Socialism and Subsistence

Both of my books, "Retreat" (2020) and "The Garden" (2025) had an aspect of left-wing politics to them. However, in sympathy to the research material (as opposed to bringing a forced perspective to bear on it) it wasn't appropriate to explore this in detail in the books. The lens of Eastern philosophy through which I surveyed the terrain, and which that generation favoured, gave a wider and more illuminating perspective on the counterculture than politics would have provided. This short blog-post survey of some carefully-selected books can be viewed as a political supplement to "The Garden."

 

In "Retreat" left-wing politics were mainly expressed by focus upon the Freudian-Marxism of theorists Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. In "The Garden", the twentieth-century strand of self-sufficiency represented by Helen and Scott Nearing, and to a lesser degree the ideas of John Seymour, had a background in Socialism.

 

 

Centering on Helen and Scott Nearing's work in homesteading in "The Garden", I had not read Scott Nearing's "The Making of a Radical" (1972). In his "political autobiography" he describes his affluent childhood, early years as a economics lecturer at Wharton School (recent alumni include Donald Trump...), being a refugee from academia and then the American Communist Party, his work as an opponent of child labour and conscientious objector, life as a freelancer on North America's informal lecture circuit, and being a persistent thorn in the side of the Military-Industrial Complex.

 

Reading the book in 2026 one can't help but lament Nearing's optimism. Born in 1883, although depressed by the two world wars which he describes as the logical outcome of capitalist colonialism, and then chastened by the McCarthy purges, Nearing was evidently cheered by the countercultural opposition to the Vietnam War and the Back-to-the-Land movement. He never witnessed the eighties and the permanence of that decade's ideology.

As much as Nearing remained primarily concerned with politics, I feel there's an evolution in his praxis when it came to his embrace of homesteading. He writes after describing the degradation of food by chemicals and long supply chains, "Under such condition any rational being will adopt and follow a simple regimen: avoid stale, processed, and poisonous food and keep away from supermarkets. To this negative rule he will add a positive life-saving note: for good health and long life, patronize organic farmer's markets - or, better still, raise and consume your own food on an organic, homestead basis." He remarks elsewhere, "a homestead becomes increasingly important for anyone whose post of duty lies inside the narrow confines of western civilization and who wants to live a quiet, simple and harmless, unharassed life."

 

Researching "The Garden" I came across the evidence that Nearing was something of a hypocrite. Truthfully, as well as many strikingly altruistic acts, he and his wife Helen subsisted on wage labour, inherited capital, insurance policies, and property sales. Writing in the context of "The Garden", which wasn't preoccupied with politics, I was able to refrain from judgement. But "The Making of a Radical" is harder to stomach knowing this. Honestly, it's still hard for me to be critical - and not just because I've been a lifelong beneficiary of capital. I mean, how is ANYONE supposed to retire in Western society without availing themselves of income produced by capital? That's what a pension scheme is...

 

It is, however, surprising that the radical Nearing doesn't make explicit the connection between the self-sufficiency he practices and the wellspring of Marxist thought which examines the Industrial Revolution. Michael Perelman's astonishing book "The Invention of Capitalism" (2000) makes it its task to flesh out Marx's ideas with regards to the greater population's transition from small-scale farming to urban wage labour. Tellingly Perelman, once a Professor of Economics at California State University, Chico, was also a homesteader.

 

Perelman's thesis is that by manipulating "Classical" economic ideology (the ghoulish, one-dimensional Adam Smith being the central nemesis here) and by villainous coercion (tactics ranging from depriving access to fishing and hunting, to the brutal theft of common land) the ruling classes herded what were once just "people" practicing a traditional way of life into the cities to create "the working class." In political terms these people had what was once their collective capital taken from them, whereupon they were forced into the activity of "Primitive Accumulation".

