection, as well as on historical sources from Galicia (spanning present-day Poland and Ukraine), Italy, Spain, France and … not many other places. So, a book about Catholic, European peasantries. It might have been illuminating to cast the net a bit wider and seek comparisons with somewhat more intact peasantries outside Europe, or maybe even to what’s probably the closest thing we still have to a peasantry in the British Isles, namely (non-Catholic) Welsh upland farmers. But no doubt a case can be made for depth instead of breadth.

As is my usual way, I’m not going to attempt to summarise or review the book so much as draw out themes from it I find informative. But first a word on the wider social science of peasantries, which has focused on three broad topics.

1. How peasants farm and make a material livelihood
2. How peasants have been modernised, de-peasantised or re-peasantised in recent history
3. How peasants think and relate to the world culturally

Joyce’s book has regrettably little to say on the first of these, as alas is the case in most social science treatments outside rather specialist sub-disciplines. It also has mercifully little to say on the second. Actually, that’s not entirely true. There’s quite a lot about modernisation. What’s merciful is that he doesn’t follow the well-worn trail of modern social science in cheerleading the demise of peasantries and trying to baptise them into the modern world as capitalists, communists, nationalists, citizens or displaced urbanites. Instead, his tone is mostly matter of fact, if occasionally elegiac.

But where the book really scores is in the depth of its analysis around peasant culture. Since I closed my previous post by saying that I want to turn in future work to a focus on long-term cultural change towards agrarian localist futures, I’m interested in any lessons to be learned from the culture of agrarian localist pasts that books like Joyce’s can provide.

For his part, Joyce seems to refuse this project: “In an age of climate crisis, and the almost untrammelled capitalism and political self-interest driving it, something is to be learned from peasants’ connection to the cosmos. All the same, we cannot go back and be peasants. I did not write this book to make peasants tutors to the present” (p.115).

Well, fair enough, although if there are things to be learned it’s a shame not to seek tutors for them, and this refusal does lead to a rather bleak and unsatisfactory ending to the book, which seems to suggest that capitalist realism has obliterated almost every meaningful possibility of connecting with peasant culture, and with the past in general.

So is all that’s left memory and elegy, and nothing really to be learned after all? I don’t think so. Capitalist realism is only a historical moment, and while, sure, we can’t ‘go back’ and be the peasants of the past, we might ‘go forward’ into the future as agrarian localists who can learn from them.

Joyce mentions that times can be hard in modern rural Ireland if you’re not on the tourist trail. I take tourism here to stand for something more general: a flow of service into favoured parts of the world, based on cheap energy and the global overproduction of capital. Whereas the ideology of (eco)modernism believes this flow will increase and ramify, the opposite seems to me a more likely trend. Tough times in rural Ireland off the tourist trail are a harbinger for tough times more generally.

So, to reiterate, what interests me is any lessons to be learned from peasant cultures that weathered the hard times of the past and that might help us navigate the hard times of the future. Like Joyce, I’ll focus here on peasant culture, but I want to remark in passing that it’s also worth looking to the practicalities of peasant livelihood-making. Joyce is rather dismissive about rural life museums with their collections of bygone hand tools and visitor experiences like building an old-style wall. On the contrary, I think you can learn a hell of a lot from such places.

Old, enduring cultures

Joyce makes the point that peasant cultures are often very old, in some cases involving practices and ideas that stretch way back to pre-Christian and pre-classical times. In a sense, there are peasant civilisations which have grown alongside but are different to those of the elites that we tend nowadays to see as ‘civilisation’ itself.

These peasant cutures are also keyed to local farmed landscapes, which are sanctified by many material markers, including the buried ancestors. As Joyce puts it, “in ‘advanced’ western societies the dead in general are too happily put away, banished from our easily forgetful minds …. in putting away the dead we also put ourselves away. Peasants were good at remembering the dead, respecting them, which is one of the best possible reasons for respecting them” (p.267).

Resonant words. But on the face of it, the historical depth of peasant cultures sounds like bad news for the agrarian localisms of the near future. In view of the crises we now face, we need to be building those localisms quickly, right now, and the ‘we’ in modern localities will often be people of disparate origin only recently connected to the local landscape – and often barely connected even then, lacking deep historical association with it.

