The end of the peasants (by François Jarrige)

“The machine isolates us, it has made us become more withdrawn than before, we are slaves of the machine”

— Anetta Balsamo, peasant woman from Italian Piedmont, 1970s

Selected pieces from Technocriticisms: from the refusal of machines to the contestation of technosciences (2014), an excellent work by the historian François Jarrige. We learn that the peasantry was a brake on industrial development, which is why the technocracy — the scientific and technical elite, entrepreneurs and statesmen — did everything possible to get rid of them. From the beginning, industrialization has been a political project imposed by technocracy on populations in an extremely authoritarian way, through institutional, physical and psychological violence (propaganda). Since then, this cancer called “development” has metastasized all over the world.

In the wake of the war, the economy of Europe, like that of Japan, was in crisis. In Germany, major cities, transport networks and industrial regions are in ruins. Even if the countryside was relatively spared by the bombings, agriculture is everywhere weakened and food shortages strike with varying degrees of intensity. In France, military operations have destroyed over 1 million hectares of agricultural land and imports are hampered by the collapse of infrastructure. But as early as 1952, production returned to its 1938 level. The post-war period was in fact marked by the transition from an imaginary of stability — the Third Agrarian Republic defended the peasantry in the face of a worrying urban proletariat — to a powerful modernising imaginary that intended to put agriculture at the service of the country's industrial development.^[1]. In a few decades, the peasantry disappeared or was massively transformed by modernization. In the middle of the 20th century, except in England and Belgium, peasants still represented more than 25% of the active population in Germany and the United States, a third in France or Sweden, more than 50% in Japan or Spain, and even three quarters of the working population in agrarian countries such as Algeria or Romania^[2]. This large workforce is not conducive to the intensive use of the most modern production techniques. Around 1950 in Europe, only a quarter of total traction power was motorized, and many farmers rejected the use of “American tractors”, which were too big for their modest farms. Moreover, in some regions, the first tractors used were often “homemade”, i.e. “assembled from cars and tractor parts by local blacksmiths or by the farmers themselves.”^[3] ”. More than in other industrialized countries, the French peasantry remained away from technical upheavals for a long time: the maintenance of self-subsistence practices and polyculture, the small size of farms (less than 20 hectares on average), the extent of the number of agricultural workers (still 36% of the active population in 1946), the existence of a protectionist policy that ensures an income for peasants, all this hampers the adoption of new techniques.

After 1950, the situation changed rapidly and the need for modernization was essential in the countryside. In thirty years, the peasantry is dead: it was reduced to only 15% of the active population in Spain and France around 1980, 10% in Japan, and even in Latin America the percentage of peasants fell by half in Mexico or Colombia between 1950 and the 1970s. In particular, the “agricultural revolution” takes the form of rapid but highly variable technical change. Marcel Mazoyer insists on the growing inequality between highly technical agriculture in northern countries and large farms in Latin America, Africa and Asia, and the mass of small farmers who continue to work manually using ancient tools and animal traction.^[4]. The technical modernization of agriculture is supported by the State and its institutions — in France, INRA was created in 1946 —, financed massively by the Marshall and Monnet plans, encouraged by agricultural unions, driven by the desire to eradicate the former peasant society identified in France with the mistakes of Vichy. Productivism is rapidly becoming established in various agricultural sectors — machinery to replace arms, consolidation, artificial insemination and treatment products to increase yields. In the modernising discourse, the peasant and his routines become the enemy that must be defeated: in 1959, the report of the Rueff-Armand Committee, commissioned by de Gaulle to report on “obstacles to economic expansion”, estimated that agriculture, with its archaic land structures, its archaic land structures, its excessively high prices and its “mentalities and behaviors that are indifferent or hostile to change”, “indirectly hampers the expansion of industry and Trade^[5] ”.

