Over the coming months I hope to compose on my blog the skeleton of a book I may end up writing (everything is so non-committal these days, isn’t it) that I want to call “The Farmer and the Field”.  Contrary to its name it is not 1) a children’s book, nor 2) an agricultural manual.  In fact it is a continuation of the commentary I have been making on the Creepy Sleepy BB concerning the development of a new idea about socialism.

The Farmer and the Field is a metaphor which I find incredibly useful.  To my knowledge it has not been used before to describe what must be done, tactically speaking, in a pre-revolutionary society such as ours.  Bascially, it goes like this:  We have a field, a farmer, and some seeds.  It is the beginning of planting season, the field has never been cleared for use before and the ground is still a little frozen from winter.  But it is time to lay in the crop to get it growing.

In this metaphor, there are three variables:  the field (its quality, its fertility, and the things in it), the farmer (this is the kind of person he is, his character) and the seeds (what the farmer is planting).  The field represents the society and its characteristics, genericly speaking.  The farmer represents the revolutionary (or the reactionary, or the liberal, or the conservative, depending on what you want to look at in the analogy) and the seeds represent the “revolution” (or the change the farmer would like to see in the field).  I will be expanding this metaphor using these three characters.  There are also a number of other things I will bring into it, such as the climate (which affect the field, but are entirely outside of the farmer’s control) and the others in the area (these affect the farmer, in that they may put some demands on the farmer that are completely outside of the farmer’s control).  All these things combine to form a story that will help describe what I believe is necessary to create a successful change in the society we live in.

As I continue writing, of course, commentary will be requested of the readers, and eventually, I will have enough material to create and/or edit a book out of.

Serenely,

Doc