Editing Agrarianism (section)

==Types of agrarianism==
===Physiocracy===
{{excerpt|Physiocracy}}

===Jeffersonian democracy===
[[File:T Jefferson by Charles Willson Peale 1791 2.jpg|thumb|right|200px|[[Thomas Jefferson]] and his supporters idealised farmers as the citizens that the American Republic should be formed around.]]
{{Main|Jeffersonian democracy|land grant}}
{{Further|Economic history of the United States#Land grants}}
The United States president [[Thomas Jefferson]] was an agrarian who based his ideas about the budding American democracy around the notion that farmers are "the most valuable citizens" and the truest [[Republicanism in the United States|republicans]].<ref>Thomas P. Govan, "Agrarian and Agrarianism: A Study in the Use and Abuse of Words," ''Journal of Southern History'', Vol. 30#1  (Feb. 1964), pp. 35–47 {{jstor|2205372}}</ref> Jefferson and his support base were committed to [[Republicanism in the United States|American republicanism]], which they saw as being in opposition to [[monarchy]], [[aristocracy]], [[clericalism]] and [[corruption]], and which prioritized [[morality]] and [[virtue]], exemplified by the "[[yeoman farmer]]", "[[Plantations in the American South|planters]]", and the [[Plain Folk of the Old South|"plain folk"]].<ref>{{cite book |last=Wood |first=Gordon S. |title=The American Revolution: A History |page=100 }}</ref> In praising the rural farmfolk, the Jeffersonians felt that financiers, bankers and industrialists created "cesspools of corruption" in the cities and should thus be avoided.<ref>Elkins and McKitrick.  (1995) ch 5; Wallace Hettle, ''The Peculiar Democracy: Southern Democrats in Peace and Civil War'' (2001)  p. 15</ref>

The Jeffersonians sought to align the American economy more with agriculture than industry. Part of their motive to do so was Jefferson's fear that the over-industrialization of America would create a class of wage slaves who relied on their employers for income and sustenance. In turn, these workers would cease to be independent voters as their vote could be manipulated by said employers. To counter this, Jefferson introduced, as scholar Clay Jenkinson noted, "a graduated income tax that would serve as a disincentive to vast accumulations of wealth and would make funds available for some sort of benign redistribution downward" and tariffs on imported articles, which were mainly purchased by the wealthy.<ref>Jenkinson, ''Becoming Jefferson's People'', p. 26</ref> In 1811, Jefferson, writing to a friend, explained: "these revenues will be levied entirely on the rich... . the rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the general government are levied. the poor man ... pays not a farthing of tax to the general government, but on his salt."<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-03-02-0439|title=Founders Online: Thomas Jefferson to Tadeusz Kosciuszko, 16 April 1811|website=founders.archives.gov}}</ref>

There is general agreement that the substantial United States' federal policy of offering land grants (such as thousands of gifts of land to veterans) had a positive impact on economic development in the 19th century.<ref>Whaples, R. (1995). Where is there consensus among American economic historians? The results of a survey on forty propositions. ''The Journal of Economic History'', ''55''(1), 139–154.</ref>

===Agrarian socialism===
{{Main|Agrarian socialism}}
Agrarian socialism is a form of agrarianism that is [[Anti-capitalism|anti-capitalist]] in nature and seeks to introduce [[Socialism|socialist]] economic systems in their stead.

====Zapatismo====
[[File:Emiliano Zapata4.jpg|right|thumb|[[Emiliano Zapata]] fought in the Mexican Revolution in the name of the Mexican peasants and sought to introduce reforms such as land redistribution.]]
Notable agrarian socialists include [[Emiliano Zapata]] who was a leading figure in the [[Mexican Revolution]]. As part of the [[Liberation Army of the South]], his group of revolutionaries fought on behalf of the Mexican peasants, whom they saw as exploited by the landowning classes. Zapata published the [[Plan of Ayala]], which called for significant land reforms and land redistribution in Mexico as part of the revolution. Zapata was killed and his forces crushed over the course of the Revolution, but his political ideas lived on in the form of [[Zapatismo]].

Zapatismo would form the basis for [[neozapatismo]], the ideology of the [[Zapatista Army of National Liberation]]. Known as ''Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional'' or EZLN in Spanish, EZLN is a [[far-left]] [[libertarian socialist]] political and militant group that emerged in the state of [[Chiapas]] in southmost Mexico in 1994. EZLN and Neozapatismo, as explicit in their name, seek to revive the agrarian socialist movement of Zapata, but fuse it with new elements such as a commitment to indigenous rights and community-level decision making.

