Against 'Farmers'
We MUST eviscerate the farmer class by force
Short rant today.
The Russian reds had a big problem when it came to kulaks and owner-operator farmers (distinct from the massed peasantry) because they would whip up big revolts and start killing Jews for fun. Leon Trotsky employed a novel solution to this: poison gas. This largely solved the problem and Lenin could get on with the task of getting the rural population of Russia to do anything other than kill Jews, an endeavour which was so stressful it gave him several strokes. I am of course not advocating we kill modern farmers (or anyone), but instead demonstrating the utility of powerful state intervention against nakedly self-interested political actors with a legitimate stake in the discontinuation of humanity they have the power to act upon.
But the point is the proud tradition of semi-militarised antisemitic misanthropy has been sustained in the ‘farmer class’ in the west who are essentially very petty owner-operators who will spray national capitals with literal shit because we demand they stop fucking the ecology of the planet on which we live. A lot of these people barely work the land and instead rely on the actual prole wage labourers who often disagree with the right-of-Pinochet positions held by their employers.
Having witnessed this, I wholly understand the brutal but effective course of action the reds took in Russia, but the thing is it wasn’t actually the best way to handle agriculture, especially in pre-industrial Russia where the evaporation of kulaks as a social formation left a huge power vacuum the state largely failed to take up in the sense they never really produced an adequate degree of nutritional abundance. Certainly, collective farms were a large step up from subsistence farming, but they suffered from various systemic issues and while food security ultimately rose, all of those famines were avoidable if the Soviets had not been so direct and monofaceted in their approach—though one could argue their hand was forced.
If we are to dismantle the farmer class we must do so in a way which sustains urban populations. Beyond the longer-term objective of reconciling town and country, we are currently in dire straits and therefore must revert to crudities we would not entertain were our movement more buoyant: we must first and foremost become urban chauvinists who are willing to leverage the various mights of the city in an uncompromising struggle against the farmer political effort. We have a larger population, a greater degree of infrastructure, a higher standard of technology, and closer proximity to the halls of political power. They have agriculture. That is all they have and with this blackmail alone they intend to enslave us to their interests. They must be defeated or else they will fuck topsoil forever and choke us to death with the flatulence of their cows.
We, the people of the city, should not have to endure this. Not only is it an indignity, it fundamentally threatens the emancipation of the species. If industrial civilisation collapses due to climate change there is just not enough coal to reindustrialise so the human race will be stuck oppressing itself in feudalism forever. These guys witting or not desire that outcome so they can continue to be stupid petty tyrants in the big 2025 and refuse to adapt their practices for the sake of everyone else.
In other words, it is a principal prerogative of the species—and by extent the proletariat—that these bastards be reminded of their place.
Western ‘farmers’ differ from traditional peasantry in that they are not peasants at all but at best petty bourgeois (at worst they form the most fascist flank of the big bourgeoisie) because they both own and work the land. They are not a proletarian working class in any meaningful sense and we must fight back against the cultural perception of them as such. The farmer must be seen as villain, not resistance fighter; the farmer sides with the occupier when they invade, the farmer collaborates with the secret police, the farmer wants nothing more than to open up a concentration camp. These are the interpretations we must foster, because they paint a far more accurate picture of what farmers are actually like.
We must make innovations in the scheme of counter-protest tactics and we must employ them to devastating effect. We must reclaim our roads when they are stacked with tractors, and perhaps frustrate their operation in a fashion which I stress in every sense must be safe and legal of course. We must ruthlessly support every scheme which disempowers them, monofacetedly and without mercy. Raise the inheritance tax on farmers until they go bankrupt. Support environmental legislation even if it feels designed to break their businesses, because it should be. We must promote research into lab-grown meat, vertical farming methods, and hydroponic farming. We must encourage the norm to move away from traditional agriculture so we may move beyond this primitive schematic of placing our own sustenance beneath the dubious custodianship of the pettiest fascists in existence. The farmer is at every point a reactionary who hates humanity.
The cultural tradition of farmer worship must be rendered an embarassing indulgence in the public eye. It must be seen as pathetic sycophancy, the property of deferring the means by which you survive to the enemies of humankind, because that is what it is. I sustain that farmer protests are a declaration of war against the rest of the species, and the rest of the species ought to respond in kind and according to the scope of the threat. This cultural tsunami must become like a scene from Shanghai in the January of 1967, where it is a deep shame worthy of fierce criticism to buck from the party line. And the party line here is the total uprooting of the farmer class and the destruction of their systems of power.
We must deeply ingraine the knowledge that the idea farmers ‘grow your food’ is a lie propagated by a lobby of little Hitlers. It is not true in the slightest. Farmers do not grow your food, they sit on large amounts of land they use inefficiently in an ecologically disastrous fashion. They are not victims: the state has coddled them incessantly to the point the entire European Union is basically an extension to a cartel for agricultural interests. And when the rest of the country asks for something back, they riot because once you coddle someone, they don’t like not being coddled. Remember, in Marxist-Leninist party-states they simply shot these types of people, yet they truthfully believe that taxing their exorbitant inheritances is communism. No, under the ‘communism’ you describe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because when the state gets really tired of them, it does not compromise, it does not negotiate, it does not talk in the terms of tax and regulations. It fucking shoots them. We are being benevolent by contrast: we are simply asking they do not make war against the rest of us for the sake of their profits. They have forgotten the scope of society and so they must be reminded.
If they cannot do this, if they cannot sustain this very basic ask from the rest of us—and I suspect they cannot—then the class structures which maintain their position must be liquidated. We must not allow an Italy situation where a collaborationist government does something stupid like banning lab-grown meat for the sake of protecting the careers of farmers. We must ensure governments are anti-farmer, will frustrate their interests. Publicly admitting you like Clarkson’s Farm in the UK should render you persona non grata at important social functions. Oh, and in countries where farmers have been erroneously permitted to bear arms, take their shotguns. These fascists should not be armed lest they get ideas about their preferred mode of political practice. It must be sustained that the ownership of shotguns is a public safety risk and therefore we must oversee a programme of mass disarmament by the hand of even the bourgeois state.
We must formulate protest movements of our own which swamp countryside communities with dyed hair urban youth with pronouns who will demand a future from these creatures in person. We must prevent any further conquests of political power by farmers and make support for them political poison. We must boycott supermarket chains which indulge in pro-farmer agitprop, and release agitprop of our own. Retailers must be forced to choose between getting new suppliers or getting new consumers. The advantage we have in our propaganda is the simple fact that we are aligned with the truth: all of the information we need is dutifully recorded by those who came before us. Unsafe and unethical industry practices, disproportionate influence in politics, state coddling at the expense of the rest of us, and politics slightly to the right of Benito Mussolini—these are all truths we can mobilise in the pursuit of justice.
The revolutionary cosplay of the farmers’ protests must be stripped so their soul is laid bare and what they are is obvious: a stoogelike appendage of the global neofascist movement. We must adopt the language of militancy and of existential struggle in response: we will turn their lines back on them. We are the people and we hold the power, you are fossilised relics of the times when we shat in buckets.
I am arguing in favour of Farmer Hate becoming a cultural staple of left-wing politics, and it must be sustained until it becomes a social movement. I am arguing in favour of the liquidation of farmers as a social class. I am arguing in favour of environmental policy, of inheritance tax, of lab-grown meat and everything we need to move beyond them. We can be the change we want to see.
‘Til next time.