Thread by @csmaje

My writing on ag localism to meet present crises is influenced by ecosocialism but more by distributism, civic republicanism & ag populism. I’ve had good engagement from ppl on the left – we share much – but also some nonsense. Long 🧵to try to lay out overlaps & divergences 1/27

Basic structure of many small farm societies of the past & (I suspect) the future: households usually comprising a small kin-related group as unit of production & consumption with exclusive access to a small area of land, set within wider commons & community relationships 2/27

The ‘exclusive access’ (=private property) bit troubles some on the left. The main problem with private property is its tendency to accumulate in few hands & thence to generate monopoly rent that excludes most people from livelihood autonomy 3/27

So small farm societies must prevent monopoly rent. I draw on the traditions of distributism, civic republicanism & agrarian populism for political resources on how to do that. But it’s not easy, and they’re prone to failure. Some handwaving on my part here 4/27

Perhaps I’m caricaturing, but ecosocialist approaches I’ve seen prefer to nationalise land, making it available by preference to communes & co-ops via processes of democratic decision-making by bureaucratic centralized authority 5/27

Democratic decision-making & bureaucratic centralized authority are also prone to failure that excludes people from livelihood autonomy. Ecosocialist hand waving there. Both our approaches share problems of land allocation 6/27

Monopoly landlordism is unacceptable to both distributism/populism & ecosocialism. But some land rental in a moral economy preserving livelihood autonomy may be acceptable to the former, which doesn't hold ‘common ownership’ as only acceptable way to divide resources fairly 7/27

IMO the household as a unit of production & consumption on land it controls is important so that it gets ecological feedback about the consequences of its actions and economic feedback about the burdens of its production & consumption 8/27

I don’t much care about the size or composition of the household, provided it’s the primary unit of production & consumption. I don’t have a normative/conservative view of what ‘the family’ should be. I’m fine with large intentional communities comprising non-kin 9/27

But in practice I think a lot of farm households will be small, close-kin groups, and I’m fine with that too. Despite much modern mythologising to the contrary, this has been a ubiquitous historic form 10/27

Successful farm households require people who are invested long-term in each other as economic & moral actors. If you want to pull apart existing kin relations & invent some other way of doing that in your own household, fine by me... 11/27

...but if it works long-term I think it’ll end up looking a lot like the kin relations & affective ties you laboriously deconstructed, only to reinvent 12/27

Household-based kin relations are vulnerable to patriarchy and other forms of domination. It’s important to create cross-cutting relationships to minimise the dangers & provide escape routes. But it’s not easy or foolproof. Handwaving from me there 13/27

Then again, *all* human relations are vulnerable to patriarchy & other forms of domination, even if they involve ‘democratic collectivism’ or other such nostrums. Socialist handwaving in equal measure 14/27

In other words, kin relations are not the fons et origo of patriarchy & domination and I’m out of sympathy with leftist strictures against ‘the patriarchal family’ inasmuch as the problem is the patriarchy & not the family... 15/27

...I’ve had pushback on this from super-aggressive 'anti-patriarchal' leftwing men whose preferred ‘democratic’ collectivism I'd strive hard to avoid if they were involved, because I think their domineering personalities would subvert it... 16/27

The history of leftwing movements is replete with this problem. No easy or foolproof routes out of domination 17/27

My experience of living in community & my reading on historic agrarian commons & contemporary intentional communities suggests to me that there is a high time-cost to negotiating the human relationships involved. It can also be rewarding, but... 18/27

...the failure rate of historic commons & modern intentional communities & cooperatives due to interpersonal conflict is high 19/27

Low energy agrarian societies often have limited resources & they often embrace this trade-off. Commons where you need them, household responsibility where you don’t 20/27

Some argue these collective failures merely reflect modern individualism. I don’t think this is well supported by the evidence 21/27

Socialism correctly emphasizes the historical importance of class formation & conflict, although IMO gets too stuck on ossified past categories. I don’t think it has an adequate account of interpersonal domination, implausibly effacing it with utopian liberation ideologies 22/27

Capitalism & socialism are often contrasted, but their shared modernist political grounding creates numerous overlaps. One of them is a tendency to think that human social organisation can master the vicissitudes of human & biophysical history 23/27

I find civic republicanism & other traditions more plausible. They’re not about quiescently waiting for ‘disaster’, but they’re able to build negative or disastrous contingency into their political account 24/27

I agree with the likes of McCarraher & Hine - capitalism is more of a surface problem, modernity itself being a deeper underlying one. Hence I find ecosocialist correctives to capitalist resource dynamics inadequate. There's a deeper cultural & spiritual problem to address 25/27

…or to put it another way, with apologies to good faith ecosocialists if it sounds too combative, opposing the bourgeois individualism of modern capitalism with the bourgeois collectivism of ecosocialism isn’t enough 26/27

Obv a lot of generalisations above, but hell it's a Twitter thread. Anyway, FWIW that's roughly how I see it 27/27