 

Primitive Accumulation is a transparent phenomenon today, one which we are all seemingly oblivious of. Indeed, I remember being confused when Mark Fisher described it to me once at an Ariel Pink gig. Just recently I came across this great explanation by the Trade Union leader Mick Lynch talking to The Telegraph where he points out that if you get up with an alarm clock and go to work, you are, as far as he's concerned, working class. Primitive Accumulation describes a situation in which a seller has nothing to trade but their own labour. They are therefore prey to capitalists because, essentially, they have no access to communal land by which to self-provision. If we all had our own land, like we once would have done before the idea of property, we would be free to grow our own food, and would not be dependent on anyone. This is how the traditional economies, largely destroyed by the Industrial Revolution, would have been organised. Once upon a time everyone was a farmer - and by being stopped from farming communal land, we became wage slaves.

 

There are, however, problems with the theory. Without question, huge population growth and the advance in agricultural technology (diminishing the need for labour) transformed rural life. Was the status quo as it had been arranged even feasible any longer? It's further complicated by the question of the division of labour. As much as, like Masanobu Fukuoka, one can dream that farming is everyone's fitting occupation, the truth is, certainly in terms of how we have evolved in the past 275 years, one can't imagine many people voluntarily to farm for a living.

 

Something that gets lost in Perelman's entirely cogent analysis is also that farming is often both grinding work, and perilous. Certainly, after many years of practice people undertake it more lightly with learnt skill, but it remains fraught by threats from the weather and nature. So while one can argue that in philosophical terms a self-sufficient farmer is "free" - in reality they might be subject to the worst imaginable bondage...

 

I've wanted to read E.P.Thompson's legendary book for a while now. Upon doing so I found myself drawing upon my own recent experience working as a maintenance gardener for rich households in Dulwich. I'm embarrassed to admit that the experience of picking up other people's children's toys and cleaning up their dog shit gave me a valuable reminder of how the affluent float upon the labour of the less fortunate. I've led a privileged life and, just as I have seen others come to the same erroneous conclusion, it's easy to assume that people working harder jobs: cleaners, delivery drivers, nurses, cooks, fisheries workers, abattoir employees, enjoy their fair share of perks and are necessarily content with their lot. Not so.

 

Since August 2023 I have also witnessed my own tiny career as an animator fall apart as a result of titanic currents in the economy. In the epic and engrossing "The Making of the English Working Class" (1963) Thompson describes the cropper's skill in which the surface of cloth was elevated by means of teazles. Cropper's wages were regulated according to the value of the finished cloth and were therefore, not only in a strong bargaining position, they also organised strongly to keep out unskilled workers. Somewhat like digital animators, who undertook what was once considered a highly technical role, Croppers were viewed as an "aristocracy" of workers. I had to laugh at the description of croppers as being "notoriously the least manageable of any persons employed in this important manufacture", because I've seen similar arrogance among animators. And yet, just as AI is fast making inroads into my own profession, the increasing introduction of new technology in the form of the gig-mill threatened the cropper's jobs. An account of 1841 describes how, "The old croppers have turned themselves to any thing they can get to do; some acting as bailiffs, water-carriers, scavengers, or selling oranges, cakes, tapes and laces, gingerbread, blacking..." No doubt their marriages and families also broke apart.

 

It didn't escape my notice that my own paternal grandmother's family are mentioned in the book "The Crossley Carpet Power Loom, patented in 1851, could weave twelve to fourteen times the speed of hand..."[p315] So turns the wheel of history!

 

 

 

Agriculture isn't dwelled upon in "The Making of the English Working Class". Thompson is mainly concerned with the hideous disenfranchisement and abuse of that section of the population that became "the working class". However, one of the key historical figures in the resistance to capital, the radical William Cobbett (1765-1835) features prominently in the book. A colourful character, apparently in love with the sound of his voice, as a result of his radicalism Cobbett had to take refuge on occasion in France and twice in America. Seemingly experiencing the full range of disgrace and eminence, he was at stages both imprisoned and an MP.