Still, perhaps we can take some comfort all the same. Our bottom-up efforts to restitch ourselves into the local can seem so compromised, so puny in the face of the task before us, so ridiculous in the eyes of the proselytisers of global techno-modernity, that it’s easy to give up. Knowing that we’re just small nodes among a multitude of multigenerational actors who are incrementally and experimentally building a new agrarian civilisation over the long-haul might steel us to the task.

Another positive aspect of this long-haul perspective on cultural genesis is that it’s possible to embrace all the people who are here with us in place, without making invidious distinctions about who’s a ‘real’ local. Folklorists and antiquarians are welcome to represent the cultures of the past in this place, and we might be grateful for what we can learn from them. But our work is future focused. We’re not obliged to accept any particular version of the past. There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’ll leave it there for now.

Also, let’s remember what Joyce sometimes nearly forgets – our new peasant cultures are oriented to local livelihood production, to farming and to the production of food and fibre. That gives us a focus for our efforts. Here in Britain, and in many other places, there are still functional field systems with ancient origins, despite the ravages of the four horsemen through the millennia, as well as the fifth one in the form of techno-modernism and the ideology of agricultural ‘improvement’. Consider the slow work of endurance that’s preserved those field systems through all that. Joyce talks about the proverbial peasant powers of passive resistance, the imperviousness to short-term modern concepts of property and law. There’s some tutoring to the present for us right there.

Let’s get started then, in this place we now call home – let’s learn how to make it bear fruit, let’s bury our dead here, let’s start to make it sacred, and let’s seek the fortitude to endure.

Unresolvable tensions

The peasant social world Joyce describes is one of mediated tensions. In the household, women and men, parents and children. In the village, households of different wealth and social standing against but also alongside one another. The village against but sometimes with the landowners and the wider political world. Catholics and Jews in the Polish peasant village. Peasants as victims of violence, and as perpetrators.

I like it that Joyce doesn’t impose some resolving lens of modernist political thought on all this to define where the ‘real’ social power lies and determine how to capture it to achieve final political redemption. In advocating for small farm societies, I’ve often struggled with well-meaning but oversimplified attempts to contrast the individualism of modern capitalist societies unfavourably with the collectivism of peasant ones, which neglect how difficult and conflicted the collectivism is and probably always will be. Joyce brings out nicely the lived complexity of the individual- and the household-in-community of peasant society. Neither individualist nor collectivist. Not for nothing did agrarian sociologist Teodor Shanin call peasants ‘the awkward class’ in upsetting neat modernist categories.

Joyce emphasizes the balancing forces of unity and division in peasant society: peasant worlds where male dominance is “often more formal than real” (p.91), where a class system of peasants is “one version of the truth” (p.81), where juridical forms of landownership and political power have their limits, and peasants have the “ineradicable conviction that the land was theirs” (p.58).

This is anathema to certain kinds of modernist thought, which regards it as mystification of ‘real’ underlying power relations. Marxism is a prime example. Joyce doesn’t have much truck with this, nor with mainstream Marxist appropriations of the peasant. He dismisses the idea of the villainous, rich, capitalist-oriented peasant or kulak of communist Russia as a myth of the Soviet imagination – and in fact a heroic countermyth of Russian peasants chafing under the control of the communist collective farm. The kulak as the archetype of autonomy and self-mastery that peasant ideology aspires to, instead of the reinvented serfdom involved in working for communist overlords (pp.232-5).

To be fair to communism – or, some would doubtless argue, to be unfair to it – it has its own authentic lineage in alienated peasant consciousness. This was the argument of the historian Norman Cohn, who saw in it echoes of the millenarian, collectivist, radical religious movements of the premodern past, with their alliances of disaffected intellectuals and the desperate poor, involving “phantasies of a final, exterminatory struggle against the ‘great ones’; and of a perfect world from which self-seeking would be forever banished” (The Pursuit of the Millennium, p.286).

Such phantasies of progress and redemption have deeply conditioned mainstream modernist thought, but it’s the more conventional currents of premodern peasant culture emerging from Joyce’s pages that I believe yield more promising political material for the future. Specifically, ideals of self-mastery in an imperfect world from which self-seeking can’t and probably shouldn’t ever be banished, but can hopefully be contained and transformed through wider collective institutions.

