Rambling incoherent thoughts on peasant communism: land and freedom

Been reading Orlando Figues' book "A People's Tragedy" about the Russian Revolution and his description of the peasantry was surprising to me, so I thought I'd bore all my reader with a monologue on it and my thoughts on the links between land ownership and freedom vs. dependence and control of people.  Yeah, yeah, 'bore off' yourselves...

Bolsheviks have stumbled into power and the cities are starving.  Inflation means money is useless, government troops have been requisitioning grain and horses from the peasants (90% of the population of Russia) for the civil war effort and the average peasant in the muddy field is sick of it all and wants to be left alone.  He has a dream of "volia", which is to be left alone to get on with the important things in life: growing food and having a laugh without some prats in uniforms taking his produce and making him work for nothing for some fat squire.

Here's a quote:

The real root of the urban crisis was the peasantry's reluctance to sell foodstuffs for paper money.  With the wartime collapse of consumer production and the huge inflation of prices, peasants could buy less and less with the rouble fortunes they were being offered for their produce.  Government efforts to buy the food at fixed prices, going back to 1916, had only encouraged the peasants to withdraw from the market.  They reduced their production, shifted to crops not subject to state control, or hid their surpluses from the gorvernment's procurement agents.  Many peasants used their grain to fatten up the cattle, or sold it to black-market traders from the towns, while many others turned it into vodka.

Ok: so those who make the important things, like food, are being shafted and so have said "bugger you lot" to the urban population, and kept it to themselves apart from a bit of bartering for tools, etc.  And booze.

Cottage industries boomed, largely undetected by statisticians, as the peasants sought to manufacture all those household products they had once bought from the towns but which were now either unavailable or too expensive for them to buy.  Rural craftsmen fashioned simple ploughs and sickles out of old scrap iron.  Flax and hemp were grown for clothes and rope; timber was cut to make wheels and furniture; reeds were gathered to make baskets; clay was dug for pottery; and oil-producing seeds were grown for fuel.  Old rural handicrafts that had gone to the wall in the age of steam were now resurrected.

 The peasants were fat and content (for the most part - the north wasn't), and would have happily gone on living like this until the end of the world if the Bolsheviks hadn't turned up with an army and shafted them in the name of socialism.  Which is ironic because the peasants had been true socialists all along.  Each village was it's own commune.  Every year the leaders (generally the eldest people there) held a council whereby all the land was divided between the villagers - everyone got a chance to farm every bit of land.  Property ownership was alien: God made the earth so no-one had the right to buy of sell it, and property (houses, tools, etc) belonged to the Family, and the head of the household did not have the right to buy or sell anything because their unborn relatives might want it!  It all had to be agreed by everyone first.  Anyone who worked the land was seen more like a family member than for example, a son who left and went to work in a city.

A peasant meeting.  Wellies and dressing gowns keeping it surreal.

There was a fly in the ointment though: the landlord.  Peasants were actual slaves before the Revolution and not much better afterwards, being used as chess pieces by both regimes for labour and soldiery.  They had to work the landlords land for nothing as "rent" for their land, pay taxes to a government they never saw or heard from, serve in their armies, and get flogged and hanged for minor misdemeanours.  Being natural pacifists they practised passive resistance, giving the impression to outsiders of being slow-witted and useless, but it was a cover-up.  They'd often get the village idiot to be their official "head man" while dealing with government, etc while the real leaders carried on as normal!

I've forgotten where I'm going with this.  Oh yeah: land and freedom.  Russia is described in the book as essentially two civilisations: Western Urban and Eastern Rural.  One aggressive and national (and international) and one passive and local.  The urban minority governed in their own interests (mainly - there were some politicians who helped the rural people, but they were rare) and in effect mined the rural populace for materials and labour for their own interests.  They looked down on the peasants, and either mocked or patronised them (holding them up to be an ideal, which happens a lot elsewhere) but never realised that they were only there because of them, and as the Revolution proved, were useless to them.  When urban and rural populations were sundered, one thrived and one declined - until it put the boot in.