 

I previously came across "Cottage Economy" (1821), one of the foundational books on self-sufficiency, through both John Seymour, and also via the pioneering American market gardener Eliot Coleman - so I was delighted to make the connection to Cobbett the radical. The book is written by way of emphasising the traditional homesteading techniques which were being fast eroded by the Industrial Revolution. The tone, however, is valuable on its own, and I can see exactly why John Seymour, another lively voice, delighted in Cobbett's writing. Here are few examples:

[Goats on boats] "When sea voyages are so stormy as to kill geese, ducks, fowls, and almost pigs, the goats are well and lively; and when a dog of no kind can keep the deck for a minute, a goat will skip about upon it bold as brass."

 

[Cruelty to Turkeys] "In France they sometimes pick Turkeys alive, to make them tender; of which I shall only say, that the man that can do this, or order it be done, ought to be skinned alive himself." 

 

[Preferring smoking and drinking] "A son who prefers a "devil" and a glass of grog to a hunch of bread and a bowl of cold milk, I regard as a pest; and for this pest the father has to thank himself."

Cobbett's other book in this territory "The English Gardener" (1829) is, somewhat disappointingly, dedicated to ornamental horticulture.

 

 

I must thank Patrick Jones of Artist as Family for making me aware of this and the Perelman books. My edition of Kirkpatrick Sale's "Rebels Against the Future"(1996) has a definitively nineties feel. The paper has yellowed in the same way as my cherished copy of David Toop's "Ocean of Sound" (1995) just as the cover is somehow reminiscent of it.

 

Sale's book does in part cover agriculture. There are passages describing the wretched lives of agricultural field workers, the effects of enclosure, and mentions of farm labourer's protests against threshing machines which inspired a "silent, embittered, vengeful campaign of poaching, burning, and rural terror." However, the still shocking story of Luddism is the book's central concern. As much as I regard their actions, smashing up mechanical looms, as futile, one has to admire the Luddites' stubborn attitude in the face of technological disenfranchisement.

 

The forces martialled against the Luddites are terrifying: "Soon after the tumult of John Wesley's funeral, ten troops of the Royal Horse Guards Blue and two regiments of the Berkshire regular militia, a total of some eight or nine hundred cavalry under the command of  a General Dyott and a thousand infantrymen, were called to Nottingham - the greatest force, as Home Secretary Richard Ryder told the House of Commons the next year, that had ever been used in England's history to respond to a domestic "disturbance." To this force was added a rotating team of thirty-six special constables to patrol the streets at night, various troops of local reserve militia, a further regiment of five hundred or so regular troops in late December, and two police magistrates sent up from London to coordinate policy with Nottingham town officials." Crikey.

 

Writing in the nineties Kirkpatrick Sale winds up his book with a chapter on the Neo-Luddites which is leveled at the disruption caused by modern computer technology. A recent book by Brian Merchant "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech" (2023) brings the argument forward to AI. It's safe to say that the importance of the example of the Luddites is set to run and run. I hesitate to even type it into a platform owned Google, but surely data centres will inevitably attract this kind of malicious vandalism?

 

 

 

The plots of land which are so critical to the story told in "The Garden" are small fields, geographically peripheral, and sometimes derelict. Few were much greater than three acres in size. Restrictively zoned as agricultural land, unused patches of wasteland, or part of the commons, they were usually not valuable real estate. Sometimes the land was owned by the growers and farmers: John Seymour's scruffy corner of Wales, Eliot Coleman's unpromising Maine shoreline, Fukuoka's family farm, Bill Wheeler's vegetable patch at Ahimsa Ranch, or David Holmgren's tiny homestead at Melliodora. However, just as often growers and farmers rented or borrowed land: Thoreau's bean field amid the commons, Peter Caddy's dunes at the Findhorn caravan park, Alan Chadwick's hillside on university grounds, John Jeavons' degraded section of an industrial estate, or Hilde Maingay's original New Alchemy plot. The ownership of some other farms is more of a grey area, for instance Patrick Holden speaks openly about his sizeable mortgage with the Anthroposophical Triodos bank for the much larger Bwlchwernen Fawr - effectively that financial institution owns it...

