The relationship between the village and the city is an old topic of science, but also of everyday life. Marx still talked about the "idiocy of the countryside", but he changed his opinion about the peasants. But let's let Marx go and tell a more modest story about the relationship with the countryside in the "Croatian ideology". However, let's stay a little longer on the classics. The left-wing writer Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem "The peasant takes care of his field" in which he says: "The peasant takes care of his field,/ raises cattle, pays taxes,/ makes children so he doesn't have to keep servants and/ depends on the price of milk." And then something about citizens: "Citizens talk about love for their native breast,/ About a healthy peasant strain and that/ That the peasant is the foundation of the nation." The continuation of the poem reverses these two parts and thus shows the Pyrrhic victory of bourgeois ideology over peasant life. We could say that this is the fate of every "peasant party" under capitalism, and we do not mean only the one that is called that.
HDZ also liked to refer to the healthy Croatian worker and peasant. We know what we got. And yet the criticism of Croatian criminal privatization focused on the destruction of industrial enterprises. It's as if agriculture wasn't completely destroyed already in the first wave. Until the international capitalists intervened, the local "rural bourgeoisie" in hastily emerging divided the PIKs and distributed the land first among the local directors, heads of those same former, now "privatized" PIKs, directors of schools and hospitals. He doesn't care that the new owners had no idea about farming. And so they soon became land buyers. In our country, the peasant, and especially the one connected to a processing industry in his area, fell into ruin almost faster than the city workers. What benefited him the least was the EU policy, which favored the consolidation of property and the so-called family farms. The idea that existing peasant-workers would become farmers was a disaster in the beginning. We'll see, the farmers will come later. And mostly from the city.
But that's why in the criticism of the newly created so-called transitional situation in ideology, the peasant suffered from his unsuspecting allies. How many lines have been written about how our conflicts, the destruction of the state and wars were hidden by the peasants. At the same time, admittedly, they did not mean only farmers, but some imaginary "peasant mentality". According to those critics, our wars are the result of pre-modern tribal conflicts, the peasants' innate attachment to blood and soil. Although in reality they were only offered blood, and their land was taken away. It also turned out that the wars for the Yugoslav inheritance were planned in the countryside. If at first they were invented in barracks and in the basements of companies, it was certainly in the cities. Our "peasants" were not only urban, but to a large extent also in the structures of the former government. Maps of the soil were drawn at first on obscure, and later on world stages, to which newly formed states and their "statesmen" were invited. Those who were disgusted by all this often attributed the matter to the primitivism of the participants in the "negotiations". And they associated this primitivism with lack of education. And that is all characteristic of peasants. He doesn't care that there were mostly doctors of science around the tables (most often lawyers and doctors, while one history doctor was enough for Croatia).
All this for Croatia was well expressed in the institution of "Herzegovinians", which boils down to the myth of how wild people came from the rocky mountains and chased the tame ones out of the fertile plains, I guess. The phenomenology of everyday life talked about those in white socks, square heads and the like. This shows that intolerance should not be sought only along ethnic lines, but it can also flourish within a nation. Croatia "disintegrated" into regions, in which every other region was suspicious of the first one for insufficiently good Croatia. What do the Dalmatians, Istrians, etc. want? These are all "peasants" without a real national feeling. Something was born that was later called "urban racism". Affected by the war and displaced, real peasants could watch it from a greater and greater distance. They were sacrificial lambs, but not subjects in their cause.
And now what? Whoever could, fled the village. It was better to be a displaced refugee in Zagreb than to remain a peasant in a devastated province. And then suddenly there was a reversal, ideologically, of course. Once the real peasants were thoroughly destroyed, when the foundations of their existence were pulled out from under their feet, the new fashion began to advertise nothing less than a departure from the city to the countryside. In some strange Rousseauian rapture of "return to nature", individual existences that left the "comfort of city life" or even lucrative careers for the new peasant life began to be advertised. There has never been so much praise for OPGs, as the finally found form of "family farms", than today. People should be returned to the vacated villages. But how? So they will become farmers, according to all the rules of the EU. And more than that. They will become our models of excellence. Someone who produces premium foods and markets them on the world market.
And so becoming a peasant is now back in. He doesn't care that it is not a solution for the majority of the aging population that still remains in the countryside. The peasant will return. And that in a big way, as our village entrepreneur. Well, it doesn't even have to be "ours". We are now, as a civilized European country, open to all foreigners, if they are from the Western world (and the British are good, even though they are not from the EU), who are ready to leave their boring office jobs at computers and take up hard work. To grow cattle, exotic plants or make top quality cheeses and wines. Nothing, because in those small businesses the main tool is the computer again. And that work on such a property is just as alienating as office work, if not more so. Owner-workers boast that they work from morning to night, but it is not difficult for them because they work for themselves. Nobody counts their overtime hours. For them, the union is a mental noun. They are happy because they finally don't have a boss. And they are surrounded by beautiful nature.
And that mystique of nature, as the proximity of a fulfilled life, although it could have a grain of rationality, was elevated to the goddess of abstract negation of capitalist reality. The ideology claims that the new peasants managed to evade the system. That the productivist and profit logic does not apply to them. They are not under pressure from the global division of labor, they are not under pressure from the world market. And people in the cities suffer from all that. Does this mean that we will all move to farms and raise crops and livestock and the world will become one sustainable arcadia?
There is one small catch. These "family farms" are only possible in a world where, in addition to them, there is also an agricultural industry and a large economy, no matter how displaced it may be. The idea of "family farms", when it was not allowed to indigenous peasants for various reasons, was and remains a middle-class or petty-bourgeois idea. Because only the middle class, in its intermediate position between the big bourgeoisie and the workers, can afford this lifestyle. Top wine, yes. But to whom? If we do not assume that the manufacturer knows all his customers personally and does not send his product to their home address, and they are also wealthy, he is connected to large distribution chains and is part of the system in a hundred other ways.
The idea that some exclusive OPGs will escape capitalism is a utopian illusion, and it is also problematic that, if they are already part of the system, they will be ennobled. Because their production is not class neutral. It is a middle-class production for the same or even richer customers. It cannot replace mass industrial production, for example. food. Someone will say - but she won't. Some people have found their niches from which they supply people in other niches. And what's wrong with that? Since we don't want to fall into moralism ourselves while denouncing the moralism of the ideology of small entrepreneurs in agriculture, let's just say that their work is not the solution to all the problems they claim to be. After all, they too are subject to the whims of the market, so some succeed and others fail.
And what about our "peasant question" from the beginning of the text? It is obvious that in today's way of production, it cannot be solved anywhere, not even here. That is why it is possible that e.g. a shepherd with his herd passes by the state-of-the-art goat farm, which is often not useful even to ensure a minimum existence. But that doesn't bother the "Croatian ideology" that he is now talking about the benefits of returning to the countryside (an amusing example is a football star who likes to pick potatoes in his free time, on his relative's farm). And the "new peasants" will only help finish off the old ones. For them, the difference between peasants as agricultural workers and peasants as a mentality, whose primitiveness has threatened our urban culture, will remain valid.
Bonus video:
