Agrarianism

• 1. Introduction

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  Agrarianism begins with a deceptively simple claim: that the farmer, not the merchant, not the factory worker, not the banker, is the most valuable citizen. Thomas Jefferson said exactly that. He built his vision of American democracy around it. But agrarianism is not simply a sentimental preference for rural life. It is a full social and political philosophy, one that has shaped revolutions, toppled governments, launched famines, and produced some of the most consequential land reforms in modern history.

  At its core, agrarianism argues for rural development, family farming, widespread property ownership, and political decentralization. It places the independent farmer at the center of a healthy society. It treats urban life, capitalism, and industrial technology as forces that destroy human dignity and independence.

  Those stakes are higher than they first appear. The questions this documentary will follow are urgent ones: What happens when agrarian ideals are seized by state power and imposed by force? Why did peasant parties rise across an entire continent in a single generation? And what does a philosophy rooted in soil and self-sufficiency have to say about the world that emerged after industrialization swallowed the countryside?

• 2. The Philosophy of the Soil

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  M. Thomas Inge, a scholar who has done foundational work defining agrarianism, lays out its core tenets with unusual precision. Farming, by his account, is the only occupation offering total independence and self-sufficiency. Urban life, capitalism, and technology destroy independence and dignity; the agricultural community is the model for all of society.

  One of Inge's tenets goes further than economics. Cultivation of the soil, he writes, carries within it a positive spiritual good. From direct contact with the earth, the cultivator acquires honor, manliness, self-reliance, courage, moral integrity, and hospitality. The farmer, in this view, follows God's own example by creating order from chaos.

  The philosopher agrees that the farmer has a concrete sense of identity, of historical and religious tradition, of belonging to a specific family, place, and region. These qualities are described as psychologically and culturally beneficial. They push back against the fragmented, alienated character of modern society.

  The Chinese school of Agriculturalism, known by its characters 农家, developed a parallel vision centuries earlier, one that emphasized peasant utopian communalism and egalitarianism. In societies shaped by Confucian thought, which held that humans are innately good, the farmer held an esteemed place while the merchant who simply made money was looked down upon.

  That Chinese philosophical tradition eventually reached Europe. François Quesnay, a committed student of Confucianism and an advocate of China's agrarian policies, drew on it when developing physiocracy, the French agrarian philosophy of the 18th century. Physiocracy, combined with the ideas of John Locke and the currents of the Romantic Era, became the foundation for modern European and American agrarianism.

• 3. Jefferson's Yeoman Republic

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  Jefferson feared a specific future for America: a nation of wage slaves. His worry was not abstract. Workers who depended on employers for income and sustenance could not vote independently, because their employers could manipulate their choices. The entire republican project rested, in Jefferson's view, on citizens who answered to no one but themselves and the land.

  His support base was committed to American republicanism defined against monarchy, aristocracy, clericalism, and corruption. The heroes of this politics were the yeoman farmer, the planter, and what they called the plain folk. Financiers, bankers, and industrialists, in the Jeffersonian account, created cesspools of corruption in the cities.

  To protect the republic from that corruption, Jefferson pursued specific economic levers. Scholar Clay Jenkinson documented Jefferson's advocacy for a graduated income tax, designed to discourage vast accumulations of wealth and to fund a form of redistribution downward. Jefferson also backed tariffs on imported goods, which he noted were mainly purchased by the wealthy.

  In 1811, Jefferson wrote to a friend with characteristic directness: these revenues will be levied entirely on the rich. The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the general government are levied. The poor man, he continued, pays not a farthing of tax to the general government, but on his salt.

  The federal policy of offering land grants, including thousands of gifts of land to veterans, earned general agreement among historians as having had a positive impact on economic development during the 19th century. That policy translated Jeffersonian philosophy into acres.

• 4. Revolution and Redistribution

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  Emiliano Zapata published the Plan of Ayala during the Mexican Revolution, calling for sweeping land reform and redistribution. His Liberation Army of the South fought on behalf of Mexican peasants who they saw as exploited by the landowning classes. Zapata was killed, and his forces were crushed, but his political ideas survived him.

  Zapatismo became the ideological ancestor of neozapatismo, the guiding philosophy of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. The EZLN, known in Spanish as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, emerged in the state of Chiapas in southernmost Mexico in 1994. It is a far-left libertarian socialist group that fuses Zapata's land politics with commitments to indigenous rights and community-level decision-making.

  Subcommander Marcos, a leading voice in that movement, described collective ownership of the land as the starting point for all other advances the movement sought to achieve. In his framing, once land passed into the hands of those who work it, the conditions were created for advances in government, health, education, housing, nutrition, women's participation, trade, culture, communication, and information. Recovering the means of production, land, animals, and machines, was the foundation.

  Across Eastern Europe, a different wave of agrarian politics emerged between 1860 and 1910, as commercialized agriculture and world market forces disrupted traditional rural society. Peasant parties advocated land reform to redistribute large estates. They wanted village cooperatives to keep crop profits in local hands. They pressed for credit institutions to fund improvements. Many were also nationalist parties, because peasants often worked land for landlords of a different ethnicity than their own.

  In Bulgaria, the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, known as BZNS, was organized in 1899 to resist taxes and build cooperatives. It came to power in 1919 and introduced wide-ranging economic, social, and legal reforms, only to be crushed by a conservative coup in 1923 that also resulted in the assassination of its leader, Aleksandar Stamboliyski, who had been born in 1879.

