Agrarian Labor as Technology of the Subject: The Dutch Colonies of Benevolence and the Maoist Sent-Down Movement¹

Emily Ng

In the print below, the gentleman in the long blue coat and the top hat – perhaps a patron or supporting member of the Society of Benevolence – faces away from the viewer (Figure 1). His gaze follows the pointing arm of what seems to be the district master of Frederiksoord – the first “free” colony among Johannes van den Bosch’s Colonies of Benevolence – toward the rows of tilled land, topped by the farming colonist and his allocated cows. In the background, a series of farmhouses, distributed along parallel roads. In the near and far distance, clusters of trees, whose role in the logic of enclosure, as we will see below, is partially obscured, presented here more as a picturesque element.

Parallelling Dutch landscape paintings of the seventeenth century, De Kolonie Fredriksoord opens up onto an expansive cloudscape, with subdued colors awash in golden light below. The central elements are familiar: the dirt road, the trees, the farmhouse, the land. Yet, the differences are telling. Formative works like Pieter van Santvoort’s Landscape with Farmhouse and Country Road (1625) tend to depict just a few farmers on a quiet, rolling, apparently unchanging landscape with a single farmhouse or two, disavowing the major commercial land reclamation projects flattening such dune-covered terrains at the time.³ De Kolonie Fredriksoord, by contrast, is bustling with clusters of humans and livestock, proudly showcasing the transformation of the landscape through cultivation amid otherwise idyllic rural visual elements.

In this, it is perhaps more akin to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s series The Harvesters (1565), where agricultural labor is also foregrounded. Yet, whereas The Harvesters features a life of work and leisure across seasonal cycles – not only reaping, but eating, drinking, and napping in autumn; not only hunting, but also ice skating in the winter – most of the characters featured in Fredriksoord seem to be busily toiling away – tilling, herding, sowing, transporting, surveying – under the gaze of their potential benefactors.⁴ It presents an industrious twist on the rural idyll, merging chronotopes of non-mechanized labor and planning, progress, and surveillance (see Stuit, this cluster).⁵ Indeed, the painting (along with its reprints) was used by the Society for promotional purposes to raise funds from potential patrons, and seems to share the gaze of the patron, assessing the yields of their philanthropic contribution.⁶

Here, an urban “sent-down” youth in a plaid button-up shirt, temporarily secured pant legs, and state-issued straw hat (Figure 2). She follows the gaze and gesturing hands of the villager, the latter marked by her “traditional” flower print shirt, embroidered apron, and shin cover-ups to keep pant legs clean during agricultural work. A voluntary prelude to the compulsory Maoist “Up to the Mountains, and Down to the Countryside” campaign of the 1960s and 1970s to transfer urban youth to the countryside (also known as the “sent-down,” rustification, or “educated youth” movement), the two figures stage an encounter between city and country. Both face the viewer but look toward a horizon beyond the canvas, in a more subtle version of the heroic “socialist-realist gaze” so common in Maoist and Soviet era imagery and cinema.⁷ Around them, signs of abundance: ears and ears of corn, filling baskets imprinted with “…third production team”, the basic, village-like unit of the Maoist commune system. In the medium distance, a group of men, seemingly sent-down youths, rest and gesture toward the landscape. Off in the far distance are electricity towers and a cargo ship, signaling a modernized countryside, and a Communist flag atop a cluster of homes – presumably the flag of the production team noted on the harvest baskets.

Echoing such renowned Chinese landscapes as Travelers among Mountains and Streams by Fan Kuan (960-1030), the painting features mountains, rivers, and trees, and is visually divided into three planes in a style common to earlier Chinese landscapes – near, middle, and far, stacked vertically. Yet, whereas the humans (and oxen) in landscape paintings like Travelers are known for their miniscule scale compared to the vastness of the mountains, with the nearest plane filled with detailed features of the land, most prominent in Aspiration in the Mountain Village are the two human protagonists undergoing mutual transformation. Their postures register a reversal of positions: the book-learned takes on an assured, determined, hardened stance, while the farmer gestures seem more gentle, pensive, and guiding.

