Planetary Peasants, Werkleitz festival celebrates the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War
This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. This text is an overworked and extended version of the initial concept for the Werkleitz festival 2025 exhibition Planetary Peasants by Daniel Herrmann, artistic director of Werkleitz, and Alexander Klose at Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle.
Spring 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War. According to Marxist historiography it was the first revolution on German soil, the “climax of the early bourgeois revolution, [and] one of the greatest class battles in the age of feudalism”[1]. Consequently, this event played an important role in the political memory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The East German 5 Mark banknote showed a posthumous portrait of Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525)[2], the reformist preacher and militant antipode to Martin Luther, whose sermons, writings and deeds are closely identified with the Peasants’ War. Other types of revolutions have reshaped the world since, though, namely socio-technological ones. In industrialized regions, both the peasantry and their agricultural labours have dramatically declined in importance, both in terms of the numbers of people involved and in terms of their political representation. Scholars from Marx/Engels onward have predicted the death of peasantry. The categorical distinction between city and countryside, each sphere traditionally with its own rights and ways of being, has been eaten up by the dynamics of planetary urbanization. Yet, the primary materials for food are still produced on agricultural sites, and the planet’s current condition of multiple ecological crises was manufactured in urban-industrial agglomerations and infrastructures, as well as on farms and fields, through the accumulation of the doings of modern machines and human beings, animals and plants[3]. At the same time, peasants around the globe, though operating under very different conditions, are currently struggling for their rights — to earn a living, to continue traditions, to stay on their lands. The following text tries to string together some of those diverse and partly contradictory ties that define this complex situation.
In the self-mythologization of the early GDR, the “land reform” of 1945 — i.e., the expropriation of large landowners and (alleged) collaborators of the Nazi-regime and the redistribution of their land among small farmers — and the subsequent collectivization of land and work in agricultural production cooperatives (LPG: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft) was presented as the completion of the Peasant’s War: “Via defeats and victories in the class struggle, the peasants’ path through the centuries has led to socialism. The oppressed class of feudal farmers became the socialist class of cooperative farmers under the leadership and alongside the working class in the GDR.”[4] After the end of the GDR in 1990, many of the LPG’s vast agricultural lands were bought by multinational agribusinesses and, more recently, bypassing existing laws that are intended to prevent this, by real estate speculators. Seen from today, the period of “actually existing socialism” in agriculture turned out to be a rationalisation measure that prepared the land for total neoliberal plundering by real existing capitalism[5]. This was a dialectical dynamics somewhat comparable to the historical role of the German Peasants’ War as a trailblazer for early capitalism and a punitive counter-reformation: in its aftermath, the peasants, freed from serfdom, were now in possession of themselves and their labour power, but not much more (except for a tighter grip on their wives and children as a result of extended property rights); at the same time, they were deprived of their traditional rights to common property as well as traditional entitlements to community services provided by the landlords[6].
Technical and scientific revolutions
Parallel to political and socio-economical turns, a potentially even more profound revolutionary dynamic has transformed things around the globe, on all political sides: the development of modern agronomy and the mechanization, industrialization and “chemicalization”[7] of agriculture. A key figure was the doctor and agriculture researcher Albrecht Daniel Thaer (1752 – 1828), who is considered the originator of the science of agronomy. He began to work for the Prussian state in 1804, founding agricultural research and teaching facilities north and east of Berlin. In 1809 he published the first of four volumes of his seminal Principles of Rational Agriculture (Grundsätze der rationellen Landwirtschaft). Another key figure was the economist, agronomist and farmer Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783 – 1850), one of Thaer’s first pupils, who pioneered principles of business administration in agriculture. Later, the centre of agronomical research in Germany moved south, to the fertile grounds of the Prussian province of Saxony (which is also where Thomas Müntzer came from, and where the Werkleitz festival 2025 Planetary Peasants is focused). Here, Julius Kühn (1825-1910) worked as the founding professor at the institute for agronomy at Martin Luther University Halle. His experiments on the monocultural cultivation of crops, which he called “eternal rye”, and which started in 1862, continues to this day.
In the mid 19th century, the region between Magdeburg to the North, the Harz mountains to the West, Merseburg to the South, and the Saale river to the East had become one of the world’s leading regions for sugar production refined from sugar beets. The world market price for sugar was determined at sugar boards in London and Magdeburg — an encounter of colonial and continental productive economies. What used to be one of the most important colonial commodities (and a luxurious one for most) — sugar made from cane grown on slave-operated plantations in tropical regions — was turned into a kind of staple food. Production exceeded demand, so new demands had to be created to normalise an ever-increasing sugar consumption. For some time, sugar was the most important export of the newly found German Empire. Prussian Saxony went through a phase of agriculture-led industrialization. The implementation of the infrastructure needed to produce sugar, namely mills and refineries and the machines used in them, attracted a saccharine geography of factories for the production of specialized agricultural machines and for food production (bread, cakes, chocolate). This economic success in competing with the colonial economies and breaking free from the dependency on their main goods, such as sugar, rubber or saltpetre, developed into an important trope in the self-historization of the “belated nation” of Germany. Without significant access to the colonial production regions, it had to apply principles of an “inner colonization”: intensified agriculture, industrialized production and innovation.
