Freedom and Peace Require Anti-Democratic Systems

“...the democratic [and unitary] republic is the shortest path to the dictatorship of the proletariat. For such a republic . . . inevitably leads to such an extension, development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle that, as soon as there arises the possibility of satisfying the underlying interests of the oppressed masses, this possibility is realized inevitably and solely through the dictatorship of the proletariat.” – Lenin, ‘State and Revolution’
 
As the saying goes, when somebody tells you who they are, believe them. Lenin’s analysis throughout ‘State and Revolution’ – both of historical dynamics and of the real intentions of Marx and Engels – is brilliant. His forecasting is less certain, but he is quite sanguine and open about the need for some reasonable length period of a bloody-handed terror state “of the proletariat”. The USSR was indeed such a state, though its success on Lenin’s terms is more dubious.
 
So when Lenin says that the state organisation most open to Communist revolution has a certain three components, we should believe him – and if we accept the vast proof of history that Communism is morally vacuous and leads inevitably to mass slaughter on an industrial scale, we will work to prevent all these conditions coinciding. What are those conditions?
 
Democratic: Though of course in Marxist-Leninist theory “democratic” in its noblest form means a coordination of local bottom-up power of communes/Soviets with top-down power of the proletarian state which faithfully seeks the good of the people, democratic in Lenin’s definition here is meant more broadly. It certainly includes representative democracy, where that is moderately franchised and empowered. Of course such a representative democracy is ultimately a tool of capitalism to Lenin, but it is a useful transition stage.
 
Unitary: Not mentioned directly in the quote above, but a vital part of the surrounding discussion – federal republics are notably inferior to Lenin than unitary ones. He accepts there was a historic need for a federal, decentralised republic in the USA, but that it was becoming obsolescent in the developed East; he sees it as a liability in Switzerland; he says it would be an improvement on the United Kingdom’s system; it would be a step backwards in Germany. You see that the exact quality of development of a state is relative to its circumstances and history. Lenin considers that the centralised republic is a better guarantor of democracy than the federal one because it allows more power to flow directly to centres of population, and for wider-ranging measures to be undertaken by the right people in power. Note that really this is simply an explication of “democratic”, in Lenin’s terms.
 
Republic: It is interesting that this is a specific point made by Lenin. He does not mean here a republic in the American sense (i.e. “limited republic” contrasted with “democracy”), but in the executive sense. He desires the abolition of monarchies. Of course, you might chalk this up to pure ideological venom – but it is hard to believe that in such a careful and practical analysis this is the case. It also seems implausible that he could gin up so much venom against the vestigial monarchy of the United Kingdom of 1917. I think he probably more clear-sightedly sees that a monarchy diverts energies and passions away from the democratic forge – even in a constitutional monarchy like the Nordics or Britain, an undemocratic figure of reverence dissipates proletarian zeal. At any rate, this too is really a “democratic” constitutional feature.
 
Now the key question: why is this particular combination of constitutional features so germane to the future dictatorship of the proletariat? Because it leads to the “development, unfolding and intensification of this struggle”. Class struggle develops, unfolds, and intensifies under the unitary democratic republic, because the mediating institutions and natural stays on class struggle have been crippled. Marx, Engels, and Lenin see the state as a way in which one class enforces its will against the other classes – it is a management of class relations. Therefore, according to their logic, you should want to render that class arrangement as unstable as possible, and increasingly open to revolutionary vanguards.
 
Now even if we take a more benign view of the state’s effect on class relations – if we believe that it often serves as the most effective and least destructive balancer of class interests available – we can accept Lenin’s conclusion. There may well be certain political conditions more conducive to an intensified class struggle than others, and as a matter of historical fact, certain social and political developments have generally preceded “popular” revolutions. France in 1789, Russia in 1905/1917, Cuba in the late 50s, and even China in 1911 were all “modernizing” nations with growing wealth more widely distributed across the population. That wealth distribution remained, nonetheless, strained and uneven just as communications and education spread the possibility of intelligible dissatisfaction. That dissatisfaction becomes foment, and from the foment many foul bubbles issue forth, all brewing toward tyranny. A growing, educated, democratically-inclined middle class is a severe danger to the peace of a nation, and must be managed with the utmost care by the hands of the state to prevent disaster.
 