• 5. Mao's Countryside Catastrophe

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  Mao Zedong believed, in his own words, that a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it. He was describing the Chinese peasantry. The poorest, most politically blank members of society were, in his view, the prime material for a Marxist revolution.

  In 1958, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward. Among its many components was a radical reorganization of rural China. Mandatory collective farming replaced family agriculture. Peasants were organized into people's communes, units that consisted of 5,000 people on average. Wages and money were replaced by work points. Those who criticized the system were persecuted as rightists and counter-revolutionaries. Leaving the communes was forbidden, and those who attempted to escape faced party-orchestrated public struggle sessions that regularly devolved into beatings.

  The Great Leap Forward also included large-scale experiments in crop planting, new irrigation systems built without input from engineers, and an effort to have every commune produce steel in backyard furnaces. The Anti-Rightist Campaign had instilled a broad distrust of intellectuals in Chinese society, so engineers went unconsulted on the irrigation projects, and the wisdom of asking untrained peasants to smelt steel from scrap iron went publicly unquestioned. None of these experiments worked.

  The Four Pests Campaign compounded the damage. Peasants were called upon to destroy sparrows and other birds that ate crop seeds. Birds were shot or scared until they dropped from exhaustion. The result was an ecological disaster: the absence of predator birds allowed the insect population to explode, and crop-eating insects devastated harvests that were already failing.

  Local leaders knew the system was not working, but they falsified reports rather than risk punishment for missing quotas. Some reported that they were greatly exceeding targets. The Chinese state developed a completely false picture of success.

  The Great Chinese Famine began in 1959, lasted three years, and killed an estimated 15 to 30 million people. Bad weather combined with the new failed farming techniques to produce massive food shortages. By 1962, the Great Leap Forward was officially declared over.

  In the late 1960s and early 1970s, 10 percent of China's 1970 urban population was sent to remote rural villages, many in Inner Mongolia, as part of the Down to the Countryside Movement. The villages, still struggling to recover from the famine, could not support the newcomers. The sent-down youth had no agricultural experience, and their unskilled labor contributed little to the agricultural sector. Many of them died in the countryside. The policy was originally meant to be permanent, but by the end of the Cultural Revolution, some of those who survived were allowed to return to cities.

• 6. Agrarianism Exported and Distorted

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  The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia drew directly on the Great Leap Forward as a model. Heavily funded and supported by the People's Republic of China, the Khmer Rouge created their own version, which they called Maha Lout Ploh. It had similarly disastrous effects, contributing to what is now recognized as the Cambodian genocide.

  Pol Pot's goal was to create an entirely agrarian socialist society by forcibly relocating 100,000 people from Cambodia's cities into newly created communes. His aim was to purify the country by returning it to Year Zero, stripping away what he considered corrupting influences. Ethnic minorities were slaughtered alongside anyone suspected of being a reactionary or a member of the bourgeoisie. The criteria for suspicion extended to the most ordinary details of a person's appearance: wearing glasses was treated as grounds for execution.

  The killings ended only when Vietnam's army invaded and toppled the Khmer Rouge. But with Cambodia's entire society and agricultural economy in disarray, the country fell into renewed famine due to vast food shortages. International journalists began reporting on the crisis and sending images out to the world, provoking a massive international response and one of the most concentrated relief efforts of that era.

• 7. Agrarian Parties Across the Globe

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  In New Zealand, Richard Seddon had described the central political conflict as early as 1884: it is the rich and the poor; it is the wealthy and the landowners against the middle and labouring classes. The Liberal Party that emerged from this conflict pursued a deliberate strategy of creating a large class of small landowning farmers who would support Liberal ideals.

  From 1891 to 1911, the Liberal government purchased 3,100,000 acres of Maori land. It also purchased 1,300,000 acres from large estate holders for subdivision and resettlement by small farmers. The Advances to Settlers Act of 1894 provided low-interest mortgages. By 1903, Liberal dominance was so complete that no organized opposition remained in Parliament. In 1893, the same government had extended voting rights to women, making New Zealand the first country in the world to do so.

  In Kazakhstan, the Auyl People's Democratic Patriotic Party has emerged as the largest agrarian-oriented force in the country. Its presidential candidate Jiguli Dairabaev finished in second place in the 2022 presidential election with 3.4 percent of the vote. In the 2023 legislative election, Auyl entered parliament for the first time, winning nine seats in the lower chamber. The party focuses on decaying villages, rural development, and the agro-industrial complex, and has consistently opposed the ongoing rural flight from Kazakhstan's countryside.

  In Ireland, the Land War of 1878-1909 led to the Irish Land Acts, which ended absentee landlords and ground rent and redistributed land among peasant farmers. Clann na Talmhan, whose name translates as Family of the Land, was founded in 1938 to represent the poor smallholders of the west, supporting land reclamation, afforestation, and rates reform. The party governed as part of coalition governments before economic improvement in the 1960s drew farmers toward other parties; it disbanded in 1965.

  In Poland, the Polish People's Party traces its roots to agrarian politics in the Austro-Hungarian-controlled Galician region. Its biggest electoral success after the fall of the communist regime came in 1993, when it won 132 out of 460 parliamentary seats. In Oklahoma, tenancy had reportedly reached 55 percent by 1910, and the pressure of war, depressed crop prices, and blocked paths to land ownership drove agrarian counties toward Socialist politics, with that movement peaking in 1914 before being dismantled by voter suppression laws and wartime policies targeting groups considered subversive.