The peasants got their Volia for a few short years, and proved that they could live well without outside interference, but it was taken away again all too soon in the name of "socialism".  By the way, peasants are described as selfish, cunning and permanently drunk as well, but if you were the product of generations of slavery and humiliation, I bet you would be too.

Give every person their fare share of the Earth, leave them in peace and watch true civilisation grow (ignore the vodka and beards).  Meddle and think you know best what others want and need, and you get what we have today: gross inequality, famine, etc, etc.

Self-sufficiency = simplicity and freedom? Sort of...

Ah yes, the simple country life.  No mortgage, no boss (almost!), no "nine to five", no twitching curtains, no sitting in traffic, no stress, no money worries, etc, etc.

Reading list includes "On Walden Pond", "How to be Free", "Hovel in the Hills", etc, to give you an idea of how it could all be, which are read on the bus to work.

Then you bite the bullet, put her money where your mouth is and get a field and a house and start digging.

Then it gets head-burstingly complicated and staggeringly easy at the same time.  I'm not including K's work here, which ain't easy by a long shot.  I'm just waffling on about self-sufficiency.  Again.

To eat a good variety of food, you have to grow a good variety of plants and rear a good variety of animals.  Each one is different and you have to know everything about each one, like why the sprouts have blown even though the soil's compact, and why brandling worms are living in them and what to do about it.  On the Island, with it's mere handful of fruit bushes, a few wee trees, a veg plot and 4 chickens, that amounts to fifty things to keep in my head all the time, and this is winter when everything's slow and bare.  Then there are the buildings and what is within them: the house, the gite, the hangar.  All with their own problems, structures, daily tasks.  Then there are the things you need to do now for the following year, like fencing, which occupies another slice of my brain and is a lot more complicated than it looks (have a look at the BTCV handbooks on-line - no, sorry, they've had the funding taken away and now sell them).  Then there are the things to do now for the following 17 years, like setting out a hedge and tree nursery round the back of the polytunnel, to be planted in their final positions in 2 year's time and pollarded and laid in 15 year's time.

It's a bit like a game of 3-D chess with a hundred pieces played out over the next two generations.  You're on one side of the board and slugs are on the other.

It is complex beyond anyone's reckoning.  I think the reason the stereotypical country yokel is depicted as talking slowly and looking a bit glazed is because there is so much brain power being used up just keeping everything he/she needs to do in focus, there are no cells left for communication with Gore-Texed townies.

Where's the easy bit, then, you northern gobshite?  Well, all you have to do is walk around with a spade, hammer, or paintbrush and use them where they're needed.  Water what needs water, feed what needs food.  Dig what needs digging.  Repair what needs repairing.  Wise Sifu say "when you start learning a martial art, a kick is a kick and a punch is a punch.  Then you progress and learn the hundred variations of kicking and punching.  Then when you become a master you realise that a kick is just a kick and a punch is just a punch."  Tao of Jeet Kune Do: a good gardening book, surprisingly.

It's anything but simple and anything but hard.

I'm off to fix something.

Hand tools give you back your life. Honest.

Working as I am with no power tools, everyone asks the question 'why are you not using a so-and-so, then you'd save time/effort/etc?'

Hah!  Time is relative, you know.  You might think you're saving time, but in fact you're just spending the same time on doing more stuff.  Being busy, fitting more in to the day, rushing about, multi-tasking, clock-watching, and all the stuff that makes people have ulcers.  Not that you can spend or save time like it's a commodity - it's just a way of measuring movement between objects and is an abstract concept.  Time I shut up and got on with the rant.

Erm, anyway...

Hand tools make you slow down.  You have to work slowly because there isn't an engine buzzing away at 5000rpm.  You have to think more about what you're doing, and you gain more appreciation of the task, the materials worked upon, and gain a more sympathetic eye.  You have to or you bugger it up and have to start again, which'll probably happen anyway if you're like me.  And as cultivating an certain attitude towards one aspect of you life rubs off on other aspects, in theory, hand tools make you more appreciative, reflective, sympathetic, relaxed, and all the other things you get from years of practising Tai Chi without paying for classes at the local leisure centre and having to make insipid chit-chat after class.  Including cramping up a lot.