 

Very little was made of this state of affairs by either the people I interviewed or in the profusion of literature I read. More than any other interviewee the subject was raised by Black farmer Karen Washington. She had started off in the eighties repurposing abandoned lots in the Bronx and growing food in those guerilla gardens. Her recent work has been with the Black Farmer Fund attempting to secure land for growers and farmers. However, she told me that she wants to encourage her people to be allowed to be stewards or caretakers of land. She casts doubt over the importance of agricultural property ownership "Because you don't live long enough to own anything."

Paradoxically, in almost every case in the book, using the alchemy of "The Law of Return" (building a topsoil with organic matter), the growers and farmers I covered turned what was, in agricultural terms, worthless land into something very valuable.

 

This important access to land is a red hot political ticket. But, certainly in what I have read, surprisingly the issue of property ownership rarely transects with that of farming and growing at small scale. There is the tireless work of Simon Fairlie who in my surmise, at least historically, if not recently, was more concerned with land ownership than the practicalities of farming. However, books like Nick Hayes' "The Book of Trespass" (2020) or Guy Shrubsole's "Who owns England?" (2019) are concerned with the primal injustice of Enclosure and in political terms with the Right to Roam and its emphasis on hiking and camping.

 

It doesn't seem like much political energy is focused upon a Neo-Peasant revolution like John Seymour (or more recently Chris Smaje) envision, with massive estates being broken down and the landscape re-partitioned into a patchwork of small organic farms. Certainly, if you follow the logic of Marx through Michael Perelman and his exposition of how the theft of common land caused the inability of people to self-provision, thereby driving them into the state of Primitive Accumulation, then this ought to be the true axis of agitation. I can only conjecture that the combination of people's complete alienation from the question of their food and where it comes from, the relatively tiny minority interest in food production, and the current effectiveness of technological solutions to farm at scale without the need for labour, all drive the question into obscurity. It's unlikely anything short of the devastating collapse of society will change that any time soon.

Permaculture co-originator reviews my book "The Garden"

 

Head over here to read David Holmgren's review of my book "The Garden: Visionary Growers and Farmers of the Counterculture."

 

I often receive books to review from publishers, but recently I was sent an inscribed copy of a book, The Garden, directly from the author, Mathew Ingram. A year after my extended interview with him in June 2023, I received the manuscript for factchecking the material that he had written about my connections to the counterculture of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. This exploration was part of his wider thesis that the emergence of organic growing and agriculture had a strong crossover with philosophical and spiritual influences in the Western world from Eastern and Indigenous cultures. He suggests that the alternative hippy counterculture of those years had a pivotal role in drawing together the search for sustainable relationships to nature in the material realm, and the search for inner harmony and growth in the spiritual realm.

With the business of life (and perhaps because I am approaching 70 years old), I had completely forgotten about our connection when Mathew’s 500 page inscribed tome arrived. As an author, it’s a bit shameful to admit that I don’t read so many books connected to permaculture and its kindred subjects these days, but once I started this one, I couldn’t put it down. 

Permaculture co-originator Bill Mollison’s apparently hard-line dismissal of both hippy vegetarian counterculture and any notions of what he called ‘woo woo’ spiritualism suggested to Ingram that permaculture might not be an important strand supporting his grand narrative. But in the book, as with many other pioneers of organics and kindred ecologically-informed working relationships with nature, he used my own origins and inspirations to make that case. It was of course an honour to have a researcher be so thorough in his reading of my work and include me in his panoply of visionaries, pioneers and practitioners as diverse as Steiner, Lady Eve Balfour, Fukuoka, John Seymour, John Todd, Vandana Shiva, Eliot Coleman, Patrick Holden and Paul Hawken, amongst others. 