Contrary to the image sometimes conveyed of a peasantry enthusiastically accepting these transformations, sociological studies very early on underlined how many peasants wanted to continue their activities. While the end of peasants, victims of the generalization of machines, is announced, historical and sociological studies on modernization are multiplying.^[6]. A survey conducted in the 1950s on the attitudes of farmers in Sundgau to modernization in Alsace underlines, for example, “that they make no room for progress or modernization and that they are entirely focused on their own preservation and maintenance of Status Quo^[7] ”. Subsequently, rural sociology complicated its approach; it became interested in peasant rationalities and began to reject the linear model of diffusion of technical progress. In an investigation into the introduction of hybrid maize of American origin in the Pyrenees, Henri Mendras thus underlines that “the system of technical and economic thought based on yield and efficiency seems, at this level, foreign to farmers in Béarnais.^[8] ”. Modernization and agricultural mechanization were however rapid, and the million tractors were reached in the early 1960s in France. This productivist development is accompanied by a gigantic amount of suffering and anxiety, sometimes leading to depression and suicides, as shown by the work on the psychosociology of work conducted by Michèle Salmona as early as the 1970s.^[9]. The imposition of modernizing productivism crushes these men and women into a total denial of their suffering. In Italy, in the 1970s, the former resistance fighter Nuto Revelli collected hundreds of testimonies from peasants and mountaineers in the regions of the province of Cuneo, in Piedmont, victims of forced mechanization. These “forgotten people of modern times” say the shock that the modernization of the countryside represented, the gap between promises and achievements. Now, notes Anetta Balsamo, born in 1930, “the machine isolates us, it has made us become more withdrawn than before, we are slaves of the machine.^[10] ”.

It is rare for the peasant world to collectively resist technical projects that change their way of life. In 1946, for example, the peasants of the small village of Tignes, in Savoy, waged a long guerrilla war based on passive resistance and sabotaging actions against the construction of the huge hydroelectric dam, which was about to drown their lives.^[11]. But this struggle, which might have seemed legitimate a few years ago, now seems to be at odds with progress. By resisting major technological projects, peasants first appear as a threat to the survival and future of the nation. The State did not hesitate to be authoritarian in the face of these recalcitrants: the number of CRS sent to the village soon exceeded that of the inhabitants, and Tignes was transformed into a real military camp. A cultural war then pitted the modernising fractions against the villagers. The camp of modernizers extends from the liberal bourgeoisie, eager to develop a more effective capitalism on the American model, to communists, defenders of the policy initiated by EDF, which was recently nationalized. Major projects are on the rise in the context of reconstruction: in 1952, the Donzère-Mondragon dam, on the Rhône, was inaugurated with great pomp and circumstance, despite numerous local protests.^[12].

Peasant struggles against modernization remain poorly known and have continued to be marginalized. Protests against the concentration of farms, land consolidation, and new technical and industrial logics are however numerous. In 1962, for example, Breton farmers attacked a poultry farm accused of unfair and unfair competition. Modern facilities, such as feeders or feed bins, are trashed and thousands of frozen chickens are destroyed.^[13]. But this type of action is quickly repulsed. The scientist Roger Heim (1900-1979) seemed very alone at the time to denounce the harmful effects of major post-war technical projects^[14]. A centralist and a chemical engineer by training, Heim turned to the study of fungi and became a recognized naturalist scientist in the interwar period. In 1942, he joined the Resistance, then was reported to the Gestapo and deported to Germany, from where he was freed in 1945. In 1948, he was one of the founders of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN); in 1951, he became president of the National Museum of Natural History and, in 1963, president of the Academy of Sciences. Despite these positions, this central actor in the emergence of the nature protection movement was constantly marginalized. In Destruction and protection of nature (1952), as in his numerous subsequent publications, he drew up an implacable indictment against the modernization of agriculture. For example, he criticizes the development of mechanized rice farming, which is supposed to “enhance” the Camargue.^[15]. In 1963, he attacked the surge of “blind industrialization”, the “concentration in our unfortunate France of puffs of pollution, chemical as well as radioactive”; all this is the work of “a machine that only rarely builds without destroying because its forces are often activated by strict financial concern and not by collective interest, and by precise ignorance of living beings, including man.^[16] ”. This concern is not entirely isolated: in his review of the book, the geographer Max Sorre, professor at the Sorbonne, testifies to the same concerns: “We are going through an era marked by the unprecedented progress of technology. The technicians who make plans amaze us with their achievements, which we are sure to benefit from. They claim to dominate the world, seeing as legitimate the suppression of what gets in the way of their plans. These are short-term in relation to the life of societies. Now we realize that these mechanics, these economists who are slaves of numbers, may lack an indispensable form of intelligence, that their power is usurped and that they are preparing catastrophes for the next day. [...] I hope that reading his book will lead truly scientific minds who are not blind to technical illusions to distrust.^[17].”

