I think it has some support among those who still percieve themselves to be part of 'old style agriculture', even if they don't actually still work on a farm, my uncle for example used to be a farm labourer (and was a tentant farmer for a while as well) but now works as a lorry driver yet he still identifies himself with that kind of agriculture. But you may be right, my views here are very heavily influenced by my family which are probably not representative so I could be overestimating support for the CA. (and I'd add that most support of the CA that I say is critical support, but in the absence of anything else it still is support)
Countryside And Class
- Thread starter General Ludd
- Start date
Funky_monks
Neo-Rustic
butchersapron said:
Yes, and from what I said on the other thread:
I feel that left-wing politics these days are nearly all hammer, and little or no sickle. So is it surprising the rural working class feel alienated?
As the UA have reminded me off it, try Captain Swing for historical rural working class struggle.
Rebecca in Wales.
Plug Plotters in Staffs.
Kett Rebellion in Norfolk.
Plug Plotters in Staffs.
Kett Rebellion in Norfolk.
Clintons Cat
Walks Like A Twat.
you can add the littleport riots (1816) to that list if you like ern
totaladdict
Well-Known Member
Hmmm. True to a degree, but the rural people still exist in those areas. As the communter belt has pushed wider (and I'm speaking from personal experience in Suffolk here, not spent huge amounts of time anywhere else), villages have grown in size. New estates are where the working class villagers end up, while the old village houses (often listed buildings) see their prices go through the roof as well-off middle class people from the city move out to their comfortable little village in the country.Kaka Tim said:
There's conflict within a lot of villages, new people moving in don't spend their money there. So while the people there get shifted out to the edges of the village, they see the old village become a dead place... a communter suburb. It's obviously not just a consequence of commuters moving in - as farm work has dropped to next to nothing, (jobs in warehouses, packing plants, factories, and then the market towns etc) people just aren't around as much. I'm drifting... but all I'm trying to say really is that there still are plenty of real rural people trying to get by in the country - they've been joined by the affluent middle class, not replaced.
Again I think you're pushing it too far. Young people here still grow up with a strong Suffolk accent (my mates 3 year old makes me smile every time when he asks, "ya ahright en ba?"). People still cook up rabbits. But that's not really the point.... you seem to be trying to set 'authentic' in stone... rural lifestyles have changed over time, and they're changing still - what would be an authentic urban lifestyle?
I do generally agree with your point about the differences not being huge... but there are still plenty of people who talk about townies. Who do see their lives being run by people who don't know country life. Who do see themselves as country boys.
Agree with this.... but round here students still play a major role during, for example, apple harvest (or fruit picking in general).
And yeah, most farm work is pretty much a factory - some cunt watching over you, division of labour to the nth degree, masses of huge machinery, a dislocation from the produce as food, as a vital part of the functioning of society, it's just a 'unit' like any other.
Clintons Cat said:
Smart....cheers...is that your site, CC? Can I link to it from mine?
totaladdict
Well-Known Member
Agree with this (although, see my point re what really is 'authentic'? but it's a minor quibble really). Class basis and class analysis, of course.... it actually seems weird to me to think that people would think that class hatred doesn't exist in the countryside. I'd imagine it always has, though maybe to a lesser degree than now I suppose, though I can't say from experience.General Ludd said:
Shit, out of time. Just to finish... "this is where we gets some of our own back", though not phrased in the same way, is fucking everywhere, every job I've had, people are resisting their bosses.
"I was at yor house last neet, and meyd mysel very comfortable. Ye hey nee family, and yor just won man on the colliery, I see ye her a greet lot of rooms, and big cellars, and plenty wine and beer in them, which I got ma share on. Noo I naw some at wor colliery that haws three or fower lads and lesses,and they live in won room not half as gude as yor cellar. I don't pretend to naw very much, but I naw there shudn't be that much difference. The only place we can gan to o the week ends is the yel hoose and hev a pint. I dinna pretend to be a profit, but I naw this, and lots o ma marrow na's te, that wer not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan to get se much o yor own way, wer gan to hev some o wors now..." - letter left by a pitman in the house of a colliery viewer in 1931 into which he and some mates had broken into during a riot.
totaladdict
Well-Known Member
Fucking brilliant! 