I’ll say more about those institutions in a moment. But a good feature of Joyce’s book is that he doesn’t romanticise peasantries into what he calls “the figure of the primitive, the peasant as elemental man” (p.28). He avoids this trap most successfully through his rich, warts-and-all accounts of peasant lifeways, and a bit less successfully by his occasional admonitions about the awfulness of peasant poverty and subjection.

The admonitions themselves are well grounded. The problem is I don’t think Joyce enquires carefully enough about the circumstances that make some peasants poor and powerless, and others not (I’ll pass over that ignorant modernist tic which assumes all peasants, all agrarians, all ordinary people in the past have necessarily been gruesomely poor and powerless). Actually, I think a little bit more Marxism could have informed Joyce’s analysis on this point – not the phantasies of a redeeming final struggle aspect of Marxism so much as its class analysis. What gives peasants in some places substantial power and wealth, while others a lower status than even the dogs of a local potentate’s guards (p.196)? Joyce does at least supply the answer – secure and untrammelled access to sufficient land. The big political question for the future as I see it is how to generate and retain such access widely across society.

Only a little more Marxism, though. Joyce nicely points out that the manual working class – the ‘elemental man’ of the classical Marxist imagination – came to an end in Europe at the same time as the peasant. The ending was ugly in both cases, but politics for the future needs to embrace the fact. No more elemental men or authentic revolutionary classes. The future will be written by us, all of us, we non-elemental and inauthentic people, who have somehow remained.

Conservatism

Dialling back to the wider collective institutions of peasant society I mentioned earlier, those institutions are for the most part – Joyce tells us – ultra-conservative. I think this is basically right, but it’s a bit more complicated than that. There is, for one thing, a collectivism, an egalitarianism and a dislike of capitalism and the crudely monetary within peasant cultures that can excite the modern leftwing thinker. Still, this undoubtedly runs aground on a strong tide of peasant conservatism. Gender relations, generational relations, ritualised decorum, politeness and taciturnity, the emphasis on proprietorship, self-mastery, devotionalism, and the restraint of the individual interior life, all run counter to the instincts of leftwing thought, and to modernist thought more generally.

Some of them run counter to my own instincts too – unsurprisingly, being the reluctant child of modernism that I am. But I’m interested in the extent to which these traits are functional for living multi-generationally in small communities, or whether the new agrarians will be able to brush them aside as mere remnants of outmoded thought. I hope to return to this theme in future writing.

A difficulty is that few of us nowadays have any experience of living fully within local agrarian communities. There’s too much economic and social flow, even for those who live all their lives on the small family farms where they were raised.

It’s possible to be justly thankful for that – I’m mindful of Raymond Williams’s words:

“there is more real community in the modern village that at any period in the remembered past. The changes that came, through democratic development and through economic struggle, sweetened and purified an older order” (The Country and the City, p.195).

All the same, I appreciate the way Joyce avoids what his fellow historian E.P. Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity” by not jumping on that popular modern bandwagon that insists everything about the past was obviously worse than today. Joyce astutely observes that “the past asks more questions of us than we do of it”, noting the “radical otherness” of the past, the ways in which its people were not the same as us (p.277). Instead, he provides an accounting of what was also lost in the kind of changes Williams invokes, including certain kinds of community.

‘Community’ is a word much bandied about by politicians of both a left and right-wing bent nowadays. I don’t think either really understand the lived, ornery complexity of a functional local community. Maybe part of my own personal journey toward ‘the awkward class’ is how increasingly at odds I feel with both these modern political traditions and their problematic conceptions of community. Again, this is something I hope to explore further.

One path into that is ecstatic peasant religious healing cults like Tarantismo, which Joyce fascinatingly examines in terms of the tension between the interior psychic life of individual personhood and the collective constraint exerted by the local community on such individualism. The cult practice helps redress the psychic pain of the individuals who bear this tension (mostly women – gender issues in the agrarian localisms of the past and future being another important issue requiring attention).

People often say that our culture needs to be more collective and less individualistic, and I don’t disagree – but I believe we should be careful what we wish for, and be sure to build subtle cultural institutions that can deal with the inevitable tensions that arise in collective societies.

