Breaking with the vision of the eternal peasant and the countryside that preserves traditions, Joëlle Zask shows that agriculture nourishes a true democratic culture. Cultivating your plot means recognizing a community of equals. Love of the earth, love of freedom and equality?
It is an established fact: since the glory of Athens and the apogee of the Greek city, democracy has been an essentially urban phenomenon. It is in ports, open to products and ideas, that man raises his gaze beyond the land and the clan that saw him born. In the city, he asserts himself in the face of nature, the group, tradition, and, wresting the autonomy of his spirit from his bodily atavism, he rises to the status of a thinking, free animal, and founds democracy. .
If one wanted proof of this, it would suffice to consider that the European conservative and fascist movements of the XIXe At XXe century have unanimously brandished, against the “degeneration of the race” embodied by the worker stupefied by the machine, alcoholic, violent and revolutionary, the healthy figure of the good people: the peasant, ennobled – morally – by work in the fields, faithful to its land and the national soul which are one. Also progress, particularly democratic progress, born in the urban matrix, must spread by “depeasantizing” the countryside.
A counter-narrative of democracy
It is with regard to this narrative, which has long permeated and still permeates the elites claiming to belong to modernist movements, that Joëlle Zask offers a counter-narrative giving the peasantry a preponderant role (both in the past and today). ‘today) in the permanence of a body of values and a way of being in the world which are the basis of political emancipation.
Joëlle Zask is obviously not unaware of the pitfall represented by the abundant agrarian literature, which shapes the figure of the peasant, the pillar of paternalism and conservative revolutions, whether they have taken a social form, like Abbé Lemire, or a political form, as under Vichy. She points out, however, that the characteristic of these ideologies, and what distinguishes them from the politically emancipatory conceptions of peasantism, is their denial of the individuality of the peasant and his historicity. In the paternalist imagination, the peasant (or the worker regenerated by gardening) is naturalized and merged into a collective identity which he perpetuates and preserves. Beyond this paternalistic romanticism, the author warns against any romantic vision of the peasant condition:
“In Germany or the Netherlands, the “return to nature” and, more precisely, to an aestheticized and idealized nature is only practiced very occasionally by a few well-off city dwellers and a few inspired artists. Despite their virulent criticism of the coldness of the city, its artificiality and its anonymity, they returned there after a few months spent in the soil, which ended up horrifying them. »
But then, why should working the land deserve to be attributed democratizing virtues?
Awareness of one’s individuality
Taking up the reflections of educators, therapists, even philosophers and democrats – like Jefferson – who hailed work on the land, from gardening to peasant activity, as conducive to the emergence of the individual, Joëlle Zask draws out the broad outlines of coherent reflection – we could almost speak of a school of thought.
The autonomous management of a plot (the notion of autonomy is crucial here), the confrontation with domesticated living things which must be taken care of to cope with hazards, the pride in producing one’s own food and meeting one’s most basic needs. , the inscription in time (the seasons) and space (the plot that we develop), like the sensations of one’s own body linked to sometimes painful physical tasks, constitute all factors which allow the emergence, the structuring and expression of an individual identity, both psychological (me, the other), physiological (I live by the sensations I experience) and intellectual (I think about my plot and the care I give it) . By cultivating the land, it is oneself that one cultivates, that one makes grow. And it is this self-awareness which forms the first democratizing virtue of agriculture.
Faced with difficulties and the need to resolve them, the gardener/farmer does not simply develop experimental thinking. He quickly understands the benefit of entering into relationships with others to exchange ideas, seeds, helping hands; in short, he grasps the interest of forming a society. In the mutual aid that develops between autonomous individuals remaining responsible for their plot and their actions, a capacity for collective action and self-government develops which constitutes the foundation and the very essence of democracy: a community of equals. recognizing each other and having developed a collective consciousness.
