The Desire for Dirty Hands

 

August Sander; Young Farmers, 1914.
Photo taken from Here

We have been removed over the generations from the land, and particularly from the everyday activity of getting our hands dirty. In the cities, there is less and less land to get to grips with, and the constraints capitalism puts on the populace at large to earn their rights to life through currency rather than through connection with natural resources has, over history, forced most to work in factories and industry. In rural areas, technological leaps in machinery and practice has meant agriculture needs fewer workers. Industry in rural areas has thus become more abstracted; I often think of those strange, lonely industrial estates blighting the landscape in the middle of nowhere. Even if you wanted to grapple with the land, the rights and ownership in the UK has become ever more restricting and dense; we have an incredibly unequal distribution of land, with half of it being owned by less than 1% of the population.

When I say “getting hands dirty,” I mean using your wits, strength, and senses to handle the natural resources that are necessary for life, not just human, to flourish. I do not mean the merciless sweat-of-your-brow capitalist or fascist domination and strife of the land. This thought trail creates the arbitrariness of work, the blue collars and white collars, people whose choices to survive under the yoke of capital result in assumptions about honesty, strength, and integrity. I mean a primitive and simple means to survival, and hopefully a deep instinctual desire to connect with that which sustains us.

Generations back, save for those who could luckily set out on other paths such as trade or the luxuries afforded the bourgeoisie, most working people and their families would have unremitting contact with the Earth, the environment, and all manner of domesticated or wild flora and fauna as a matter of daily life. I use this blanket description to apply to serfs in Medieval fiefdoms to the pre-depression farming family units across the world. There would be those within the family who had a yearning not to be in contact with the land, but other things, specific non-farming trades or academia (in some later eras only.)

A great reversal seems to have occurred; generally, people work and live with little genuine contact with the raw, natural essences of life, and those who yearn for this contact have societal constraints on where they end up living, working, and generally spending their time, making it difficult for such a path to be followed. This switch wasn’t some sort of malevolent event; Capitalism’s fervour for constant growth has resulted in a ceaselessly morphing civilisation that is constantly reaching for infinite growth.

I chose August Sander’s photograph Young Farmers, 1914 to go with this piece as I feel it encapsulates this shift in Western society beautifully; the young men, showing off their flash suits with the backdrop of the countryside, called out as Farmers by the photograph title (the photograph is often also called ‘Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance’) yet dressed unlike farmers. This video points out that this generation of farmer likely would’ve been the first to be able to afford a suit such as this, stepping from the abashed poverty and struggle of working the land towards a desire to be in contact with something else.