Nature

Peasants, says Joyce, do not think in terms of concepts like ‘nature’. Land is to be worked and cultivated – made cultural – which isn’t easy. “The wild as our sublime makes no sense to the peasant” (p.59).

There’s a lot to be learned from this way of thinking. Capitalist economics tells us that resources are scarce, while a common counterargument is that they’re only scarce because the capitalists monopolise them – if we shared them fairly, there’d be abundance for all. True enough, perhaps, but that abundance is mercurial, conflicted and not directed wholly beneficially at people. Yes, there’s endless fecundity and growth in the world, but also endless decay and death, endless weeds and crop predators, endless things that don’t go to plan. There’s a sophistication and brilliance to the way that festivals like carnival in peasant societies play culturally with this abundance-scarcity duality in ways that make our modernist solemnities on the topic seem clunky (I wrote about this here).

Perhaps peasant societies live out the biocentrism of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic. Fighting their corner like all the other plants and animals, peasants are ‘plain members and citizens of biotic communities’, not the godlike humans of romantic modernism floating above it and lost in raptures at the wonder of it all. I’m sure there are good ways of combining contemporary ecological knowledge, new technological innovations and time-honoured agrarian practice that can help us both appreciate nature holistically while rolling up our sleeves to make it yield our dinner. But most of what I’ve seen about the footprint of these different lifeways convinces me that multitudes of hard-nosed but energy-poor agrarians spread out across the landscape trying to turn it to account to feed and shelter their households will cause less damage to the natural world than multitudes of urban-capitalist consumers loving nature to death by opting for the latest supposedly land-sparing techno-fixes.

Indigeneity

So while it’s no doubt true that we cannot go back and just ‘be’ peasants – not without a lot of painstaking cultural work, anyway – I nevertheless believe there are many ways in which peasants can be tutors to the present, and help us to anticipate an ecologically renewable agrarian future.

Yet in critical environmentalist circles today, when people extol the virtues of traditional lifeways, peasants don’t get much of a look in. All the talk is of indigenous peoples instead. No doubt there are good reasons for this, especially in places like the Americas with recent histories of colonial land theft and modern land degradation. But I wonder if something else is going on too. It’s easy to recuperate a ‘progressive’ political position around indigeneity – those who were colonized, brutalized and considered inferior turn out to have greater land wisdom than we descendants of the colonizers. And, politically, ‘we’ cannot be ‘them’, which safely distances us from indigeneity. It’s as if indigeneity, especially of the foraging and hunting variety, is another at-a-distance technology, not unlike alt-meat or nuclear energy. The forager and the scientist as the elemental people of a mature modernity, unlocking its mysteries to achieve progress on our behalf.

European peasantries, by contrast, don’t make quite such good progressive heroes. For one thing, there’s the conservatism that Joyce mentions. There’s also the historical weight of the peasant past – not something to progress toward in the aftermath of a racist colonialism, but something apparently to regress back to in the aftermath of an unsustainable capitalism. Cue the endless, tiresome remarks about bucolic fantasies and nostalgic romanticism aimed at we latter-day agrarians.

The truth, though, is that the land wisdom of peasants parallels the land wisdom of indigenous peoples. Both use low-input methods keyed to a renewable local human ecology, and both – as Joyce puts it – understand land to be a “social rather than an economic entity”, anchored by family and kinship, such that “reproduction as well as production comes into the picture” (p.23). Indeed, many indigenous people are peasants. They evince most of the peasant traits discussed by Joyce, including the conservatism often enough.

The land wisdom of peasants and indigenous people is ultimately the land wisdom we moderns have to learn, not by some magic process of technology transfer but by long cultural development, starting now. There are no shortcuts to it. To begin that learning, it wouldn’t hurt to drop the whole misplaced temporal topology of ‘going back’ and ‘moving forward’ as we try to learn how to be indigenous to place. No more elemental men – neither of the past, nor the future. But honour and respect to the dead.

Plenty of new work in prospect, then, to work through all that. But if you’re still interested in my older work on the theme of agrarian localism vs manufactured food, my podcast about it with Rachel Donald of Planet Critical is just out here.

New reading

Anthony Galluzzo. 2023. AGAINST THE VORTEX: ZARDOZ AND DEGROWTH UTOPIAS IN THE SEVENTIES AND TODAY (Zero Books).