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From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

December 21, 2015

From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

As a student in the 1980s, I was educated by probably the last generation of academics who found it possible to identify wholeheartedly with Marxism. They were good people and clever thinkers, and I suppose I became a Marxist myself for a time under their influence. I never made a good revolutionary, but I believed in science, progress, rationality and, above all, equality. I was acutely conscious of how lucky I was to be a privileged citizen of a privileged country – privileges that in many ways were built on the backs of less fortunate people. So, if I thought much at all about the kind of society I wanted to see, I suppose it would have been one in which everyone could live a life like mine – an urban wage labourer working in the knowledge economy, shopping in the supermarket, and getting away for the odd weekend to the mountains to reconnect with the wilder side of life.
Decades later, I’m a mostly self-employed farmer working a small piece of land, growing a fair slice of my own food, with few opportunities to ‘get away’, but absorbed in the daily wildness of creating sustenance from the earth. I still believe in equality, and I still believe in science, progress and rationality, although in a more conflicted way than before. And when I now think about the kind of society I’d like to see – which I do more often than I used to – I imagine one in which a lot of people live a similar kind of life to my present one. I have, in short, become an advocate for peasantisation, localisation, agrarian populism, anti-globalisation and degrowth – a cluster of ideas that I think of as an economics of the home1.

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