Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I believe the key aspect of commoning as doing good things together in the fact that both take their place within a larger collective politics of creating resilient and renewable local societies where people are autonomous and self-possessed actors within larger cooperative networks.
In this post and the next, I aim to lay out some issues about property relations by sketching how they might work in a semi-autarkic rural community or region within a small farm future.
Self-possession implies property in some sense – being able to claim a personal right to generate wellbeing from the world we share with other people and organisms.
So my plan for meeting the climate apocalypse is to keep thinking, keep writing, keep farming and keep being hopeful (but not ‘optimistic’) as best I can. What’s yours?
And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.
I’ve taken it upon myself to project a small farm future, not to produce some social blueprint of appropriate living arrangements as determined by myself.
The household is oriented to meeting its own socially defined needs. There is no inherent tendency to the amplification of production or the accumulation of wealth.
To what extent does the peasant way inherently impose certain kinds of social structure, to what extent can we now exercise different choices over those structures, and how might peasant societies of the future differ from or resemble ones of the past?
I wannabe a voice as best I can for those tried and tested strategies of innumerable small-scale and peasant farmers down the ages who for the most part never left a script, never had a book to sell, a big idea or a guru to promote, but who I believe have nevertheless still left much from which people today can learn.
Instead of the ‘best of all possible worlds’, then, the responsibility is to identify the ‘least bad of all likely worlds’ and the ways it may be realized.
Nobody can possibly say how these complex intersecting crises will pan out. For sure, nobody can say that they’re certain to pan out well.
Since my book A Small Farm Future makes quite a play for local self-reliance, I thought I should at least temporarily try to put my money (or, more pertinently, my produce) where my mouth is by only eating food produced on my farm for a week.
