You may, or not, know David DuByne’s excellent podcast/youtube called ‘Mini ice age conversations’. In my peasant capacity, I regularly listen to what he has to say, with his phenomenal mix of knowledge streams and his pulse on agricultural developments around the world.
Last Sunday he released a talk titled ‘The largest story on the planet not being talked about, EU farmer protests’. It’s on all the major podcast platforms, but ‘curiously’ I can’t see it on his youtube channel - which is of course a clear hint at the importance of what he is reporting.
You might find it most enlightening. I deem it to be need-to-know. Not many other independent voices seem to be picking it up.
It is generally assumed that farmers/peasants are the most amorphous, non-political, passive and placid segment of the population. Of course they have been known to stage peasant rebellions in centuries past, always repressed with the greatest of violent firmness. It is thus assumed that farmers/peasants don’t do revolution.
David’s podcast about ‘the largest story’ provides a very different view. Farmer rebellion in large numbers, with extremely explicit action involving large farm machines (dumping loads of refuse and manure in strategic decision-making places, blockading roads and other kinds of business-as-usual-busting mischief) is in full swing, in many places and spreading around the EU. The Dutch started, under the threat of 3000 farms to be expropriated. The French farmers have been the proverbially revolutionary example for others to follow elsewhere - by now in over a dozen EU countries.
Peasants only rise up like this when they are at their wits’ end. They are a patient lot, down-to-earth, accustomed to hard work, the vagaries of climate, and the interference of authorities who have never held a clod of clay in their manicured hands. Said authorities have now pushed their nonsense ‘policies’ too far, and the farmers are not taking it any more. They know better than anyone that if they go down, everything goes down.
David’s rendition of what’s happening with the EU farming folk sent a chill down my spine. Because what he says is very familiar - working on my ‘Russian book’, I’ve just finished writing the chapter about the Russian revolution of 1917, a revolution in which the reputedly amorphous peasantry played the fundamental role.
You read that right. This is one of the many ‘things about Russia’ that we never heard about, any more than the MSM are telling us about farmers revolting across the EU - things that are not even widely known in Russia.
We like to believe that the Russian revolution was done by a handful of hard-nosed brutal bolsheviks, brain-addled with marxist ideology, at the behest of, and with funding from, the big banksters, more or less manipulating crowds of ignorant and passive lowly proletarians. The western conspiracy to bring down tzarist Russia was real, but let’s not give it credit for more than its share of the actual event (unless we want to believe that everything is pre-ordained from above and the ‘little people’ have no agency in history).
Marx despised the peasantry as an intrinsically non-revolutionary, backward class. Lenin believed what Marx said. But within a few weeks of landing in Russia after his (in)famous ride in a sealed train through Germany, as he followed keenly all that was happening especially in the masses, Lenin turned away from marxism. The Russian revolution of October 1917 was not a marxist revolution. Let that sink in.
Lenin realized that the revolutionary impetus was coming, en masse, from a peasant ethos prevalent in both the peasantry and the industry workers. The latter were for the most part first generation workers, still attached to their villages and amounting to some 10% of the population. The peasants constituted 80%. The soldiers were predominantly from the worker and/or the peasant population. All three categories came from the deep culture of the downtrodden, but resilient, underclass, from the literal grassroots of Russia.
What is little known is that all those lowly people had been organizing spontaneously, without any need for marxist activists to ‘show them the way’, for years (while said activists were for the most part outside the country). All had reached the point of no return in their rejection of the whole economic system and governance establishment. The masses had been educating themselves in their own ways and places, and preparing for a radically different future aligned with values as remote from marxism as they were from capitalist tzarist autocracy. The downtrodden had matured a consciousness that made them strong and clear-thinking in ways unavailable to peasant rebellions in earlier centuries.
