From Philosophy To Fellahi

The remarkable continuity of peasant experience and the peasant view of the world acquires, as it is threatened with extinction, an unprecedented and unexpected urgency. It is not only the future of peasants which is now involved in this continuity. The forces which in most parts of the world are today eliminating or destroying the peasantry represent the contradiction of most of the hopes once contained in the principle of historical progress. Productivity is not reducing scarcity. The dissemination of knowledge is not leading unequivocally to greater democracy. The advent of leisure--in the industrialized societies--has not brought personal fulfillment but greater mass manipulation. The economic and military unification of the world has not brought peace but genocide. The peasant suspicion of "progress," as it has finally been imposed by the global history of corporate capitalism and by the power of this history even over those seeking an alternative to it, is not altogether misplaced or groundless.

If one looks at the likely future course of world history, envisaging either the further extension and consolidation of corporate capitalism in all its brutalism, or a prolonged, uneven struggle waged against it, a struggle whose victory is not certain, the peasant experience of survival may well be better adapted to this long and harsh perspective than the continually reformed, disappointed, impatient progressive hope of an ultimate victory.

~ John Berger, Pig Earth, xxvi.



"And do they not see that God gives sustenance to those whom He will and measures [it out]? Truly, therein are signs for people with faith! So [you should also] give to one near to you his due, and to the poor and those wandering on the way; that is best for those who yearn for God's face--and they are truly the muflihun." Qur'an 30: 37-38.