While the lack of footnotes to each and every reference, along with a few typos and rare errors (such as mixing up carbon to nitrogen ratios in composting) might frustrate the more academically inclined reader, I found the story of people, events and consequences of all these connections and crossovers an enthralling read. It confirmed and filled in my own scattered and sketchy understanding of this history of both organics and the counterculture. Further, I found myself imagining all the other permaculture pioneers from Declan Kennedy in Germany to Robyn Francis in Australia, who might be included to reinforce his thesis, along with Albert Bates in the USA whose story is featured in the book. Perhaps inevitably, the story is strongly biased in the Anglo-American and, more generally, English speaking world, but where does one draw the line between a book and an encyclopedia?

While I wholehearted concur with his thesis that the counterculture was a primary influence in the emergence of working ecological relationships with nature in gardening and farming, I noted his acknowledgement of the role of progressive collectivist politics of the left, in my own and many other of the organic pioneers. On the other hand I think Ingram perhaps underplays the contribution to organics of agrarian social conservatives from the libertarian right. I agree with his dismissal of some academic attempts to portray a strong connection between fascist ideology and organics, given that fascist ideology was so popular in the wider society in which organics emerged in the 1930s. However, as a young man immersing myself in Australian and New Zealand organic networks in the 1970s, I was surprised to see how many of that older generation came from the other end of the political spectrum to my own second generation, radical leftist heritage. Over the last half century, I have come to see the threads of wisdom from that lineage in its fruitful fusion with the left. 

None of this undermines the strength of Ingram’s thesis about the counterculture, which in many ways was outside of the left-right political framework. And in any case, maybe once the Trumpian revolution runs its course with a reformation of both agriculture and health along ecological principles, someone will write the book about how socially conservative values, including Christianity, were the primary wellsprings of the new organic orthodoxy. As always, the victors write history.

But to return to Ingram’s thesis… If his research throughout was as thorough as the parts with me, then I am really impressed at this effort spanning so many sources, including more than 300 cited books. As the people and events featured reach back some generations, it is timely in capturing firsthand recollections and reflections from so many older people still alive to pass on their aural history. These stories are a great source for understanding how a significant proportion of a generation reacted to the evidence that their ordinary everyday lives, and the systems that shaped them, would be seen by future generations as crimes against those future generations and Mother Nature herself.

Ingram avoids the tendency to either romanticise or demonise the counterculture and the working relationships with nature it imagined, spawned and rediscovered. 

He explores issues that have since become centre stage in any consideration of humanity’s future: from the practical question of till or no till and every variation between; the place of domestic livestock and wildlife in human habitats; the acknowledgement and/or appropriation of indigenous knowledge; the role of technology, for better and worse, in finding our place in nature; to the ways in which we can contribute to regenerating Mother Earth that reflect our earthly and etheric natures. 

For a general audience, this book is a window into how those at the fringe have been the creative sources of so many progressive and hopeful signs in a world of accelerating stresses and confusions. Thus I see it as an antidote to the current rising demands for conformity to current orthodoxies, which ironically includes some of those that the counterculture have helped create. 

As we say ‘the action is at the edge’. This design principle works both spatially, in the interface with nature, and conceptually. The latter being characterised by the derided fringe-thinkers prepared to ignore the shackles of orthodoxy and chart their own path to the future in the brave hope that, if it is fruitful, others will follow.

For all those deeply embedded in permaculture as a lived reality, a conceptual framework and a global movement, I think this book is a must-read for delving into the many kindred spirits, influences and actions that precede and parallel the origins, rise and spread of permaculture over almost 50 years. 

And I think I now have to delve back into Ingram’s Retreat: how the counterculture invented wellness, which itself laid the foundation for this further exploration into the now ancient organic maxim ‘healthy soil, healthy plants, healthy animals and healthy people’.

Eartha & Aetherias

 

Alicia Bay Laurel is the celebrated polymath - artist, author, and musician - who found international fame as the visionary communard behind the classic self-sufficiency book "Living on the Earth".

Her latest production Eartha & Aetherias is described by her as an "eco sci-fi romantasy graphic novella." It draws upon her experiences living in Hawaii during the nineteen seventies and all that entailed: "hiking on volcanic mountains, swimming in waterfall pools, ecstatic improvisational dancing, communal living in the jungle, sailing, camping on beaches, learning natural medicine from holistic healers, permaculture gardening, foraging, cooking with hand-gathered ingredients, chanting with Tibetan lamas, and receiving Hawaiian songs & guitar tuning from Hawaiian elders."

