Agrarianism is a social and political philosophy that advocates for rural development, a rural agricultural lifestyle, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. Those who adhere to agrarianism tend to value traditional forms of local community over urban modernity. Agrarian political parties sometimes aim to support the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy, powerful and famous in society.
Philosophy Some scholars suggest that agrarianism espouses the superiority of rural society to urban society and the independent farmer as superior to the paid worker, and sees farming as a way of life that can shape the ideal social values.Thompson, Paul. 2010. "Interview Eighteen" in Sustainability Ethics: 5 Questions Ed. Ryne Raffaelle, Wade Robinson, and Evan Selinger. United States: Automatic Press It stresses the superiority of a simpler rural life in comparison to the complexity of urban life. For example, M. Thomas Inge defines agrarianism by the following basic tenets:M. Thomas Inge, ed. Agrarianism in American Literature (1969), introduction; paraphrased Farming is the sole occupation that offers total independence and self-sufficiency. Urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy independence and dignity and foster vice and weakness. The agricultural community, with its fellowship of labor and co-operation, is the model society. The farmer has a solid, stable position in the world order. They have "a sense of identity, a sense of historical and religious tradition, a feeling of belonging to a concrete family, place, and region, which are psychologically and culturally beneficial." The harmony of their life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society. Cultivation of the soil "has within it a positive spiritual good" and from it the cultivator acquires the virtues of "honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality." They result from a direct contact with nature and, through nature, a closer relationship to God. The agrarian is blessed in that they follow the example of God in creating order out of chaos.
History
The philosophical roots of agrarianism include European and Chinese philosophers. The Chinese school of Agriculturalism (农家/農家) was a philosophy that advocated peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. In societies influenced by Confucianism that had as its foundation that humans are innately good, the farmer was considered an esteemed productive member of society, but merchants who made money were looked down upon. That influenced European intellectuals like François Quesnay, an avid Confucianist and advocate of China's agrarian policies, in forming the French agrarian philosophy of physiocracy.L.A. Maverick, "Chinese Influences upon the Physiocrats," Economic History, 3:54–67 (February 1938), The physiocrats, along with the ideas of John Locke and the Romantic Era, formed the basis of modern European and American agrarianism.
Types of agrarianism Physiocracy
Jeffersonian democracy
The United States president Thomas Jefferson was an agrarian who based his ideas about the budding American democracy around the notion that farmers are "the most valuable citizens" and the truest republicans.Thomas P. Govan, "Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words," Journal of Southern History, Vol. 30#1 (Feb. 1964), pp. 35–47 Jefferson and his support base were committed to American republicanism, which they saw as being in opposition to monarchy, aristocracy, clericalism and corruption, and which prioritized morality and virtue, exemplified by the "yeoman farmer", "planters", and the "plain folk". In praising the rural farmfolk, the Jeffersonians felt that financiers, bankers and industrialists created "cesspools of corruption" in the cities and should thus be avoided.Elkins and McKitrick. (1995) ch 5; Wallace Hettle, The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War (2001) p. 15
The Jeffersonians sought to align the American economy more with agriculture than industry. Part of their motive to do so was Jefferson's fear that the over-industrialization of America would create a class of wage slaves who relied on their employers for income and sustenance. In turn, these workers would cease to be independent voters as their vote could be manipulated by said employers. To counter this, Jefferson introduced, as scholar Clay Jenkinson noted, "a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward" and tariffs on imported articles, which were mainly purchased by the wealthy.Jenkinson, Becoming Jefferson's People, p. 26 In 1811, Jefferson, writing to a friend, explained: "these revenues will be levied entirely on the rich... . the rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the general government are levied. the poor man ... pays not a farthing of tax to the general government, but on his salt."
There is general agreement that the substantial United States' federal policy of offering land grants (such as thousands of gifts of land to veterans) had a positive impact on economic development in the 19th century.Whaples, R. (1995). Where is there consensus among American economic historians? The results of a survey on forty propositions. The Journal of Economic History, 55(1), 139–154.
Agrarian socialism
Agrarian socialism is a form of agrarianism that is anti-capitalist in nature and seeks to introduce socialist economic systems in their stead.
Zapatismo
One notable agrarian socialists was Emiliano Zapata, a leading figure in the Mexican Revolution. As the leader of the Liberation Army of the South, his group of revolutionaries fought on behalf of the Mexican peasants, whom they saw as exploited by the landowning classes. Zapata published the Plan of Ayala, which called for significant land reforms and land redistribution in Mexico as part of the revolution. Zapata was killed and his forces crushed over the course of the Revolution, but his political ideas lived on in the form of Zapatismo.