I don’t know whether present-day farmers across the EU can rally around a similarly shared ethos, a coalesced consciousness also shared by factory workers and lower-level white collar workers. The civilization of modern economy and culture has severely fragmented populations. But in recent years we have seen ‘rehearsals’ - yellow vest actions in France and beyond, truckers in Canada - echoing the Russian ‘rehearsal’ of 1905 (there were three revolutions, one in 1905, two in 1917) in which widespread peasant uprisings, violently suppressed, provided crucial lessons-learnt to the masses.
When those who grow the food of nations reach the point of losing everything, and make it known loud and clear, they are giving the most powerful signal, from the most fundamental part of society. When this signal is amplified by the concomitant signal of food scarcity, growing hunger and destitution, which is today getting louder from all over the world, we are hearing the echo of 1917 Russia, of 1789 France… While certain elite figures translate ‘let them eat cake’ into ‘make zem eat ze bugs’.
The peasantry rises up for good when it knows that an old order is crumbling, scrambling to make a great ‘reform’ or a great ‘reset’. When these things happen, everybody has to make a choice - there are no fences left to sit on. In Russia, the revolution led into a horrendous civil war between those who wanted a society of justice for all, and those who wanted to resurrect the old order in newish clothes, preserving the indispensable oppression of the masses - the masses who did, and still do, the real work of the real economy.
Are we inching closer to revolution? It feels like it…
But the farmers are still at the stage of making claims for governments and EU bureaucrats to treat them less oppressively - not yet at the stage where there is no point in negotiating anything anymore. And how united are they, in their ranks as well as with other categories of population, not only in terms of what they are fighting against, but also of collective positive aspirations? There are those who want to continue doing the same chemical-intensive farming without concern for vanishing pollinators and dying soils; those smaller farms that want the freedom to do organic, permaculture, agroforestry without the prohibitively burdensome load of paperwork, authorizations, certifications; those with big loans to repay; those who are being expropriated to make place for dystopian cities; and a variety of other configurations. In Russia the peasantry was more homogeneously poor, community-minded, and beyond fed up - and had begun self-organizing on its own impetus, such that the bolsheviks were compelled to shed lots of their ideology for the sake of pragmatic reality on the ground.
A potential revolution in our times will be complex beyond the complexities of those earlier ones in Russia and France - a revolution of reality against virtuality, of real human values against false beliefs and abstract ideologies, of those who build dignity in real work against those who build wealth on the slave-work of the many, of the people of the soil against emperors clad in nonsense, of true co-creative partnership with Nature against the parasitical system that rapes her, of real human solidarity against atomization of individuals, of wholeness against internal fragmentation… Of human economies and cultures rebuilt from ground-level reality and the true spirit of humanity recovering this Earth as our beloved great garden of infinite diversity.
This fits solidly with other aspects of history. We were invading and occupying Russia in 1918, trying to block the revolution. I've tried to understand what we were doing there, and I finally concluded that we didn't want Russia to become a competing industrial power. In other words we recognized that Lenin was a competing type of capitalist, not a socialist as usually defined.
The Soviet system in the '50s and '60s was more profit-based than our version of capitalism. Businesses were expected to make a profit, and most government revenue was from VAT, which motivated the government to encourage profit. Our system has always been mainly based on share value, not profit. In Russia the capital and loans were controlled by the government for the good of all workers, not by Wall Street for the good of Morgan and Rockefeller.
That's what we feared. We didn't fear actual communism. Actual communism would have ruined Russia, thus sparing us the trouble of constantly trying to invade and obliterate Russia.
http://polistrasmill.blogspot.com/2016/02/soviet-profit.html
Thank you for showing the complexity of the uprisings in your last two paragraphs. I hadn't thought about whether regenerative farmers will make common cause with chemical farmers, for example.
Alternative media are covering the farmers. Here are a few Substack references:
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/big-update-today-farmers-surrounded
https://merylnass.substack.com/p/great-news-dutch-farmers-party-secures
https://dailynewsfromaolf.substack.com/p/holy-crap-french-farmers-dig-up-highways
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/farmers-agitation-civil-disobedience-farm-laws-7631940/