Unlike nostalgic, counter-urban Sung Dynasty (960-1279) portrayals of farming, which often feature a single male farmer with his ox(en), Aspiration in the Mountain Village foregrounds the meeting between farmer and urbanite, both women.⁸ It presents a revolutionary rearticulation of the rural idyll: a space of transformative encounter and shared horizons, a mountainous landscape marked by emblems of the party-state, peppered with modern technologies. Part of the Maoist “massification” of audiences for artistic productions, printed posters such as this were to be widely reproduced, circulated, and viewed by the very subjects featured in the image, who were to feel interpellated by the heroic call.⁹

Both Fredriksoord and Aspiration in the Mountain Village thus evoke older visual motifs of natural landscapes to promote campaigns that send urbanites to the countryside. While clearly divergent in scale, setting, and design, many parallels undergird the Colonies and the Sent-Down Movement.¹⁰ Both were spurred in part by the perceived scarcity of urban employment amid industrialization, and the need to redistribute urban bodies across non-urban spaces. Both prescribed farming to city dwellers otherwise inexperienced in it. Both began as voluntary programs and ended with coerced participation. Both, many have argued, failed.¹¹ In addition, both aimed at – or at least offered rationales based on – the virtuous transformation of the subject through embodied engagements with agrarian labor. Yet, such transformations were articulated against different ills. In what follows, I explore how these two movements differently imagined rural labor as a corporeal technology of the subject.

The Colonies: Enclosure, Autonomy, Surplus

In 1818, following the Napoleonic Wars, Johannes van den Bosch founded the Society of Benevolence, a donor-based program that would send voluntary urban poor – and soon after involuntary urban criminalized poor – into rural, internal “Colonies of Benevolence” to perform agricultural work (see Introduction, this cluster). The Colonies were imagined as a solution to an array of national problems, among them, widespread urban poverty, the need to reform communal marke land ownership for modern agriculture and the free market, and decreased access to cheap imported grain following the collapse of the Dutch East India Company.¹² The urban poor would be brought to the hitherto unproductive lands of dunes and peat bogs, providing for their own sustenance rather than “idly” relying on charity.

Deploying Christian-cum-Enlightenment conflations of idleness with vice, the logics and practices of these internal colonies and those of external colonies mutually informed each other (see Bosma and Valdés Olmos, this cluster). Themes of industriousness were combined with themes of morality and autonomy, and given shape in contrast with idleness and dependency. Van den Bosch’s formulations can be understood in the context of the broader “industrious revolution” and discourses on “productive virtue,” to which poverty and idleness were increasingly tethered in Dutch rhetoric and policy, as well as in the liberalist articulations of the middle class.¹³ Echoing French and British liberalism, idleness was deployed in condemnations of the “idle aristocracy,” against which middle-rank “industrious classes” would define themselves as the true bearers of civilization.¹⁴ On the other end, imaginations of industrious, self-willed labor were central to the distinction between the middle-rank and proletarian “rabble” classes, who were to be excluded from new formulations of “the people.”

In line with its aim of providing poor relief through labor rather than charity, the Society’s archival photographs of the Colonies (Figure 3) showcase the metamorphosis of the so-called rabble classes into the virtuously productive “people” of an emerging civil society. Here, rows of colonists are posed atop rows of vegetation – a mutual ordering of self and land, one cultivating the other through agriculture. (But as the not-quite-perfect rows give hint to, such efforts at order often fell short of their aim.) Moreover, the visible enclosure of the colony plot by the lines of trees – minimized in Figure 1 –speaks to notions of agrarian labor inherited from John Locke’s labor theory of property, which would influence generations of liberal thinkers to come, including those in Van den Bosch’s milieu. In Locke’s writings, the centrality of reason to liberty and civil society was tied to industriousness, particularly through the dual notions of private property and agrarian labor. Articulated through a language of colonial difference, labor upon enclosed property provided at once the moral ideal and rationale for colonization. For Locke, more than in mere non-urban subsistence, the “industrious Englishman engaged in agrarian labor, defined repeatedly as cultivation, enclosure and husbandry of land,” which distinguished him explicitly from “the American Indian who is ‘idle.’”¹⁵

