{"id":27740,"date":"2017-11-08T07:48:38","date_gmt":"2017-11-08T12:48:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27740"},"modified":"2017-11-08T07:48:38","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T12:48:38","slug":"the-return-of-the-peasant-or-the-history-of-the-world-in-10%c2%bd-blog-posts-8-of-reconstituted-peasantries-and-alternate-modernities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=27740","title":{"rendered":"The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts \u2013 8. Of reconstituted peasantries and alternate modernities"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?p=1309\">The return of the peasant: or, the history of the world in 10\u00bd blog posts \u2013 8. Of reconstituted peasantries and alternate modernities<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Continuing with my \u2018History of the world\u2019. As ever, the fully referenced version of this essay is available <a href=\"http:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/?attachment_id=1257\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m going to come back to the issue of peasantries as the \u2018universal class\u2019 at the end of this essay. For now, I\u2019d just like to broach the issue by returning to the question of peasantries under capitalism by way of what the doyen of Caribbean anthropology, Sidney Mintz, called \u2018reconstituted peasantries\u2019. Mintz was referring specifically to the rise of peasant farmers in the Caribbean around the edges and in the aftermath of the slave plantation system \u2013 people who weren\u2019t originally peasants, but workers in the capitalist world economy (plantation slaves) who turned to peasant farming as the best available option open to them under changing circumstances.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019d like to submit Mintz\u2019s concept for more generalised use \u2013 at points of breakdown in the capitalist world system, peasant production can present itself as an attractive or, at least, as a least-worst option. For those of us who suspect that major breakdowns in the capitalist world system are likely in future, the possibility of a more widespread emergence of \u2018reconstituted peasantries\u2019 becomes interesting. If that\u2019s how things turn out, an intriguing question is the extent to which post-capitalist reconstituted peasantries of the future might resemble any peasantries of the capitalist or pre-capitalist past. In other words, is the history of agrarian production and its social structures prior to and during the development of the capitalist world system relevant to its future after capitalism \u2013 does agrarian society have a predictable structuring \u2013 or have I been wasting my time reading and writing about all this history?<\/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 \u2013 8. Of reconstituted peasantries and alternate modernities Continuing with my \u2018History of the world\u2019. As ever, the fully referenced version of this essay is available here. I\u2019m going to come back to the issue of peasantries as the \u2018universal [&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":[6],"tags":[111,2500,16083,3666,9739,15786,9738],"class_list":["post-27740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-capitalism","tag-history","tag-history-of-the-world","tag-modernity","tag-peasantry","tag-peasants","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27740","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=27740"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27740\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27741,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27740\/revisions\/27741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}