"a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan to get se much o yor own way, wer gan to hev some o wors now..."
Man, I have to work out how to write my dialect. I tell yer ba, ahs a dussy fucken rum en 'uh work owt.... but I'm getting there...
"a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan to get se much o yor own way, wer gan to hev some o wors now..."
Man, I have to work out how to write my dialect. I tell yer ba, ahs a dussy fucken rum en 'uh work owt.... but I'm getting there...
fishfingerer
sultan of cringe
In the same vein, a Molly Maguire's coffin notice. 
totaladdict
Well-Known Member
Someone got a letter at work the other day, and they were taking the piss out of it - "hehehe, look how thick this old boy is" - When I read it, it was brilliant. There wasn't a single bit of punctuation, apart from some weird spacing thing, throughout a page or so of writing. And barely a word was spelt "correctly". But I could hear this old boy speaking it... I bet he had knarled old hands, a wrinkly, brown face, teeth missing, and a grey v-neck jumper with holes in it over a stained old shirt - he could have been my grandad.
Up with re-localising language!
Up with re-localising language!
There are tons of brilliant incomprehensible letters in Hobawn's Captain Swing, can't find any pictures of them on the internet unfortunately.
Deleted.Smølfine said:
totaladdict
Well-Known Member
Cool. I've ordered it from the library....General Ludd said:
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Ah well - was a good idea. Maybe we can try again?
Nice one Smølfine.
Nice one Smølfine.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
Industrial agriculture and imports account for most of it, at least for the present. (See for example eating oil) Meanwhile we are exhausting and polluting our aquifers, trashing our soil with chemicals and industrial farming methods and progressively damaging the ecosystem services we depend on. (see for example Pimentel et al )ernestolynch said:
It takes about 10 units of oil energy to put one unit of food energy on the table, in an industrialised country such as our own.
Given that oil is a finite resource, and that demand for oil is rising inexorably, we may see some fairly radical changes in how our food systems work, if not in our own lifetimes then certainly within our childrens' lifetimes.
So I would venture to predict that ownership of the means of producing food, and the deployment of the labour required to work it, will become increasingly important issues when oil prices start rising as the demand outstrips supply.
Well I eat organic food anyhoo - but Bernie, thats another thread.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I agree that the problem is another thread, but the political significance of the countryside is in this thread, or so I understood. I was just underlining it.
Bernie Gunther
Fundamentalist Druid
I'll elaborate if I may? The current situation in the countryside is not something that can be sustained for more than a decade or two without some major changes. The most fundamental reason to work is to eat and this implies that changes in our food systems have political implications (see e.g. Harry Cleaver's stuff on Green Revolution ) The food system which currently supports us is unsustainable though, and the conditions that allow it to operated as is presently does are likely to change radically within a relatively few decades.
One only needs to consider the fuel protests to understand how sensitive our current agricultural (and food distribution) forms are to rising oil prices.
Given that food production is such a fundamental form of production, this suggests to me that there are both opportunities and threats in such changes. So it seems to me that likely future changes might be relevant to the sort of discussion we're having here.
Some thoughts on the likely implications:
1) Oil energy substitutes for labour now. Many current trends arise from this, but it seems unlikely that the enabling conditions can continue much longer.
2) Localisation of food systems seems like a logical response to high oil costs.
3) What would a labour-intensive future food system look like? Who profits?
4) Small farmers are mostly in serious shit now due to debt and recent food safety crises. Agribusiness and property developers are absorbing their land.
5) What alternatives to 'Bernard Matthews Turkey Gulag' would we like to see?
6) In 1800 we could feed 10m people without oil, now we have 60m but the ability to feed them the way we do depends on access to relatively cheap oil.