Modernity of agrarian democracy
These small communal democracies, very widespread in the Middle Ages, fiercely attached to their political autonomy and their capacity for self-government, played a major role (although little recognized) in political history, in Europe but also in the Americas. Unfortunately, the author’s English, American, German or Brazilian references omit to refer to a state that is certainly modest, but located in the heart of Europe, and whose roots lie in the visceral attachment of small rural communities to maintaining their customary rights and their administrative autonomy: Switzerland.
Jefferson was acutely aware of the interest in strengthening the institutions of American democracy by basing it on a socio-economic organization whose base was made up of a numerous peasantry, jealous of its rights and developing early, within rural communities. , know-how in self-government. Hence the importance he places on the possibility given to everyone to receive a lot of land, a generalization of the principles put in place by Oglethrope, the founder of the city of Savannah.
Would this, however, only concern pre-industrial societies? Apart from the fact that many societies are still massively agrarian and would benefit from thinking about their political trajectory based on this agrarian reality rather than against it, Joëlle Zask identifies, within old industrial societies, the movements of urban gardening, of shared gardens as a form of reappropriation of the psychological and political properties of community gardening – particularly in neighborhoods hit by social and economic crises (unemployment, violence, drugs, etc.). This movement is accompanied by a reappropriation of urban space and its resocialization: vacant lots are taken over, but sometimes also parts of public gardens, flowerbeds, the base of street trees.
Land ownership
Locke made respect for individual property the foundation of what would become modern liberal democracies. But this cautious fear of attacks on property, on the part of the State, has seriously underestimated the fact that the property of some can oppose access to the property of others. Land grabbing, in the absence of means of redistribution, leads to the exclusion of most men from property, and the latifundia end up replacing these small rural communities of which Jefferson dreamed.
In response, rural communities, like today’s urban gardeners and neo-peasant movements, are as much opposed to the collectivization of land by the State as to unlimited and absolute individual property. They prefer more flexible and more shared forms, making it possible to adapt the provision of land within the community according to the needs and capacities of each individual.
This management of land allocation, although it generally excludes entire ownership and in particular the right to transfer the plot that is being exploited – in short, it is a use property – does not necessarily lead to a collective development and certainly not collectivization, in the sense that this term took in the Soviet Union or in China in the XXe century. The individual and the collective are experienced together, and not in exclusion of each other.
Community struggles for appropriation, both rural and urban, against the State and multinationals (or, as is often the case, against their close association) constitute struggles not only economic, but social and political. This leads Joëlle Zalk to make the link both with participatory research, which comes from a dialogue between academic knowledge and vernacular knowledge, and with agro-ecology practices, which go against the industrial model. The struggle of gardeners and farmers constitutes the keystone of a reappropriation of individual and collective autonomy.
All gardeners?
Faced with the abundance of incriminating texts against the “anti-modern” peasantry, Joëlle Zalk’s essay is a defense defense and, ultimately, a committed defense of the gardeners’ and peasants’ movements. In doing so, and despite the precautions taken by the author, the reader may experience a form of saturation and annoyance with regard to the central thesis: the democratic values of peasant communities.
By choosing its examples, one could very well argue that the Neolithic revolution laid the psychological and intellectual foundations for the appropriation of fertility (land, water, domesticated plants and animals) which founded the appearance of agricultural, patriarchal and hierarchical societies. , from which the first empires arose. The appearance of agriculture is a total cultural fact from which a whole series of very diversified social forms proceed: imperial and conquering, or democratic and peaceful. The merit of this essay, otherwise erudite and well written, is essentially to remind us that democracy and mutualist socialism are part of this agrarian history – like imperialism and paternalism – and not against it.
Each society has generated its form of agriculture and each form of agriculture is linked to a society. After all, agriculture is an economic activity, indeed economic activity in essence, and has been for 10,000 years. However, the forms of economic and political organization cannot diverge over time for long; they answer each other.
Capitalism comes from a bourgeois conception of the world, authoritarianism from a monarchical conception, socialism from a democratic conception. It is therefore natural that democracy prefers cooperative and self-managing modes of economic organization, and this rule applies to agriculture as well as to manufacturing production or commerce. And, in this sense, shared gardens are nurseries for democrats. So, all gardeners to save democracy?