It is both a personal and a political account. The book is full of poverty, displacement, and the down-trodden lives of rural communities. Tragically here-in lie the most obvious parallels. The similar processes of enclosure that took place in Ireland or Poland, the oppressive reality of the Church and landlords whose demands screwed the population still further. The difficulties of poverty, hunger and drought.
Much of the book is interesting. There's a wealth of material. While it is easy to note the hardships, Joyce also celebrates the culture of the peasant. The music, songs, poetry and literature. But the book suffers from too many viewpoints. The reader is bounced geographically and finds themselves peppered with facts and allusions, while it is not always clear to whom material refers. Joyce is also prone to an over literary style, he says at one point "The presence of the past is my theme" but its not particularly clear what he means by this. He indicates that this is about how "solid, real things" such as buildings and fields shapes, shape the "possibilities for remembering", but its not clear how this is.
Such philosophical diversions make the book hard to love. The author is on much stronger ground when linking peasant history to cultural changes and following through the implications of this. He notes, for instance, that "old forms of peasant exploitation have been replaced by new ones, those of large-scale capitalist food production" and then how the old gang-master systems have become industrialised. HE writes, of southern Italy, how:
Newly arrived workers are cheaprer than those who have been working in Italy for a long time, who have often developed decent relationships with local farmers and are mostly unionised. The Tunisians fall into the first category, the Romanians and immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa into the former (I think he means latter here)... The children and grandchildren of once impoverished Italian peasants now, in some cases, exploit other European and African peasants or those people's children. Women face a combination of excessive overtime, harsh working and living conditions, the withholding of wages and physical and sexual violence.
But here too he pulls his punches - not in highlighting the realities of rural work for immigrants - but in failing to truly explore how industrial agriculture arose on the back of rural work and how and why it has been embedded. I remember reading Philip Lymbery's book Dead Zone which explores how the European Union's Common Agriculture Policy decimated Eastern Europe's small-scale farming. It's a horror story, yet its barely a diversion in Joyce's book.
That said, Joyce is firmly on the side of those migrant workers whose explotiation generates billions for massive corporations while leaving them in poverty and us with unhealthy, tasteless food. In fact, Joyce's solidarity with the underdog runs through the book - and not just for familial reasons. He draws heavily on the writings of John Berger, a radical Marxist who never neglected the peasants. Joyce has imbibed Berger's radicalism, but I fear that he never really gets to the bottom of a crucial question: What is a peasant.
There are hints of this early on. Joyce quotes the Russian economist Alexander Chayanov as offering a defintion of the peasant "as primarily orientated to securing the subsistence needs of the family unit". It remains, probably, the most useful definition of a peasant. But Joyce then queries this and says if this is "strictly applied it would leave Europe in recent centuries pretty much bereft of peasants, contrary to common sense and common usage." But this is unhelpful. Common usage is never how we should define things, and common sense doesn't tell us anything. In fact the problem with Joyce's approach (and it is opposite to Chayanov) is that essentially it defines the peasantry based on an amorphous relationship to the land, not to the reality of their explotiation. Understanding why rural people are more likely to be workers and not peasants ought to have been a core part of this book - as it also explains the destruction of culture and people that took place in rural areas.
This is why the chapters of the book that explore the transformation of rural life are inadequate - because Joyce rarely drills down to examine how explotiation changes. In fact while Joyce rightly argues for the uniqueness of the peasantry, he never really makes it clear what that uniqueness is. Instead it becomes simply their culture, or the fact they work the land in some way. At one point he tells us confidently that there were "many peasants" in the USA - but not by any useful definition. As a result Joyce finds himself making points that muddy things, rather than clarifying. Is "peasant music... essentially different, in that it is interwoven more deeply with life"? There plenty of places were music is deeply embedded in life which are certainly not peasant.
In places Joyce critics those Marxists who he says have failed to get to grips with the peasantry. Here I was also disappointed. He quotes Marx as describing the peasantry as living in the "idiocy of rural life", but seems unaware that many Marxists recognise that this was a mistranslation, Hal Draper famously translating the sentence as "isolation of rural life" in his edition of the Communist Manifesto. Similarly in discussing a radical peasant uprising he notes that "these people were not Marx's potatoes in a sack, incapable of joint action". But the history of peasant struggles does show the exact opposite. In many cases, the richer peasants did refuse to unite with the poorer peasants, or their united action diverged at the point when their interests began to differentiate. This is the result of the problem of not diving deep into the peasants' actual economic reality - you end up in a position where all peasants are the same.
My final disappointment with the book was Joyce's failure to really discuss the rich tradition of peasant resistance - particularly in Eastern Europe which much of the discusses. There is a brave and forgotten history of rebellion and uprising, brilliantly recounted in Jakub S. Beneš recent history. But there's nothing here on rural trade unionism, the Molly Maguires, Captain Rock and so on, except a few disappointly sparse references.
Readers looking for a wide analysis of what happened to the peasantry will probably be disappointed by this book. It does not really offer that. It does have some interesting and well researched material on culture and literarture and readers will, as I did, enjoy this as well as Joyce's curation of photographs and other material. But I was left unsatisfied at this lament for a lost world that never quite breaks free of romanticism.
Related Reviews
Beneš - The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe
Lewin - Russian Peasants & Soviet Power: A Study of Collectivization
Bax - The Peasants War in Germany
Patnaik & Moyo - The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
Lenin - The Agrarian Programme of Social-Democracy in the First Russian Revolution 1905-1907
Bello - The Food Wars
Bernstein - Class Dynamics of Agrarian Change
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