John Berger and the loss of rural culture

Nine years ago today, the British writer and critic John Berger died. In 2026, we are celebrating the centenary of his birth as one of the most original, committed and influential intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st.

After a successful career as an art critic and painter in post-war London, Berger decided to leave the UK and ended up in Quincy, a small town in the French Alps, close to Geneva. This is where author and poet Jorge Luis Borges is buried, a man for whom Berger felt great admiration, despite occupying the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. Berger had abandoned painting to devote himself entirely to writing, a hybrid kind of writing, without borders, like the world he envisioned.

In fact, emigration was one of the themes that run through his short stories, novels, film scripts (he worked with Alain Tanner), poetry and essays, published either separately or within the same book, as in Pig Earth, the first volume of his Into Their Labors trilogy. This quote from the Gospel of St. John opens the book: “Others have labored and ye are entered into their labors” and it is worth remembering it now that we are in the Christmas season. The author of Ways of Seeing, G which won the 1972 Booker Prize, Once in Europe and Lila and Flag, was a heterodox Marxist — down to earth but also possessing a sense of transcendence.

Berger wrote Pig Earth in Quincy, between 1974 and 1978, while observing the lives of the peasants there. His was not the perspective of a tourist but of someone determined to tell the story of a class and a peasantry on the verge of disappearing. In the text An Explanation, included in the book, he tells us: “My writing about peasants separates me from them and brings me close to them.” He was not lying to himself. Even though he spent a lot of time in the countryside and the house where he lived with Beverly, his wife, and their son Yves belonged to one of the neighbors, and despite his commitment to the land as a way of life as opposed to a hobby, a place where he had gone to learn and not to teach; despite all that, Berger always knew he was privileged, that he could leave at any time.

In this volume of short stories, which ends with the essay Historical Afterword, which seems even more relevant decades after it was written, Berger pointed out that there can be agriculture without peasants, a rural world without people. “In Western Europe, if the plans work out as the economic planners have foreseen, there will be no more peasants within twenty-five years,” he wrote. Visionary words that also describe Spain in the 21st century, when agribusiness and intensive and industrialized agriculture have prevailed. The peasant way of life was not only about food production, but also about a way of relating to the environment — a culture that has largely been lost today.

“Peasant life is a life devoted entirely to survival,” Berger wrote in the same essay. “To dismiss the peasant experience as something that belongs to the past and is irrelevant to modern life; to imagine that the thousands of years of peasant culture leave no inheritance for the future, simply because it has almost never taken the form of enduring objects; to continue to maintain, as it has been for centuries, that it is something marginal to civilization; all this is to deny the value of too much history and too many lives. You can’t cross out a part of history like the one that draws a line on a settled account.” The loss of rural culture is as relevant as the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the Spanish writer Luis Landero would conclude years later.

However, Berger maintains that the peasantry turned out to be more resilient than previously thought. “The peasant has survived far longer than was predicted. But within the last twenty years, monopoly capital, through its multinational corporations, has created the new highly profitable structure, agribusiness, whereby it controls not necessarily the production but the market for agricultural inputs and outputs and the processing, packaging, and selling of every kind of foodstuff.”

Today, the countryside in Europe is in the hands of large landowners. The common agricultural policy has favored industrial and intensive agriculture over small producers, who are seeing their profit margins shrink. The signing of the agreement with Mercosur is one more step towards the reallocation of the kind of agriculture that we need, one that should cater for local consumption and not be planned for export, benefitting only large companies. Although still very limited (the use of glyphosate, for example, a powerful herbicide that wreaks havoc on nature, including humans, is still allowed), the small advances of the Green Agenda on pesticides and phytosanitary products have been swept away by the new reactionary wave that is dominating the world. Polluted land is less fertile land, with less biodiversity and greater threats to crops.

It is paradoxical that small farmers consider environmentalists their enemies, when the only viable agriculture in biophysical and economic terms is ecological and regenerative agriculture; curious that they do not see the climate emergency as a threat to their very survival. How do you cultivate the land in a world where the seasons disappear, when looking to the sky for an answer can become a memory of the past? Pig earth.

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