Today there is much talk of "homesteading," and the interest in the "homestead" seems to be growing in proportion to the collective understanding of the inadequacy of our collective faculties of problem solving, which is an understanding that deepens as our myriad interconnected social and environmental crises intensify.
This is an instinctual shift as well. In a deeply specialized society undergoing a dramatic process of corruption, the evaporation of trust that results from this state of affairs lends to a pervasive sense of uneasiness in regards to the food, infrastructure, medical care, technologies, and services which keep us ensconced in and contributing to greater society.
The idea of breaking away and living as a homesteader, procuring a greater swathe of one's own necessities by one's own efforts, becomes much more attractive in the collective imagination. Here is a direction one can take that carefully reduces one's exposure to the increasingly unstable cluster of social resources of industrial society, and renew one's connection with the land, getting back to some lower center of gravity, as opposed to hovering there, suspended and helpless, trapped in the belly of capital as it unravels.
The term "homestead" itself obscures just as much as it reveals, which is owed to a complicated history and entrenched complex of images and assumptions associated with the word. But we are often obliged to use it when talking about related matters, due to its broad acceptability and currency as a descriptive word. It is very much a Western and American word, with its history of settler farms and its connotations of an isolated, single family operation.
When moving deeper into the actual activity itself, the nature of "homesteading" departs from its original connotations - though perhaps not as far as we thought.
Don't get me wrong, engaging in what we today call homesteading is a very rich, challenging, and rewarding experience, and certainly a good way to live, and a tenuous way to move forward through the many interlocked social and environmental problems we've found ourselves in. But there are some illusions associated with the popular understanding of the process which should be set aside and dispelled, which, after this is done, reveals unexpected insights about the nature of our societies and their evolution.
What is thought of as a return to self-sufficiency and sustainability is still a process in which ultimately manufactured goods are manipulated and refined to create the desired products and infrastructure for one's more local needs, at a smaller scale and a slower passage of time in terms of production and reproduction.
There are surely a number of isolated exceptions throughout the US, but the typical modern homesteader is still using manufactured tools and various forms of fossil fuel, wood fuel, and solar power, as well as sophisticated vehicles and machinery for saving labor, such as tractors, trucks, saws, hammers, and the like. And let's not forget store-bought foods and resources to complement one's own domestically produced foods and resources, for sustenance and enjoyment.
Where the homestead is not an old family tradition - which still has its roots in Western Civilization - one enters into it as a prior product of modern civilization. As such, there must be some sort of maintenance of continuity: one still has tastes and sensibilities - and a deep well of traditions, knowledge, and techniques to draw from - which are formed in the civilization and which are generated in specific points in time and space.
And so the process of homesteading is still continuous with what is happening in the greater society. One hits the ground running, so to speak. The simplification of one's life is still contingent on what one eats and drinks, how one likes to sleep, how one likes to be housed, and etc. And those things have a history. The change must always occur in relation to something, and thus has a directionality.
This is still very much a deeply socially interdependent process for many different reasons. All of the manufactured goods - even the secondhand and antique variety - depend on incredibly complex networks of manufacturing, commerce, and repair.
And the typical homesteader is still subject to taxes and maintaining one's space in a regime of private property. And various resources and services must still be bought with the dollar, that floating, magical, and disembodied currency guaranteed by that far-removed, avaricious, and violent giant, the US Government and US capital.
The dollar still maintains a sort of social path of least resistance for the procurement of resources. It has short-circuited those arduous historical processes in which local trust must be maintained with a community that itself maintains a set of intricate and enduring traditions for manipulating natural resources and furnishing finished goods. Good luck finding that on a smaller scale in the core of capital, where the traditions have been taken up and processed in the service of commerce, and the traditional communities swept away.
If one still has access to the dollar, it is irresistible. Try forging a hammer and some nails on one's own, right after one has smelted the iron and steel required, and after one has procured the coal and the required vessels to hold and manipulate the heat and materials. Or one could always look into a completely different building method, which requires an entirely new understanding of how materials are acquired, fashioned, and bound. And I could go on.
So the dream of self-sufficiency, independence, and proximity to the land is clarified: yes one can move in that direction, but one must necessarily move in the historical period and the society one finds oneself in. The power of industry and manufacturing as a historical phenomenon becomes most apparent precisely when one tries to move away from it: it is everywhere, and the bulk of the world population is intimately connected to it.
This is not strictly a contemporary condition either. The whole history of homesteading is replete with images of rugged and self-sufficient settlers, living off of their own self-generated resources, and without a doubt this was a very different way of living. But that state of affairs itself was predicated on vast interconnected social forces: the government funding of settlers, the evolution of state finance and commerce, the volatility of the European Old World which was setting in motion the colonial expansions, the early industrial explosions of manufactured goods and technologies which powered the early homesteads, and so on. Those intrepid, "self-sufficient" homesteaders were far from alone.
So now we have a clearer picture of the nature of homesteading, and hopefully some of the illusions surrounding it have been dispelled. This piece has gotten to be about as long as I'd prefer for the moment. Next, I'd like to talk about what it all means.
