Presentation short abstract

This paper traces hidden genealogies of radical, left-wing farming politics in Europe, and asks how they were transformed through the early 20th century double movement of fascism/social democracy.

Presentation long abstract

Up until the 1930, we could still find multiple examples across Europe of farmers and farmworkers organising under a left-wing or explicitly socialist framework, be that in producer co-operatives, farmers’ parties or grassroots formations. Today, while across the world social movements are challenging the imperialist status-quo, many of the organisations and spokespeople representing farmers’ interests in Europe are either aligned with liberal, centrist political programmes, or, increasingly, formulate their demands through racist, xenophobic nationalist rhetoric.

This paper looks at the particular moment in the early to mid-20th century after which radical, left-wing agrarian politics seemed to largely disappear from the European stage. It analyses what conditions, constraints and contradictions left-wing farmers and farmer organisations were met with, to speculate on some of the causes for their decline, disappearance and/or erasure in the historiography. In particular I want to pay attention to the double moment of fascism/social democracy during the first half of the 20th century, the effects of the two World Wars on agricultural policy in different regions, and how farmers movements negotiated and shifted in relation to these changing conditions.

By arguing for an understanding of fascism and European liberal democracies as structurally linked, rather than diametrically opposed, the paper illuminates the ways radical alternative visions for society and for food provisioning (socialist, anarchist, communist, and beyond) were subsumed and/or erased and proposes that a deeper interrogation of the class-composition of the farming subject is necessary, if we want to understand what happened to the agrarian left.