Popular publicists, including the non-fiction author and early Nazi propagandist Karl Aloys Schenzinger, repeated this trope time and again, especially with regard to the historical development and significance of the chemical industry[8]. The rendering of an “agricultural biological chemistry” and the development of the first artificial phosphate fertilizer by the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) in the 1840s, who taught and lived in Gießen in the state of Hesse-Darmstadt and later in Munich, were a pillar of the emerging chemical industries of Germany and other nations. When the new “Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik” (BASF) Ammonia Synthesis Factory Merseburg opened in 1916, as the first in a network of chemical production plants later known as the “chemical triangle” formed by Bitterfeld/Wolfen, Leuna and Buna, its production was directed towards ammunition for the ongoing war (replacing the saltpetre from Chile that was no longer accessible because of the British Naval Blockade) and towards artificial fertilizers for an intensified agriculture.
From Gerechtigkeyt to Climate Justice
The invention and large-scale deployment of artificial fertilizers, together with the mechanization and industrialization of work, instigated by far the most profound changes in agriculture since its invention. Following tractor tracks and artificial fertilizer traces of phosphor, potash and nitrogen leads us to regions around the globe and across political borders. The same machines were put to work, the same substances used, even in the strictly politically divided countries on both sides of the “iron curtain”. The tracks and traces of agriculture’s industrialization lead to fields of maximized productivity, as well as to exhausted and eroded soils and to areas of excessive accumulation akin to the dead zones that result from the over-nitrification of runoff water close to ocean estuaries around the globe. Today’s planetary condition is to a significant degree defined by such—human-made, intended or unintended—migration of organic and inorganic substances linked to agricultural activities: plants and animals, but also, and mainly, chemical compounds such as CO2 or ammonium-nitrates and their accumulation in the Earth’s ecosystems.
Today, agricultural machines in the former LPG plantations of Müntzer’s homeland are tracked and controlled by GPS, and the yield of local fields is sold at international stock exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade. Peasantry, like the working class, seems to have dissolved into milieus. So, the question might be, what do our present and future have in common with the causes of the Peasants’ War? Seen from a planetary perspective, it quickly becomes clear that the adversities of peasant labour have only shifted — whether to the exploitation of seasonal workers, very often migrant workers without passports and legal rights, who are still made necessary in many agricultural processes, despite all mechanizations and automatizations, or to regions of the world where crop failures and extreme weather events continue to be existentially threatening. Besides, the end of serfdom in European countries was paralleled by the enslavement and forced migration of millions of people to work on plantations in the American and Asian colonies. Their insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles carry many of the aspects of the European peasants’ wars, both in their contents and in their outcomes. The “Plantationocene” holds up under post-colonial conditions[9]. The question of justice today must be considered not only on the level of classes or strata of one society, but also between the populations of rich and poor countries. The concept of climate justice, as it is discussed and demanded today, emphasizes how much people within and between societies benefit from industrialization, and the price they pay for it: pollution, devastation, or the loss of habitats due to climate change.
Feeding the world-to-come in a fairer way still requires revolutionary action, or so it seems. Given the expansion of capitalist conditions in the development of the world system in the last 500 years, but especially in the last decades, many ecological thinkers and activists around the globe interpret the rule of ownership and capital as being at the core of all environmental problems. The question of agricultural land for a steadily growing world population is still decisive for territorial conflicts and geopolitics, and will increasingly become so in the climate-changed future. The expansion of plantations reduces rainforests and displaces human communities. On the other hand, the growth of settlements, industries and infrastructures is destroying agricultural land worldwide. These circumstances, as well as the expansion of markets, the ongoing industrialization of agriculture, and the threat to rural areas due to changing climate conditions, have resulted in a massive increase of migratory movements of people leaving soils that don’t feed them anymore. In order to end the destructive dynamic of this age of “capitalist realism” and open up perspectives for sustainable, post-capitalist, post-profit maximizing future societies, as advocated by the Japanese neo-marxist Kohei Saito[10], we must once again turn to the agrarian sphere and its modes of (re)production as a main source of inspiration, energy, and revolutionary dynamics.
Notes
(1) Manfred Bachmann, „Zum Geleit“, in: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (ed.), Der Bauer und seine Befreiung. Ausstellung aus Anlaß des 450. Jahrestages des deutschen Bauernkrieges und des 30. Jahrestages der Bodenreform [The peasant and his liberation. Exhibition on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War and the 30th anniversary of the land reform], Dresden 1975, p.7; translation by authors.
(2) The idea was to show an ascending line of important individuals in a revolutionary history, starting with Müntzer on the 5 Mark note and culminating in Lenin on the 500 Mark bill.
(3) For an analysis of agriculture as the initial force that led into today’s anthropocenic condition, see: David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Oakland 2012.
(4) From the concept of the Committee of the Council of Ministers of the GDR for the 1975 exhibition on the German Peasants’ War and land reform in Dresden, quoted after Bachmann, ibid.; translation by author.
(5) see Ramona Bunkus and Insa Theesfeld, “Land Grabbing in Europe? Socio-Cultural Externalities of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in East Germany”, in: Land 2018, 7, 98.
(6) Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn/New York 2004; Eva von Redecker, Revolution für das Leben. Philosophie der neuen Protestformen, Frankfurt/Main 2023.
(7) “Chemisierung” is the German neologism used to describe the application of chemically produced substances to enhance productivity and reliability in agricultural production.
(8) His books Anilin (1936) and Bei IG Farben (1951), about the advent of the German chemical industry, sold a million copies during the NS-time and in post-war West Germany.
(9) see Maan Barua, “Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography”, in: Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2022, pp. 1–17.
(10) See Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne 2022.
For more information on the exhibition see: https://werkleitz.de/en/planetarische-bauern-ausstellung. It is part of the state exhibition of Saxony-Anhalt/Germany in 2025, titled Gerechtigkeyt – Thomas Müntzer & 500 Jahre Bauernkrieg (Justice – Thomas Müntzer & 500 years of Peasants’ War)