Before I proceed to my conclusion from Lenin’s thesis, it must be frankly admitted that he seems – at a very brief glance – to be have been wrong. Those four sample Revolutions did not occur, surely, in unitary democratic republics, did they? But not so fast: first, in general, his principle may be indicatively right if not specifically right, insomuch as it points to general conditions and patterns.
 
Second, and much more to the point, many Revolutions have happened against the very background of a “unitary democratic republic”. The two great Revolutions of the 19^th century were, to the Communists, those of 1848 and 1870 in France. The former generated a unitary democratic republic – which soon fell to dissension. The radicals did not win that bout, with Louis Napoleon declaring the Second Empire instead. The latter Revolution was again a secondary effect, with Louis Napoleon captured and deposed by the Prussians; the Communards of Paris rose against their own republican government, feeding off the democratic and radical fervour of the “day of freedom”.
 
Russia and China, in fact, offer something of the same pattern. Yes, in February 1917, the Kadets and SRs and Mensheviks overthrew the Tsar – and founded a unitary democratic republic, becoming all the more unitary as the Soviets were subsumed. It was against that background that Lenin overthrew the Kerensky Government, and it was with the unified state machinery that he suppressed the election results of 1918. China, too, did see its first revolution lead to a pseudo-unitary pseudo-democratic pseudo-republic (it was complex, okay?). The many ructures over three decades led eventually to Chiang crushing the warlords and surviving the Japanese – only for that unified state to be taken by Mao and his Communists.
 
Lenin’s idea of historical development is not watertight, but it is generally successful as an explanatory device. Levelling, centralization, and bureaucratization are not neutral or technocratic or mitigatory processes – they are ultimately a political solvent. (There is sometimes a temporary purpose for a solvent, of course, but its abuse leads to many nightmares.)
 
So my central response to Lenin is this: if one rejects his view of the state as malignly oppressing subaltern classes, but instead believes that it can and ought to serve a regulatory role between classes; and if one recognizes the clear historical process he identifies; then one must make every political effort to prevent the full confluence of the dissolving factors (democracy, the unitary state, and the republic) gathering in one’s state.
 
Now, it may be fairly said that one or more of these has seemed to exist in relative stability in many, many states over time. Sometimes a solvent has its use. But this is because the component – often of long custom and with many checks – has reached an equilibrium with more solid components of the constitution. Britain extended the franchise with only delayed ructure several times in the 19^th and 20^th centuries – but was renowned through much of that time, including to Lenin, as having an extremely vestigial central state apparatus at home, all whilst under the nominal reign of a hereditary monarch. Many Imperial Chinas – including the current one – have complex bureaucratic systems recruiting for and empowering the centralised state, but there has never been a corresponding democracy, and often only the myth of a republic.
 
I am not, then, arguing against any democracy, or any unitary power, or any republic, as if in a particular local dynamic one of those elements might not work well or be needful. I am saying that you can have wine or ale or Scotch, but not all three in a punch bowl. Selection and localisation is required.
 
With all this in mind, we may identify the manoeuvres of modern day radicals for what they are. When a British person calls for a republic, an extension of the franchise to age 16, and a more powerful administrative state (the state they regularly condemn, remember), they are not in good faith, seeking peaceful solutions for social ills. They desire the fundamental destabilisation of the rather decayed house in which we all live. They would rather topple it, with our children in it, so as to rebuild on some secret blueprint, rather than repair and beautify. When American radicals call for race-based equity programmes and the abolition of their filibuster and the geographic balance of the Senate, they are not calling for any equity that will happen in history. We know how their plans will go, in the end (and they will be as disappointed, deep down, as anyone).
 
The British Monarchy and the American Senate and German Federalism and the old University seats and hereditary Lords and the tradition of finding a reluctant town doctor for your Congressman – these are not merely good old traditions, a fine brocade depicting the ideal of noblesse oblige, an honouring of the localities, a realization of the power of land, a tradition of service, or whatever else. They are those, and much more, and to be vigorously preserved where this age of destruction has not taken them. But to our purpose, let me describe the great advantage of these institutions and social traditions.
 
