{"id":25042,"date":"2017-08-30T20:33:43","date_gmt":"2017-08-31T01:33:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25042"},"modified":"2017-08-30T20:33:43","modified_gmt":"2017-08-31T01:33:43","slug":"the-return-of-the-peasant-or-the-history-of-the-world-in-10%c2%bd-blog-posts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=25042","title":{"rendered":"The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1259\">The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>About a year ago I started publishing on this site various projections for how the future population of southwest England where I live might be able to feed itself substantially on the basis of small-scale, relatively self-reliant \u2018peasant\u2019 farming \u2013 convincing myself, if no one else, in the process that such a \u2018Peasant\u2019s Republic of Wessex\u2019 might be feasible. The notion that a small farm future of this sort may occur and may even be desirable and worth striving for is, I confess, hardly a mainstream political position. And yet it\u2019s one that I\u2019ve come to, for reasons that I\u2019ve documented here over the years. Essentially, I think that humanity faces a series of interlocking ecological, economic, political, cultural and social crises that, if they\u2019re resolvable at all, are most resolvable through a turn to small-scale, predominantly self-reliant farming. Actually, I see this way of life less as a \u2018solution\u2019 to modern \u2018problems\u2019 as a non-modern way of being that\u2019s intrinsically less problematic. But I\u2019m anxious to avoid easy dualities \u2013 not everything about modernity is necessarily bad, and not everything in a turn to small farm agrarianism would necessarily be good. I\u2019ll say more about that in due course.<\/p>\n<p>The main difficulties in achieving a turn to small-scale agrarianism are not agricultural, but social and political. So I now want to turn my attention away from issues of farm scale and structure towards these socio-political issues. As I started thinking about them, I found myself constantly drawn to history and to what the past may be able to teach us about the possible course of a small farm future. I\u2019m still not really sure whether it <em>does <\/em>have much to teach us. I said above that a small farm future would be <em>non-modern<\/em>, but that\u2019s not the same as <em>pre-modern<\/em>: a non-modern small farm future needn\u2019t necessarily much resemble a pre-modern small farm past.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts About a year ago I started publishing on this site various projections for how the future population of southwest England where I live might be able to feed itself substantially on the basis of small-scale, relatively self-reliant \u2018peasant\u2019 farming \u2013 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1306,15786,15787,9738,5125,7643],"class_list":["post-25042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-survival-2","tag-agrarianism","tag-peasants","tag-self-sustaining-farming","tag-small-farm-future","tag-small-scale-farming","tag-world-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25042"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25042\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25043,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25042\/revisions\/25043"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}