The Pipe and Paper

The Pipe and Paper: An Anarcho-Agrarian Manifesto

"There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace. To avoid the first danger, one should plant a garden, preferably where there is no grocer to confuse the issue. To avoid the second, he should lay a split of good oak on the andirons, preferably where there is no furnace, and let it warm his shins while a February blizzard tosses the trees outside."
– A Sand Country Almanac: By Aldo Leopold

Anarcho-Agrarianism deals first with the fact that men are spiritually unhappy, which comes before the fact that they are now economically and materially unhappy; though this is quite as much of a fact. We propose what is entirely practical, that men should seek the most solid of things, which is the earth, for the most useful of things, which is food, is none the less dependent on the principle that it must not be sought in a servile or bestial or merely mechanical manner. If it were, it would not give the normal degree of human happiness, which it is the object of such an experiment to give. You can treat a man like a machine, but you cannot make him an unfeeling machine; you can treat a man as a beast, but you cannot make him a happy beast; you can treat a man as a slave, but you cannot at the same time produce out of mere food the sensation of freedom.

Once upon a time human beings grew food and ate it. We are unique amongst creatures in that we are the only ones to have discovered and used agriculture. Our reason allows us to not only pick the wild berries, but to cut, plant, cultivate, and improve them. We even discovered how to create thornless blackberries, which surely is a marvellous thing if you have ever picked from the entangled brambles of the wild ones. Certainly agriculture, which is the purposeful growing of food is a critical aspect of humanity’s ability to survive. Without it our population would surely nearly disappear in comparison to our current numbers.

Every technology has consequences. An old farmer once told us that tractors did immense harm to the community. He was old enough to have seen the last of the horse men give in and go to the oil-driven behemoths. Over the next half century he saw the tractors and farms get bigger as more and more farmers were pushed from the land. A tractor does not stay in the direct power of man or nature. It does as it wills and does not tire as animate things naturally do. It obeys no seasons or time, but goes without stop.  Technologies have consequences, and when the technology is not human scale then it does harm to humanity.

What follows is our basic tenets:

1. Farming is the sole occupation that offers total independence and self-sufficiency.
2. Urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy independence and dignity and foster vice and weakness.
3. The agricultural community, with its fellowship of labour and co-operation, is the model society.
4. The farmer has a solid, stable position in the world order. He has 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 his life checks the encroachments of a fragmented, alienated modern society.
5. Cultivation of the soil has within it a positive spiritual good and from it the cultivator acquires the virtues of honour, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality. They result from a direct contact with nature and, through nature, a closer spiritual understanding. The agrarian is blessed in that he follows the example of creating order out of chaos.

Our aims include:

1. Restoring the family as the basis for society:
The rural family must regain its place at the heart of the social order. Individualism is at the heart of many of the woes seen in today's society. Anarcho-Agrarianism seeks to remedy this by providing the conditions necessary for families to grow together through work. A family that provides for itself most of its own necessities can live peaceably on the land without some modern conveniences. Too often the cost of this modern materialism is the soul of the family.

2. Stewardship:
Stewardship in Anarcho-Agrarianism is something that must not be left to the secular order. We need to step in and be the leaders by living in ways that counter the modern materialistic mode of life. Anarcho-Agrarianism seeks a simpler ideal where the family provides as much for its own needs as possible and is dependent on the other families in the community for much else that is needed. In this way family independence and security are ensured and not subject to every economic high and low. The father (and mother often) is no longer forced to leave the home and become a mere money provider. Rather this simpler mode of life allows the father to remain physically present on the farm and remain in his place as the spiritual leader of the family. This then allows the mother also to have an important economic role in running the farm and taking care of the home and the children. This order is restored and the insanity of the modern way of life is combated in some small way.

3. Building a Community:
Today many families feel isolated and alone in the larger cultural milieu. Often times there are many fears and anxieties as these families seek to keep the purity of the children’s minds and bodies intact. Community is essential for living in its fullness. Community charity is the rule of life and children can be raised without the negative pressures found in the larger culture. Life is not meant to be lived alone. We are members of one Community and it is our hope that rural communities one day again will thrive.

4. Restoring Culture:
In many rural places in the West there are still traces of Agrarian life from an era when culture flourished. If culture is to be revived it will happen around the hearth in homes filled with love, in quiet evenings of singing, reading good books, and filling the home with authentic Charity. Anarcho-Agrarianism seeks to restore culture in rural homes everywhere. When again families live out and celebrate great feasts together again then Agrarian rural life will be well on its way to a true restoration.

To be clear, Anarcho-Agrarianism is greater than just returning to the land. We can have a large impact on life around the country and even the world, not only by helping families directly move to the land, but also by teaching about a fuller way of life that is bound up with this move to the land. In general, this means living a way of life that is radically directed by our ideas. Land fits into this because man has essential ties to the physical, material, and earthly. We have almost completely eclipsed this aspect of our lives in the modern world. It could be said that we are no longer living a human way of life and this makes it almost impossible to live an Agrarian way of life, because grace builds upon nature. This is the key foundation of the land movement, to return to a more human and grounded way of life, to heal our souls and our culture. This has to be more than the action of the few who can and are willing to make an actual move. What about everyone who is "left behind"? Anarcho-Agrarianism can be a general impetus toward a renewal of culture.