When you bully a reluctant town doctor to go and represent you, knowing he disagrees with you on many things, and scarcely wants to do the job except out of duty, with him knowing you may kick him out at the next election, but also knowing that in Washington he will be his own man of honour and dignity – then you will not end up with some little theorist or career climber. You may find that devolving power to the localities is inefficient, but an empowered locality is much more liable to successfully resist the overreach of a meddling state than a bureaucratic sub-office of that state. No-one has ever pretended, in England, that hereditary Lords are natively wiser than their neighbour – but they don’t need political patronage, and for a long time they were raised in such a way that they shed proportionately more blood for their nation than any other section, bonding those sections both on the land and at war. And a geographically-based US Senate ensures that the proletariat may never patronisingly say “See, farmers, you are economically vulnerable; you need our vanguard; we are the only ones who can politically succeed.” Wyoming may always turn round and send its two Senators with a polite refusal.
 
If you desire stability, peace, and a modicum of private freedom – preferring the flawed real to the perfect delusion of radicalism and Communism – then you must, in all circumstances, seek to prevent the thorough “democratization” of your state.

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things VII: The Smallholding

A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things

I.          The Home

II.         The Shadow Society

III.             The Schoolroom

IV.             The University

V.                The Night School

VI.             The Workshop

      VII.      The Smallholding 

This spring, we rehoused one rather bullied bantam and bought three new layer hens at some cost. Two days later, one was dead. A severe case of ventpecking had caused a severe wound. The bird expired in front of me. I felt guilty; chickens die, and I don’t find that upsetting, but I knew I had failed this bird. There is a reciprocal set of duties in animal and land care, where the beast and soil serve, and the human protects and nourishes. H1N1 regulations (a grim parallel to covid rules) meant the birds were inside their generously-sized run; nonetheless, the stress had plainly got to them. I resolved to solve that problem the next day.
 
First, I put the bird in a bucket, the only container to hand. I picked some smallish broccoli heads to make room for others growing beneath. I walked home, called a friend to come over with his toddlers, and began to learn how to butcher a chicken. Whatever my frustrations over the death – moral, financial – there was no use wasting the meat and the opportunity.
 

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The land has a way of exerting reality on the smallholder or farmer. Nature is intractable. A hen is a hen and a cockerel is a cockerel. Boulder clay is dense and stodgy, and buying enough compost to improve all of it at once is cost-prohibitive. Over a winter with record rain, you have no option but to get muddy and cold and dig drainage ditches through the clay, or else lose your whole spring crop. Death is inescapable – from played-out courgette bushes thrown in the compost to worms thrown to the chickens to, yes, those chickens dying – and that death is a resource.
 
Any one thing in the composition of Creation may and must alter, but the orchestra plays on. Engagement with the soil is the most primal and necessary form of learning Permanence. It was the first disciplinary lesson the Lord taught Adam, indeed – that thorns must grow, and serpents strike, and yet through toil and the grace of God, food comes forth.
 
The defender of the Permanent Things, then, must by any means possible build a smallholding. Where the family and house is the most immediate experience of Permanence (or the lack thereof), the smallholding is the most abiding. It ought not surprise us that just as the family and house is greatly debased in Western society, so the processes of agriculture are, too.
 
Chickens are cramped together in yawning Tarteran concrete boxes, cattle pumped with drugs that subtly poison their milk, vegetables doused in toxic mists. This is not the inevitable use of technological advances – praise God for technology that allows us to redeem the time for greater value! – but the natural end of a society organised on distance, not locality; on palming responsibility off, not taking responsibility up; and on economic organization that vastly favours sedentary service roles.
 
But how may we join the side of reality, and press back the boundaries of the Unreal City? (“Big Ag” is surely a City; the angular geometry, the poured concrete of the pens, the manufactured chemical supplements, the aversion to natural patterns of sun and moon and season.)
 
We ought each take one little pot, and fill it with good rich soil, and plant something.
 