[[Subcommander Marcos]], a leading member of the movement, argues that the peoples' collective ownership of the land was and is the basis for all subsequent developments the movement sought to create:<blockquote>
...When the land became property of the peasants ... when the land passed into the hands of those who work it ... [This was] the starting point for advances in government, health, education, housing, nutrition, women's participation, trade, culture, communication, and information ...[it was] recovering the means of production, in this case, the land, animals, and machines that were in the hands of large property owners."<ref>See ''The Zapatistas' Dignified Rage: Final Public Speeches of Subcommander Marcos''. Edited by Nick Henck. Translated by Henry Gales. (Chico: AK Press, 2018), pp. 81–82.</ref></blockquote>

====Maoism====
[[Maoism]], the [[Far-left politics|far-left]] [[ideology]] of [[Mao Zedong]] and his followers, places a heavy emphasis on the role of peasants in its goals. In contrast to other [[Marxism|Marxist]] schools of thought which normally seek to acquire the support of urban workers, Maoism sees the peasantry as key. Believing that "[[political power grows out of the barrel of a gun]]",<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch05.htm|title=Quotations From Chairman Mao|publisher=Peking Foreign Languages Press|access-date=1 April 2018}}</ref> Maoism saw the Chinese Peasantry as the prime source for a [[Vanguardism|Marxist vanguard]] because it possessed two qualities: (i) they were poor, and (ii) they were a political blank slate; in Mao's words, "A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it".<ref>Gregor, A. James; Chang, Maria Hsia (1978). [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1407255 "Maoism and Marxism in Comparative Perspective"]. ''The Review of Politics''. 40: 3. pp. 307–327.</ref> During the [[Chinese Civil War]] and the [[Second Sino-Japanese War]], Mao and the [[Chinese Communist Party]] made extensive use of peasants and rural bases in their military tactics, often eschewing the cities.

Following the eventual victory of the Communist Party in both wars, the countryside and how it should be run remained a focus for Mao. In 1958, Mao launched the [[Great Leap Forward]], a social and economic campaign which, amongst other things, altered many aspects of rural Chinese life. It introduced mandatory [[collective farming]] and forced the peasantry to organize itself into communal living units which were known as [[people's commune]]s. These communes, which consisted of 5,000 people on average, were expected to meet high production quotas while the peasants who lived on them adapted to this radically new way of life. The communes were run as [[co-operative]]s where wages and money were replaced by work points. Peasants who criticised this new system were persecuted as "[[Right-wing politics|rightists]]" and "[[Counter-revolutionary|counter-revolutionaries]]". Leaving the communes was forbidden and escaping from them was difficult or impossible, and those who attempted it were subjected to party-orchestrated "public [[struggle session]]s," which further jeopardized their survival.<ref>Thaxton, Ralph A. Jr (2008). ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=14A1qPQOgQMC Catastrophe and Contention in Rural China: Mao's Great Leap Forward Famine and the Origins of Righteous Resistance in Da Fo Village] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190226022145/https://books.google.com/books?id=14A1qPQOgQMC&source=gbs_navlinks_s |date=26 February 2019 }}''. [[Cambridge University Press]]. p.&nbsp;3. {{ISBN|0-521-72230-6}}.</ref> These public criticism sessions were often used to intimidate the peasants into obeying local officials and they often devolved into little more than public beatings.<ref>Thaxton 2008, p.&nbsp;212.</ref>

On the communes, experiments were conducted in order to find new methods of planting crops, efforts were made to construct new irrigation systems on a massive scale, and the communes were all encouraged to produce steel backyard furnaces as part of an effort to increase steel production. However, following the [[Anti-Rightist Campaign]], Mao had instilled a mass distrust of intellectuals into China, and thus engineers often were not consulted with regard to the new irrigation systems and the wisdom of asking untrained peasants to produce good quality steel from scrap iron was not publicly questioned. Similarly, the experimentation with the crops did not produce results. In addition to this the [[Four Pests Campaign]] was launched, in which the peasants were called upon to destroy sparrows and other wild birds that ate crop seeds, in order to protect fields. Pest birds were shot down or scared away from landing until they dropped from exhaustion. This campaign resulted in an ecological disaster that saw an explosion of the vermin population, especially crop-eating insects, which was consequently not in danger of being killed by predators.