Why do people think that power tools are better then?  Because with a power tool, you can finish a job quickly.  Sort of.  At least, that what I was taught to think until I started using proper hand tools.  Jobs have become things to get done so you can then spend time doing something you enjoy, like watching telly.  Rush, rush, rush.

Problem is, in order to do more, you need a machine to help.  Machines as we know them (like powered drills, strimmers, etc) have only been around for 150 years or so at a push, and have not had the time to evolve like hand tools have over millennia, and this means the materials worked upon have had to be altered to fit the machine.  Hand tools have been altered to fit the person using them and the materials worked upon.  So instead of local green wood for example, carefully seasoned and worked sympathetically, you get dry-as-a-bone pine timber that warps, splits, goes rotten overnight, and has to be treated with God knows what to be able to last.  This is because someone invented a combine harvester for trees, which could chop a lot of trees down, as long as they resemble pencils.  To saw loads of timber very quickly, it has to be dry because tools working at high speed get clogged with anything resembling green wood.  Result? B&Q (or Gedimat over here) and all it's bollox.

So why all the rush?

I think that the reason this is so nowadays is that people have had their time divided into "work" and "leisure" for them, with "work" being the unpleasant bit you do to be able to enjoy "leisure".  Bit like working overtime to be able to afford a holiday.  All well and good, apart from the fact that the time spent working is a hell of a lot more than the leisure time, and if you spend most of the time looking forward to something else, you don't live in the present and you have no life.  Better to find leisure in work, or make them the same thing.  Get a decent hand tool that fits your hand and body, and work on materials as you should do, without rushing, and you have no work or leisure, just life.  'So he says sitting in front of a computer drinking home brew', I hear you cry.  Well, all things in balance - I scythed the field (a wee bit, anyway - horses do most of the work) today and have sawn and split a load of logs as well, so there.  The home brew's a bit stronger than normal as well.

Bloody industrial revolution started this all off with it's manufactories, silly tea sets with frogs on and steam whistles.  It became more profitable to make standard items in huge quantities by machines and people were convinced that the methods and materials that had evolved over thousands of years were no good.  Why spend all your time scything when these new combine harvesters mean the field gets mown in a tenth of the time and then you can have the time off?  Pity that there was no time off because to pay for the combine harvester you have to work longer hours and all those people who did the mowing are now call-centre gimps trying desperately to sell you a bag o'shite to meet a pointless target to win an extra five minutes break time which they then spend on trying to wrestle an extra KitKat out of a dispensing machine, setting off the tilt alarm, alerting Security and getting an Official Verbal Warning ('I have to tell you that if we have to give you another Verbal Warning, we will have to step up to a Written Warning, Mr B, all over a 60p chocolate bar.  Also, what do you do that takes so long in the toilets?' 'Digging a hole to freedom, boss.'), or on the dole saving up for that once-a-week 8 tins of Viborg Pils for four quid.  Bit Thoreau-ist, this.  Sort of.

Here's a relatively lucid example: we're chopping our firewood in a woodland with hand tools.  'Pourquoi are you not using a chainsaw?' people ask.  Say that I did use a chainsaw.  I'd get a lot more work done, and then could have the rest of the day off to do... what?  Sit in a sunny woodland and have a picnic?  What do you think we're doing now?  If I used a chainsaw, I'd not be able to hear the birds, the wind in the trees, be able to chat to my wife, look out at the view, or anything that would be a pleasure.  I'd be hot and sweaty in the massive nylon padded chainsaw pants, deafened by the engine, blinded by the fumes, my nerves would be in jitters from the vibrations, I'd end up cutting wood that was too big or cut too much of it because I could, I'd be risking serious injury, and it would be too much like work.  Use a hand saw and suddenly you're back in the woodland with all the nice things associated with it, getting bigger arm muscles and an appetite for a massive tea as an added bonus.  I'd also have to work to earn money to pay for the chainsaw and all it's accoutrements, the fuel, etc, and get a bad back in return.  A decent 3ft saw costs £60, chainsaw costs £470. The chainsaw is a machine, the saw is a tool.

Machines increase your work, tools enhance your life (as long as they're decent ones, that is).

I should reply "why the hell do you use a chainsaw?"

Better than chainsaws here.