This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘P’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
There are various interpretations of this phrase, often applied to different regions of the world, but in general it implies people who live primarily by the food and resources they grow or harvest themselves, creating only a small surplus to trade for other goods. In general liberal economics has sought to eliminate peasant agriculture in the name of economic efficiency; when from a more critical standpoint it could be argued that peasants cannot be as easily exploited by the economic process, and so must be severed from the land to make them work within the conventional economic process. Per unit area of land peasant agriculture is more ecologically efficient, producing more food per unit area of land with far lower resource inputs. The core of most national and global farming policy, however, is to intensify/industrialize food production to serve global commodity markets and produce an economic return – irrespective of the impact upon the global/local environment.
At its simplest, ‘pedagogy’ is the study of how we formally or informally learn the knowledge and values of society, and in particular pass these from one generation the next. In its broadest sense, it studies how different social, economic, and political factors combine to socially reproduce society’s structures within future generations and institutions – and how changing those factors has the potential to shift the social structure within future generations. In isolation, it is the study of how groups or technical specialisms structure knowledge in order to pass it to new members, or society-at-large.
An ecological and lifestyle design system which seeks to maximize human food and resource production within a diverse ecological process, allowing the inputs normally derived from fossil fuels or mined minerals to be replaced by ‘ecosystem services’ – i.e., natural ecosystems of plants and animals working with human agriculture to produce those inputs naturally. Increasingly permaculture design is providing means to grow food in urban areas, or create natural green areas on land which was once arid desert. Generally permaculture is a means to intensively grow food without creating ecological damage associated with conventional intensive methods, and so is often associated with low-impact developments/lifestyles. As a result of the direct human labour involved, permaculture requires people to have a direct relationship to the land to close resource cycles and eliminate pollution, and so is frowned upon/opposed under traditional liberal economic models which separate producers and consumers via the business cycle, protecting the economic power of concentrated land ownership.
Under Marxist economic theory, the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (literally, ‘the little managers’) are not true professionals (like the professional managerial class) nor employed workers (like the proletariat), but instead form an economic class of independent skilled tradesman or artisans who exist between these two economic classes. One of the successes of both Thacherism and Reaganism in the 1980s was to significantly expand the petty bourgeoisie (as large industries were broken-up and multi-level subcontracting created lucrative employment for those willing to work under these new conditions) beyond what Marxist theory envisaged – in the process breaking-down traditional proletarian institutions such as trade unions. And as the petty bourgeoisie often identify with the interests of the professional managerial class and ruling elite, even though in economic terms they have little better life chances than many ordinary proletarian workers, this created a new reactionary Right-wing lobby, which has since become critical to the rise of Donald Trump, or Brexit in the UK. More generally – historically in Italy, Germany, and Latin America – the reactionary nature of the petty bourgeoisie was significant in the rise of Fascism.
It’s impossible to summarize such a broad philosophy in a paragraph, but… A field of philosophy originating in the 1950s and 1960s arguing that many aspects of the modern world have ceased to have a direct meaning in our lives, and increasingly meaning has been modified by the signs and meanings embedded in the symbolism or values of modern economic life. Right-leaning pundits argue that postmodernism has removed meaning because all meaning is relative; on the Left, postmodernism is increasingly resulting in a form of nihilism, because if there is no meaning, what’s the point of life?; arguably neither wing really engage with the deeper message of postmodernism – that in a world ever-more tightly in the grip of global economic forces, the individual has ever-less personal agency, and so must negotiate a see of competing influences to define what is ‘real’ for them. Recently superseded by ‘metamodernism’.
In classical Marxist theory, ‘the bourgeoisie’ are the economic class of business managers or professionals who traditionally side with the ‘ruling class’ (who actually own most of the assets in society). Where this Nineteenth Century model falls down is that the changes in business structure, especially communications technology facilitating greater economic globaization and liberalization, mean that while the bourgeoisie has grown to perhaps 15% of the population a larger influence on popular politics today is held by the ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (who have very different priorities). More importantly, with the rise of the bureaucratic state, it is more accurate to describe the bourgeoisie as the ‘Professional Managerial Class’, since they form the core of the national and global bureaucracies which make the industrial state function – and today it is the face-less/soul-less rules of bureaucratic systems which wield power in the modern state rather than any particular social force within it.
Property/proprietary rights are a legal instruments which gives natural persons and bodies corporate rights over physical or intellectual assets, allowing them to exploit these assets for profit in whatever manner they wish. Due to the historic concentration of property rights amongst an economic elite the benefits of society’s economic assets flow to a few; which means they are also the means by which the majority of the population are forced to work for a wage from those who hold society’s economic assets. Even in countries where land or resources are centrally owned by the state, these are still treated as ‘private assets’ controlled to the state rather than resources which may be shared by all citizens; hence why under Neoliberalism the privatization of state assets to benefit private interests has been the cornerstone of growing wealth inequality. For this reason private property, and its role in controlling the bulk of the population, is a key debate in Anarchist theory far more than the other ‘-isms’ of the Left – the most notable example being Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s statement, ‘all property is theft’.
Beyond simple marketing or advertising, ‘public relations’ (PR) arose from the expanded mass media environment of the second half of the Twentieth Century, promoted by figures such as Edward Bernays. In a time when the mass media provides 24/7 rolling news and features, public relations seeks to manipulate the perceptions of a person, a brand, a corporation, and even states, in order to create a positive image. PR is also key to the way contemporary party politics in Western democracies seek to massage perceptions of some policies, while deflecting attention from other unwelcome issues or general debates. Latterly, as digital systems have massively expanded the scope of data collection about the public, PR has morphed into a more malevolent form of lobbying known as ‘strategic communications’.
A social and political movement in the West from the late 1970s. While capitalism has commodified the symbolic value of punk as fashion and musical products, at the heart of punk philosophy is the idea of self-creation and self-organization as a means to liberate the individual from the controlling power of markets and Capitalism – hence why punk ideology is traditionally associated with Anarchism. While the heyday of the punk subculture was from 1976 to the mid-80s, punk values now influence many fields from permaculture, to art and media creation, to free computer systems (‘cyberpunks’).