None of these new systems were working, but local leaders did not dare to state this, instead, they falsified reports so as not to be punished for failing to meet the quotas. In many cases they stated that they were greatly exceeding their quotas, and in turn, the Chinese state developed a completely false sense of success with regard to the commune system.<ref name=hinton1984>{{Cite book  | last = Hinton | first = William  | author-link = William H. Hinton | title = Shenfan: The Continuing Revolution in a Chinese Village | publisher = [[Vintage Books]] | location = New York | year = 1984 | pages = [https://archive.org/details/shenfan00hint/page/236 236]–245 | isbn = 978-0-394-72378-5 | url = https://archive.org/details/shenfan00hint | url-access = registration}}</ref>

All of this culminated in the [[Great Chinese Famine]], which began in 1959, lasted 3 years, and saw an estimated 15 to 30 million Chinese people die.<ref>Holmes, Leslie. ''Communism: A Very Short Introduction'' ([[Oxford University Press]] 2009). {{ISBN|978-0-19-955154-5}}. p. 32 "Most estimates of the number of Chinese people who died range from 15 to 30 million."</ref> A combination of bad weather and the new, failed farming techniques that were introduced by the state led to massive shortages of food. By 1962, the Great Leap Forward was declared to be at an end.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mao once again radically altered life in rural China with the launching of the [[Down to the Countryside Movement]]. As a response to the Great Chinese Famine, the [[President of the People's Republic of China|Chinese President]] [[Liu Shaoqi]] began "sending down" urban youths to rural China in order to recover its population losses and alleviate overcrowding in the cities. However, Mao turned the practice into a political crusade, declaring that the sending down would strip the youth of any bourgeois tendencies by forcing them to learn from the unprivileged rural peasants. In reality, it was the Communist Party's attempt to reign in the [[Red Guards]], who had become uncontrollable during the course of the [[Cultural Revolution]]. 10% of the 1970 urban population of China was sent out to remote rural villages, often in [[Inner Mongolia]]. The villages, which were still poorly recovering from the effects of the Great Chinese Famine, did not have the excess resources that were needed to support the newcomers. Furthermore, the so-called "[[sent-down youth]]" had no agricultural experience and as a result, they were unaccustomed to the harsh lifestyle that existed in the countryside, and their unskilled labor in the villages provided little benefit to the agricultural sector. As a result, many of the sent-down youth died in the countryside. The relocation of the youths was originally intended to be permanent, but by the end of the Cultural Revolution, the Communist Party relented and some of those who had the capacity to return to the cities were allowed to do so.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://chineseposters.net/themes/up-to-the-mountains.php|title=Up to the mountains, down to the villages (1968)|website=chineseposters.net|access-date=10 April 2019|archive-date=28 April 2019|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190428210451/https://chineseposters.net/themes/up-to-the-mountains.php|url-status=dead}}</ref>

In imitation of Mao's policies, the [[Khmer Rouge]] of [[Cambodia]] (who were heavily funded and supported by the People's Republic of China) created their own version of the Great Leap Forward which was known as "Maha Lout Ploh". With the Great Leap Forward as its model, it had similarly disastrous effects, contributing to what is now known as the [[Cambodian genocide]]. As a part of the Maha Lout Ploh, the Khmer Rouge sought to create an entirely [[Agrarian socialism|agrarian socialist]] society by forcibly relocating 100,000 people to move from Cambodia's cities into newly created communes. The Khmer Rouge leader, [[Pol Pot]] sought to "purify" the country by setting it back to "[[Year Zero (political notion)|Year Zero]]", freeing it from "corrupting influences".<ref>{{cite news |last=Taylor |first=Adam |date=7 August 2014 |title=Why the world should not forget Khmer Rouge and the killing fields of Cambodia |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/08/07/why-the-world-should-not-forget-khmer-rouge-and-the-killing-fields-of-cambodia/ |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |access-date=3 April 2020 }}</ref> Besides trying to completely de-urbanize Cambodia, ethnic minorities were slaughtered along with anyone else who was suspected of being a "reactionary" or a member of the "bourgeoisie", to the point that wearing glasses was seen as grounds for execution.<ref>{{cite news |date=16 November 2018 |title=Khmer Rouge: Cambodia's years of brutality |url=https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399 |work=[[BBC News]] |access-date=3 April 2020 }}</ref> The killings were only brought to an end when Cambodia was invaded by the neighboring socialist nation of [[Vietnam]], whose army toppled the Khmer Rouge.<ref>{{cite news |last=Hersh |first=Seymour M. |date=8 August 1979 |title=2.25 Million Cambodians Are Said to Face Starvation |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/08/archives/225-million-cambodians-are-said-to-face-starvation-plight-held.html |work=[[The New York Times]] |access-date=3 April 2020 }}</ref> However, with Cambodia's entire society and economy in disarray, including its agricultural sector, the country still plunged into renewed famine due to vast food shortages. However, as international journalists began to report on the situation and send images of it out to the world, a massive international response was provoked, leading to one of the most concentrated relief efforts of its time.<ref>{{cite news |last=Hawk |first=David |date=14 July 1984 |title=Cambodia: Famine, Fear And Fanaticism |url=https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1984/07/15/cambodia-famine-fear-and-fanaticism/3108f639-cb06-42c7-b16c-769376123d38/ |newspaper=[[The Washington Post]] |access-date=3 April 2020}}</ref>