The book's first incarnation was presented by "twenty-five year old" Alicia as a reading with illustrations and accompanying slides to a packed audience at the Maui Community Theatre in Kahului in 1974. But Alicia never pressed ahead with publishing it as she threw herself into touring as a singer-songwriter and storyteller. Circling back fifty years later "seventy-five year old" Alicia has brought a whole other set of talents to the production, and in a sense completion, of this enchanting book.

The central drama in the story is the ecstatic unification of the characters Eartha, the feminine nymph representing the embodied powers of mother Earth, and Aetherias, the masculine spirit representing an unfettered cosmic energy. In their coming together in love, the divine is made manifest. This classic spiritual concept is handled with the sophistication and profound wisdom that only this Queen of the Hippies could could bring to the tale.

There was so much I loved about the book. In the first instance I found the nudity of Alicia's characters very liberating. It's hard to imagine in our repressed and buttoned-down society how the natural unadorned body needn't immediately be sexualised, or equally that that sexuality might be woven with kindness and affection, and not fraught with violence. Alicia's instantly recognisable drawings are enchanting and slyly funny, the decorative aspect of the illustrations endlessly inventive, and structural ideas like the dotted lines representing "dubbed out" spiritual beings are ingenious.

The book is available in colour and with a monochromatic interior edition from her excellent website. Get yourself thence for some authentic hippie vibes in 2026.

Knepp

 

I drove down to Knepp yesterday with my friend Mags. The weather was stunning. We had a tour around the walled garden but the highlight for me was wandering around the estate itself. The place just feels so HEALTHY! The birdsong is simply incredible - Mags has a birdsong app on her phone - she ran it and there seven birds audible just where we were standing.

 

The rewilding is all very well and interesting but I really admire that they sell meat of the animals they cull - even horse we discovered. I had a choice Longhorn steak for lunch. The Knepp film is great if you haven't seen it - but I was also intrigued to learn that Isabella Tree has an interest in the esoteric religion of Nepal.

Einkorn

A field of Einkorn and Emmer Wheat I photographed growing at FarmEd.

I'm having a thing with Doves Farm Organic Wholemeal Stoneground Einkorn Flour.

I've only rarely endorsed a product like I did with Hodmedod's delicious Carlin Peas. That's reserved for food so great that by eating it you're making the world a better place.

Einkorn wheat is an ancient grain that was originally harvested as many as 30,000 years ago. The USDA list it as having the following advantages over modern wheat: +44% Protein, +291% Riboflavin, +23% Vitamin B6, +290% Beta Carotene, +28% Iron, +3367% Vitamin A, +10% Manganese, and +250% Lutein. I swear that after eating it for a while you can really feel that nutrition bump.

Like many people are discovering about themselves, I'm a bit sensitive to gluten. Einkorn has less gluten which is also less complex, and consequently easier to digest. Of course, in the absence of that regular gluten, that means that it doesn't make such pillowy bread and pastry. Like, so what?

Because Einkorn hasn't been refined through breeding, it has a relatively simple 14 chromosomes (as opposed to Industrial Wheat's 42 chromosomes). All these factors define it as food which predates Industrial agriculture's meddling. Today's food, especially food which isn't grown organically, is not only doused with toxic chemicals, it's markedly less nutritious.

I'm thinking more and more about how that big shift in human behaviour from our traditional pre-Industrial lifestyle, to how we live today, is my real subject. The counterculture seems to me to be an inchoate yearning for that relatively recent lifestyle. It was a yearning for traditional non-hierarchical spiritual beliefs, truly "conventional" agriculture, natural food, and community living.

I really missed bread, and this has now become THE staple in my diet. I make a simple loaf with it once a week, and usually eat it twice a day. In due course I might figure out to make a sourdough loaf but right now that's beyond me.