A growing body of work shows the early, and largely transnational, emergence of environmental concerns during the Cold War era.^[18]. The environmentalist movement and thought are developing in particular in the United States, in close connection with debates on demographic perils and the overexploitation of natural resources. As early as 1948, Fairfield Osborn published The Plundered Planet, where he shows how “man has become a new geological force” that is preparing to “destroy the very sources of his life”. In the book, the naturalist calls into question the “new discoveries that have allowed man to exploit natural resources much more efficiently than before”, and he challenges the emerging idea that life could “be endlessly supported and ensured by artificial means.”^[19] ”. However, more than the proliferation and gigantism of industrial techniques, it is primarily the demographic explosion that concerns him, which contributes to the identification of technocritical analyses with “neo-Malthusianism”.^[20] ”. In the United States, the 1962 publication of Silent spring, the book by zoologist Rachel Carson, has the effect of a bombshell and contributes more than any other to disseminating the criticism of productivist agriculture^[21]. In it, she reveals the destructive effects of DDT on aquatic fauna and establishes a link between the death of ecosystems and the massive use of pesticides since 1945. It is causing a gigantic controversy over the project of artificialization and technical control of nature. Her work was quickly contested by the industry, and she was the subject of a vast amount of misinformation work: she was accused of being “hysterical”, of being in the service of the KGB and of wanting to bring American society back to the Middle Ages. As early as May 1963, however, the Kennedy Administration's Advisory Committee on Science recommended limiting the use of pesticides, and the book was a quick success with the general public. In France, it is translated very quickly, even if it does not arouse as much debate.

At the same time, the first concerns about the health of agricultural workers arose. As early as 1949, in California, twenty-five workers fell ill after working in an orchard sprayed with the Parathion pesticide; and, in September of the same year, the California Department of Public Health recorded 300 cases of poisoning by agricultural chemicals. But these health incidents are struggling to get people talking about them: they mainly concern immigrant populations who are silent and invisible in public spaces.^[22]. In France too, while the use of pesticides grew at a high rate of 7% per year in the years 1950-1960, the health of agricultural workers remains a secondary issue. Nathalie Jas explains this by the shortcomings of medicine, which is unable to identify the pathologies caused by exposure to pesticides, by the weakness of health concerns in agricultural environments, but also by the importance of controversies on the effects of pesticides, which tend to erase the manipulators of these products from the lists of victims in favor of consumers.^[23].

Overall, opposition to the intensification of agriculture through the use of chemistry and mechanization seems rare. They mainly concern isolated personalities or the first organic farming movements that then appeared in Germany, England and Japan.^[24]. Inspired by the agronomic principles theorized in the interwar period by the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, the German Pfeiffer, the English Howard or the Japanese Fukuoka, organic agriculture began to be structured in the years 1950-1960 in response to the growing tide of technoscientific practices.^[25]. In his last book, published shortly before his death in 1945, the botanist Albert Howard already denounced the excesses of mechanization and artificialization of modern agricultural practices.^[26]. These authors have opposed the technological surge and the transformation of agriculture through chemistry in the name of the unwavering links between soil fertility, food quality and population health, links that new methods risk breaking. For his part, the Swiss Hans Müller developed and popularized a method of agriculture called “organic organic”, which advocates the autonomy of producers, short distribution channels, and the supply of nitrogen by natural means. Based on work in bacteriology, however, these methods struggle to convince beyond a small circle. For these founders of “agro-ecology”, it is also not enough to challenge the surge of technosciences and its effects on the peasant world and natural environments, it is above all necessary to imagine other techniques and agronomic knowledge capable of competing with “conventional agriculture”: “Just as at the beginning of capitalism, weavers were unable to protect their women, children and themselves against brutal exploitation by assaulting The factories and by destroying the tall chimneys, in the same way we cannot win against this cause. determining the destiny of agriculture through a crusade against technology, against the engine. It is not against something, but only for something big and beautiful, likely to excite the young generation, that agriculture will win this battle...” wrote Hans Müller^[27].

In 1961 the French Association for Organic Agriculture was created, and in 1964 the Nature and Progress association appeared, which developed the first specifications defining the standards of so-called “organic” agriculture. It was also in 1961 that Pierre Rabhi, an Algerian immigrant and an industrialist in the suburbs of Paris, chose the “happy sobriety” of returning to earth against the above-ground modernity of the “Trente Glorieuses”. Disgusted by factory work, he discovered that the “productivist obsession” was “just as virulent in the countryside”. The young peasants of the Cévennes he meets are in fact caught “in an irrepressible transe”, indoctrinated by the modernising discourse, fascinated by the “feats of agrochemistry” as well as by the tractor, this “God who dominated everything”, this “God who dominated everything”, “symbol of power, emblem of technical progress shrouded in all fantasies”. For his part, he chose the “radical refusal of industrial agriculture” and gradually became the prophet of “organic subsistence agriculture” thought as an alternative to conventional technical production.^[28].

François Jarrige