Warriors and merchants
So I think there may still be further opportunities for merchant self-landlords to build more renewable and regenerative local economies within and against the structures of the warrior landlord state.
small farm future
Of climate crimes, community conflicts and carbon cowboys
A small farm future is not an ideal I’m championing, although there are aspects I do try to speak up for. Rather, it’s a coming reality that I’m trying to analyze in order to make the best of it.
A further note on gender, families and households in a small farm future
Men are best connected through kinship to a caring household (so are women, but that seems to be easier to achieve), and households in turn are best connected to wider networks of social institutions.
A note on land value tax
So while an LVT might be a slight improvement on the present situation, I can’t get hugely excited about proposals to end human misery either through an LVT charged by the central state or through overthrowing the centralized state to create … another centralized state.
Rural gentrification Part IV: the internship problem
To complete my present mini-series of posts on rural and agrarian gentrification, I want to talk about what I’ll call the internship problem. This relates to the practice of employing young or new entrant people at low or no wages, usually on the basis – or at least the pretext – that the opportunity gives them experience that will enable them to get more gainful employment in the future.
A small farm future – the case for death taxes
I’ve long argued that if the world survives great power warmongering and eco-apocalypse then the future it faces is most likely a small farm future. Heavy death taxes would be one way to expedite that future…
Rural gentrification Part III: of locals and migrants
‘Floods’ of migrants has the wrong connotations, but the weather and the tides are definitely changing and unless radical policy measures are taken we’re going to see large changes in human population distributions.
Rural gentrification Part II: Of localists and homesteaders
Homesteading is not fundamentally a ‘movement’, as the comment I quoted earlier suggested, still less a centrally planned one. Rather it results from the failure of monopoly corporate planning, public and private, and it will grow as that failure grows.
Rural gentrification Part I: Of localists and nationalists
When localists born or made embrace or adopt a particular place to live there’s surely no reason for them to base their localism in an inherent lack of openness to people or ideas from elsewhere.
Warre and peace: of gifts, government and men with guns
Anyway, as governments wrestle with the increasingly impossible predicaments of our times, it seems to me likely that this space of publics versus governments will become a lot more politically diverse. And that’s the point at which the question of ‘public ownership’ becomes a really live issue.
Ten years of Small Farm Future
I wouldn’t normally be straining myself to get a post out on New Year’s Day, but (checks archive) blow me if today isn’t the tenth anniversary of this blog’s inception.
From the dawn of everything to a small farm future: a review of Graeber & Wengrow
In that sense, I endorse GW’s upbeat conclusion that it’s within people’s power to change things and remake their social world – not a power or a social world restricted to particular classes, groups, genders or political ideologies, but one available to everyone.
