{"id":56679,"date":"2021-02-08T09:40:53","date_gmt":"2021-02-08T14:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56679"},"modified":"2021-02-08T09:40:53","modified_gmt":"2021-02-08T14:40:53","slug":"the-awkward-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=56679","title":{"rendered":"The awkward class"},"content":{"rendered":"<header class=\"entry-header\">\n<h3 class=\"entry-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/smallfarmfuture.org.uk\/2021\/02\/the-awkward-class\/\">The awkward class<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/header>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<p>Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my book\u00a0<em>A Small Farm Future\u00a0<\/em>will soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants.<\/p>\n<p>This claim is at odds with most of what\u2019s been written about rural trends over the past century or so, along two dimensions. The first is historical: peasants will be liquidated by the march of progress. As Karl Kautsky (quoted on page 246 of my book) famously put it in his \u2018agrarian question\u2019 in 1899: \u201cIn what ways is capital taking hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, smashing the old forms of production and of poverty and establishing the new ones that must succeed?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The second dimension is sociological: internal tensions among small-scale farmers destabilize any coherent notion of \u2018the peasantry\u2019 as an enduring entity \u2013 an argument usually framed in relation to the separate class interests of \u2018upper\u2019, \u2018middle\u2019 and \u2018lower\u2019 peasants. So in the standard view, for reasons both external and internal, peasants are on their way to being something else.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no denying that recent history furnishes evidence for this. Capital has certainly done its share of revolutionizing and smashing peasant agriculture since Kautsky\u2019s day, and plenty of rural class conflict has accompanied the process. But most people heralding the demise of peasantries have been enthusiastic cheerleaders for the process rather than disinterested observers, and it\u2019s possible they\u2019ve enthused a little too much.<\/p>\n<p>On the one hand, Marxists like Kautsky have generally tried to divvy up peasantries into the more comfortable terrain of Marxism\u2019s Ur-conflict between free-flowing capital and free-flowing labour, making landless or land-poor lower peasants over in the image of their preferred revolutionaries, the proletariat&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<p>chris smaje, small farm future, class conflict, farming<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The awkward class Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my book\u00a0A Small Farm Future\u00a0will soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants. This claim is at odds with most of what\u2019s been written about rural trends [&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":[2,6],"tags":[15683,30919,299,9738],"class_list":["post-56679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-liberty","tag-chris-smaje","tag-class-confict","tag-farming","tag-small-farm-future"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56679","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=56679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56680,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56679\/revisions\/56680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}