The revolution – in the old sense, the return – begins with a seed, quite literally in this case. The smallest of smallholdings can start on your windowsill or balcony. A single small tray, a bag of compost, and a bag of mizuna seeds will do to begin to reclaim your corner of the earth from the dark miasma. Scatter the mustard seeds across the little tray full of soil, cover lightly, and water. In 14 days, and 21, and 28, trim some of the shoots and add to a meal – tiny nutrient bombs, made from sun and water and soil. Once all the shoots are cut, scatter more seeds.
 
Of course, you can grow more things than that, even in a small flat – grow some herbs for dinner, put a lily in the bathroom, perhaps even some finger carrots. You might even, if unencumbered by ordinary standards of taste, have a couple of bantam hens instead of a rabbit! A cramped, dehumanising box in a tower can, with really very little effort (mustard grows itself to great proportions – ask the Lord for His past statements on the matter), become an affirmation of reality, of life, and of gratitude.
 
But what if you have a small garden? Well, I have found that whilst my children do enjoy lawns to run around on, they can find those in parks, too; but small children love farming, too. Children believe, correctly, in magic, and see magic in the ordinary processes of the garden. Set aside your monocultural, sterile lawn; raise beds, plant dwarf plum trees, tear out the laburnum and replace it with sea buckthorn, set a pergola at the top, and look out upon your own orchard and kitchen garden, in an ordinary suburban garden.
 
That is an abundance you can share with your neighbours too; suddenly the small patch of Permanence you have dug back becomes an invasion of reality into the lives of others. Not only might they see the bulbs at one end and the onion stalks in the middle and the ripe berries on the bushes – but perhaps you could manage things so they can share the bounty, too. My own garden is divided from my house by a back road – I plan within the year to get thornless blackberries growing on the garden boundary, so passers-by can pick as they go. You could put bags of plums out the front in autumn. Indeed, if you give your children the responsibility of harvesting the fruit – or of managing quails in a shed, or whatever else – they could sell them for “pocket money”, giving them an investment in your shared ministry of the land, which is indeed as political and social a ministry as any.
 
But an important question may arise here; why worry about lawn monoculture? Why share? Well, of course, the Philosophical Conservative will have an instinct to variety and to shared bounty, but more detail may be of value here. Our great monocultures degrade soil – beef in one places, corn in another, vegetables of a limited variety in another. But the stubborn nature of Nature is that variety and succession produce resilience and abundance.
 
So we should enrich the land we cultivate. We do not come to it to draw from it, but to live with it; for Christians like me, stewardship of the land is a sacred, God-given duty. It is a resource given to me as gift, but also put upon me as duty. I look at my boulder clay soil, accept my financial limits, and plan within them to make it more fertile and better-draining year on year. This has at least three beneficial effects: it cultivates resilience and abundance in me, in my virtue, by a parallel process, by teaching me to value richness and health and a thing reaching its proper end; it fulfils that great stewardship duty; and it leaves the land in better condition when I move on, whether on my feet or in a box. The land ministry is a land-healing ministry (thus Joel Salatin).
 
There is a concomitant issue of scale. To talk of the “smallholding”, or even the American “homestead”, is to remind ourselves of the properly human scale of our activities. Soaring cathedral spires are proper – when they direct us to God. But the vast, inhuman scale of virtually every sector of our economy is not a blessing of liberty or a peculiar gift from God, as some have it. That inhuman scale is a warping and debilitating thing for the soul. Nowhere is this more true than in agriculture. The chicken is a silly and sometimes vicious beast, but there is a preternatural skill in its clawing, its spotting, its hopping, its scraping; somehow, even, there is empathy in the rooster’s gentle cooing when it finds food, and the startling moment it gives way to its hens, so they might be fed. None of that can happen in the battery cages, nor even, really, in the laying barns – if nothing else, because every young cockerel will be thrown to the pigs at a young age in such a situation, given their lack of immediate economic productivity.
 