Zapatismo would form the basis for neozapatismo, the ideology of the modern Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Known as Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN in Spanish, EZLN is a far-left, libertarian socialist political and militant group that emerged in the state of Chiapas in southmost Mexico in 1994. EZLN and Neozapatismo, as explicit in their name, seek to revive the agrarian socialist movement of Zapata, but fuse it with new elements such as a commitment to indigenous rights and community-level decision making.
Subcommander Marcos, a leading member of the movement, argues that the peoples' collective ownership of the land was and is the basis for all subsequent developments the movement sought to create:...When the land became property of the peasants ... when the land passed into the hands of those who work it ... [This was] the starting point for advances in government, health, education, housing, nutrition, women's participation, trade, culture, communication, and information ...[it was] recovering the means of production, in this case, the land, animals, and machines that were in the hands of large property owners."See The Zapatistas' Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos. Edited by Nick Henck. Translated by Henry Gales. (Chico: AK Press, 2018), pp. 81–82.
Maoism Maoism, the far-left ideology of Mao Zedong and his followers, places a heavy emphasis on the role of peasants in its goals. In contrast to other Marxist schools of thought which normally seek to acquire the support of urban workers, Maoism sees the peasantry as key. Believing that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun", Maoism saw the Chinese Peasantry as the prime source for a Marxist vanguard because it possessed two qualities: (i) they were poor, and (ii) they were a political blank slate; in Mao's words, "A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it".Gregor, A. James; Chang, Maria Hsia (1978). "Maoism and Marxism in Comparative Perspective". The Review of Politics. 40: 3. pp. 307–327. During the Chinese Civil War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Mao and the Chinese Communist Party made extensive use of peasants and rural bases in their military tactics, often eschewing the cities.
Following the eventual victory of the Communist Party in both wars, the countryside and how it should be run remained a focus for Mao. In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward, a social and economic campaign which, amongst other things, altered many aspects of rural Chinese life. It introduced mandatory collective farming and forced the peasantry to organize itself into communal living units which were known as people's communes. These communes, which consisted of 5,000 people on average, were expected to meet high production quotas while the peasants who lived on them adapted to this radically new way of life. The communes were run as co-operatives where wages and money were replaced by work points. Peasants who criticised this new system were persecuted as "rightists" and "counter-revolutionaries". Leaving the communes was forbidden and escaping from them was difficult or impossible, and those who attempted it were subjected to party-orchestrated "public struggle sessions," which further jeopardized their survival.Thaxton, Ralph A. Jr (2008). Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village . Cambridge University Press. p. 3. . These public criticism sessions were often used to intimidate the peasants into obeying local officials and they often devolved into little more than public beatings.Thaxton 2008, p. 212.
On the communes, experiments were conducted in order to find new methods of planting crops, efforts were made to construct new irrigation systems on a massive scale, and the communes were all encouraged to produce steel backyard furnaces as part of an effort to increase steel production. However, following the Anti-Rightist Campaign, Mao had instilled a mass distrust of intellectuals into China, and thus engineers often were not consulted with regard to the new irrigation systems and the wisdom of asking untrained peasants to produce good quality steel from scrap iron was not publicly questioned. Similarly, the experimentation with the crops did not produce results. In addition to this the Four Pests Campaign was launched, in which the peasants were called upon to destroy sparrows and other wild birds that ate crop seeds, in order to protect fields. Pest birds were shot down or scared away from landing until they dropped from exhaustion. This campaign resulted in an ecological disaster that saw an explosion of the vermin population, especially crop-eating insects, which was consequently not in danger of being killed by predators.
None of these new systems were working, but local leaders did not dare to state this, instead, they falsified reports so as not to be punished for failing to meet the quotas. In many cases they stated that they were greatly exceeding their quotas, and in turn, the Chinese state developed a completely false sense of success with regard to the commune system.
All of this culminated in the Great Chinese Famine, which began in 1959, lasted 3 years, and saw an estimated 15 to 30 million Chinese people die.Holmes, Leslie. Communism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press 2009). . p. 32 "Most estimates of the number of Chinese people who died range from 15 to 30 million." A combination of bad weather and the new, failed farming techniques that were introduced by the state led to massive shortages of food. By 1962, the Great Leap Forward was declared to be at an end.