Therefore, Anarcho-Agrarianism is similar but not identical with back-to-the-land movements. We concentrate on the fundamental goods of the earth, communities of more limited economic and political scale than in modern society, and on simple living - even when this shift involves questioning the "progressive" character of some recent social and economic developments. Thus Anarcho-Agrarianism is not industrial farming, with its specialisation on products and industrial scale.

We believe that Agrarian society is superior to industrial society and stress the superiority of a simpler rural life as opposed to the complexity and chaos of urbanized, industrialized life. In this view the farmer is idealized as a self-sufficient and thus independent as opposed to the paid labourer who is vulnerable and alienated in modern society. Moreover, Anarcho-Agrarianism links working the land with morality and spiritualty, and links urban life, capitalism, and technology with a loss of independence and dignity while fostering vice and weakness. The agricultural community, with its fellowship of labour and cooperation, is thus the model society which we envision.

An Agrarian society is one in which agriculture is the leading vocation, whether for pleasure or for prestige – a form of labour that is pursued with intelligence and leisure, and that becomes the model to which the other forms approach as well as they may. But an Agrarian life will be secured readily enough where the superfluous industries are not allowed to rise against it. The theory of Anarcho-Agrarianism is that the culture of the soil is the best and most sensitive of vocations, and that therefore it should have the economic preference and enlist the maximum number of workers. To this ends, we also emphasis that Anarcho- portion, in which we see the state and all government redundant at best.

In the Agrarian view, a whole life — what we might call an organic life — is the only truly aware one. The individual is connected to the environment, and to the social order. The urban view on the other hand isolates the individual from the social order, from nature and from anything but the immediate desires of the individual. Seasons? Air condition them. Time? Hide it under makeup and plastic surgery. Sadness? Bars, casual sex. But when we awaken to this view, we can see how the city itself is a false subset of reality. It is like a special occasion pretending to be the normal rules; if the behaviour that prevailed on Christmas morning became the norm, it would lose its specialness and society would become less effective. The city has some of this feel of the rules being suspended, but only while you're in the city. Outside of it, the whole order applies again. As a result, the city people destroy anything with context. They prefer the immediate, tangible, material and social; they fear that with too many connections to the world outside the city. This makes them foes of Anarcho-Agrarians, to the point of justifying just about any warfare against them. And indeed, in many instances, the state itself, which we have no use for, supports the city bias, and should thus be viewed as a perpetual antagonism to our aims.

Industrial mindset, also, has contempt for anything small, rural, or natural and that translates into contempt for centralised economic systems, any sort of local self-sufficiency in food or other necessities. The industrial "solution" for such systems is to increase the scale of work and trade. It brings Big Ideas, Big Money, and Big Technology into small rural communities, economies, and ecosystems —
 the brought in industry and the experts being invariably alien to and contemptuous of the places to which they are brought in. The result is that problems correctable on a small scale are replaced by large-scale problems for which there are no large-scale corrections. Meanwhile, the large-scale enterprise has reduced or destroyed the possibility of small-scale corrections.

Instead, an Anarcho-Agrarian life mainly utilises local biomass which serves as food, tools, building material. Mechanical devices making use of wind or running water also can be used to convert natural energy flows. In order to further increase production as an Anarcho-Agrarian society, we must either increase the intensity of production or obtain more land to expand into. Expansion may take place either by claiming territories occupied by industrialists, or by claiming new ecological niches of our own. We are well aware that the best lands for farming are usually already under cultivation, forcing Anarcho-Agrarians to move into less and less arable lands over time. It is within our duty to push back against this diminishing margin of utility held over us by industrial society and its opposing interests.

Conclusion:

In the end, Anarcho-Agrarianism supposes, not merely that men should live on the land, but that they should work it with a certain status of domestic dignity and decency, without which a completely civilised man will always lose his self-respect. On the question of whether such a scheme must be regarded as a purely economic scheme; or whether we did not conceal in it certain moral and religious implications: our proposal is a purely economic proposal, in the sense that we can state in purely economic terms what it is that we propose. But we could not possibly state in purely economic terms our reason for proposing it. For that reason ultimately refers not to land but to life; not to property but to happiness; not to the body but to the soul.

Our choice of society type reflects not our external environment, but our internal one. If we have found a balance between self and world, the Agrarian viewpoint is less threatening and more sensible; if we have found only the human world, ourselves and our social peers, then we cannot enter that world. This division in values is not an imposed dichotomy. Instead, it describes two very basic approaches to the world: either we treat it as something of which we are part, or we decide that it is part of us, and treat it like a child or employee under our command. As humanity looks for a way to balance its needs with the quest to stabilise and nurture our planet, we are starting to look at a level below laws and economics to basic cultural values. Through this process, we see a surge in Anarcho-Agrarianism — and with it, we bet, a surge in people paying attention to the world around them, again.

Life, Land & Liberty.