This issue of the human scale affects not just quantity, but design – variety necessitates itself on such a scale, because your 0.05 of an acre of a back garden, or your 3 acre homestead, cannot possibly contain everything at a grand scale. You must both select what will be cultivated, and restrict it to what is balanced: three rows of potatoes, and no more, or there’ll be no space for the carrots and cabbages. Three feeder pigs in the 12x12 deep bed shed, because to pasture them would be too space-extensive. This confrontation with constraint, with the balance of interests, is tutelary for the soul. No Emperor or President has ever more practically grappled with an issue of state – of whether to send forces to North Africa or Singapore, or how to keep the currency afloat – than a gardener does every time the matter of culling a sick or barren hen arises. Most of us will never deal with the questions of contingency and constraint faced by the mighty, but we can find our own field of action on the smallholding.
 
We also learn from the necessary connectedness, the symbiotic rhythm, of a human scale and a regenerative purpose. My chickens provide me four services, at least: eggs, manure, tilling, and (rarely, as they are layers) meat. Nettles in the yard can be left as shelter for the chickens, or torn up and either composted, or crushed in water with dock leaves and other greenery to make “green tea”, that gloriously stinky natural fertilizer. The green tea ends up on the courgettes; the courgettes end up in my belly, their scraps end up in the chicken yard, and the worked-out plant ends up in the compost at the end of the season...as do the chicken manure and the eggshells and everything else that is organic but not edible. (Eggshells are edible and a good supplement for poultry, but we can’t be bothered to grind them up enough so that the chickens don’t try it on their own eggs.)
 
Those connections remind us, endlessly, that life is not transactional and none of us are an island. Of course there are cost-benefits to calculate. Part of governing the land is making decisions for the common good. But those decisions have to do with duty, and mutual responsibilities – me and the chickens and the land, dependent on each other – not the seeking of gain entire. This is a lesson of political commonwealth, transposed to the allotment. You were made for your neighbour, and your neighbour for you, and the economic and social norms that separate and alienate you are bent and corrupted, not true norms deriving from true, reliable normality.
 
Now, though I have said something of the small scale, perhaps you have been blessed to have land in quantity, or perhaps you aspire to that. None of these principles are impossible on the larger scale – they just require a greater labour force. Your family, your friends, your neighbours – the vulnerable or lonely known to you, the skill-seeking – there are many places you can turn for aid. Perhaps your abundance can be turned to mutual abundance – to job creation, to the granting of small plots for families to garden, to semi-managed woodland encouraging the flourishing of vulnerable animals. The Citadel of the Permanent Things takes in every outer grange, not just those within the castle walls.
 
The Citadel does not exist on its own, after all; no fortress is built for its own purpose. It defends – something. The Citadel we seek to build over the next decades and centuries is built to shelter the Permanent Things, the old good things in slightly altered dress. Those Things include the land; indeed, nearly every castle has first been built to hold land. What boots it to protect a set of abstract ideas, but have no place to live them? We may seek to salvage our family and home from the conflagration, but without space to grow (even a tray on a windowsill), we doom ourselves to be spiritual refugees.
 
Our vision of a rejuvenated civilisation – in the lives, perhaps, of our grandchildren, or great-great-great-grandchildren – cannot consist solely of an ornate church, some friendly private societies, and a village school with an integrated idea of learning the good old things. That would be an amputated civilisation, all head and no body. There must be land – green and brown in Britain, red in North Carolina, yellow in Arizona, and a thousand colours elsewhere, blue steppes grass and white calcite soils in Spain. Polychromal land for a various people, rich in nature’s many-branching createdness. You can imagine the view from the heavens in this speculation – the station commander looks down by day on the regreened Sahara, and by night on the less dense, greatly scattered lights of a land-living humanity. The commander knows, when he returns home, when he is accustomed to our gravity again, he will be able to return to his 3 acres, which his wife and sons and daughter have trustworthily farmed in the meantime. It is spring; lambs will be here soon. Every technological aid is his, but – spaceman that he is! – he only uses those which lead his land to its natural ends. The lambs have abundance; the fruit trees have abundance; his sons have abundance. And when he next takes watch in the stars, his children will look up, and then down, knowing their father hears the music of the heavens, and they know the rhythm of the earth.
 
It begins with a tray of mustard seeds, sown in faith, put on your windowsill.