7) Attempts at sustainable and egalitarian rural ways of life are being made, albeit mostly by middle class hippies, at least in the UK. This model seems to work ok, but is it accessible to all?
One only needs to consider the fuel protests to understand how sensitive our current agricultural (and food distribution) forms are to rising oil prices.
Given that food production is such a fundamental form of production, this suggests to me that there are both opportunities and threats in such changes. So it seems to me that likely future changes might be relevant to the sort of discussion we're having here.
Some thoughts on the likely implications:
1) Oil energy substitutes for labour now. Many current trends arise from this, but it seems unlikely that the enabling conditions can continue much longer.
2) Localisation of food systems seems like a logical response to high oil costs.
3) What would a labour-intensive future food system look like? Who profits?
4) Small farmers are mostly in serious shit now due to debt and recent food safety crises. Agribusiness and property developers are absorbing their land.
5) What alternatives to 'Bernard Matthews Turkey Gulag' would we like to see?
6) In 1800 we could feed 10m people without oil, now we have 60m but the ability to feed them the way we do depends on access to relatively cheap oil.
7) Attempts at sustainable and egalitarian rural ways of life are being made, albeit mostly by middle class hippies, at least in the UK. This model seems to work ok, but is it accessible to all?
The Black Hand
Unclean
Funky_monks said:
Perhaps I am talking about the farmers whose operation was large enough to employ some workers... it is undeniable that some aspired to be gentlemen, and that some acheived it... (how many of course is a moot point)
AS for 'ideological evidence', quantifying this is difficult but it is definately a process...
newbie
undisambiguated
I guess it's uneven around the country but contributory factors to the rise in rural house prices include incomers buying country tranquility for retirement or for second/weekend properties and locals converting homes into 'country cottage' holiday rentals. This is townie money buying into an idealised British countryside, with the expectation that it be picture postcard pickled, often accompanied by the sound of the drawbridge to paradise being pulled up.
One response of the farmers to rising input costs- particularly oil- has been diversification. The FMD year revealed how reliant the rural population has become on leisure spending- farming tourists is second only to milking CAP subsidies in rural income generation, maybe overtaken it in popular areas. Another has been away from mass production of food staples towards niche products (organic &/or low volume, high value cheeses or wine or why- luxuries in other words).
There is a global market in food, sustained only by oil and exploitation. We (the population as a whole) eat oil and the fertility and labour of others (cows from Argentina, beans from Kenya) bought from supermarkets who care little for concepts like 'food miles' or sustainability. We want cheap food and lots of it (the obesity issue is pertinent here), that's why we accept the turkey gulag (brilliant!). Yet we decry the industrialisation of the countryside, because we want to go there for our leisure or our retirement, and we want it to remain picture postcard.
What this means for the rural working classes isn't clear (not to me anyway). Most likely continued dispersal away from the countryside into the towns & cities to make way for an older, richer population.
One response of the farmers to rising input costs- particularly oil- has been diversification. The FMD year revealed how reliant the rural population has become on leisure spending- farming tourists is second only to milking CAP subsidies in rural income generation, maybe overtaken it in popular areas. Another has been away from mass production of food staples towards niche products (organic &/or low volume, high value cheeses or wine or why- luxuries in other words).
There is a global market in food, sustained only by oil and exploitation. We (the population as a whole) eat oil and the fertility and labour of others (cows from Argentina, beans from Kenya) bought from supermarkets who care little for concepts like 'food miles' or sustainability. We want cheap food and lots of it (the obesity issue is pertinent here), that's why we accept the turkey gulag (brilliant!). Yet we decry the industrialisation of the countryside, because we want to go there for our leisure or our retirement, and we want it to remain picture postcard.
What this means for the rural working classes isn't clear (not to me anyway). Most likely continued dispersal away from the countryside into the towns & cities to make way for an older, richer population.
Streathamite
ideological dogmatist
there was a village school in Norfolk which was the scene of Britain's longest strike, for one.icepick said:
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