The right of the English colonizer to claim “wasted” land – defined as non-enclosed and non-cultivated – was thus justified through the very act of labor upon enclosed land, defined as industrious. Such “liberal colonial” justifications were not simply applied to external colonies, but would also be taken up as the premise for internal colonies across Europe and North America.¹⁶ Tree-lined views of the Colonies, in this sense, are crucial for the visual staging of the subject-in-transformation, as the very possibility of productive virtue required the transformation of an unbounded, idle wilderness into an industrious, agrarian rurality.

If the imagined movement from wilderness to cultivation was produced in part through spatial enclosure, that from coercion (as forced laborer) to freedom (as civilized citizen) was routed in part through a production of desire in the Colonies: the desire for surplus. Alongside enclosure, the visual dominance of parallel lines in the photograph resonates with capitalistic logics of surplus production through monocultural cash cropping. While the makings of autonomy for the poor through agriculture might first point to self-subsistence, the Colonies importantly aimed to teach the urban poor to produce beyond personal subsistence.

Defending himself against liberal critics of coerced labor in the Colonies, Van den Bosch proposed a theory of labor linking coercion with surplus. He argued that what critics termed “free” wage labor was, in fact, not free at all, as wage laborers were forced to hire themselves out due to their lack of access to the means of production. Far from the Marxian critique it may seem to resemble, Van den Bosch’s argument naturalizes the necessity of coercion.¹⁷ Slipping implicitly away from the particularity of “idle” populations, he suggests that coercion is needed to produce any surplus: “The foundation of all labor above and beyond that required immediately to fulfill natural needs is the result of force.”¹⁸

With urban wage labor markets in mind, rural residence at the Colonies was thus to (re)produce the autonomous, self-disciplined, commodity-producing ideals of the market—“to inculcate both capitalist work discipline and responsiveness to market incentives to crop production.”¹⁹ Copper medals, formal status, and degrees of freedom in activity were awarded depending not only on general good behavior, but on levels of production.²⁰ Rural labor in the Colonies, in short, was designed to cultivate a rudimentary capitalistic subjectivity. Learning to want to produce surplus, the logic went, would prepare the colonists for self-sustenance in the real market, ridding the former pauper at once of idleness and dependency, paving their way toward autonomy. Tree-lined enclosures reinforced notions of agrarian industriousness and private property, while involuntary participation materialized (and paradoxically revealed) the implicit coercion structured in the so-called free market.

The Sent-Down: Encounter, Proximity, Anti-Bureaucratism

From the 1950s through the early 1970s, amid an array of other political campaigns, the Maoist administration sent waves of urban zhiqing, “educated/intellectual youth,” and bureaucratic officials to live, work, and be “reeducated” in rural regions across China. By 1968, participation became systematic and compulsory, in what came to be referred to as the “Up to the Mountains and Down to the Villages Movement.” An estimated 17 million youths would be sent to the countryside across the span of a decade, some to rural village communes, others to military and state farms.²¹ Whereas the Colonies centered their efforts on criminalized paupers, the Sent-Down Movement was aimed at those poised to be potential future leaders of the nation (indeed, many contemporary leaders, including the current Chinese president, were once sent-down youth).

Various lead-ups to the campaign have been proposed: concerns over rising urban unemployment, fear of political instability from the Red Guard movement, the need for agricultural development after years of rural surplus extraction to support urban industrialization, and increasing factional tensions within the Chinese Communist Party. The final notion is worth elaborating on here. Whereas Mao had long been known for his stance against excessive bureaucratization and technical specialization, a political split had grown between those who advocated technical rationality as a necessary price for development, and those like Mao who felt bureaucratization was antithetical to communist equality, as “it would make technical specialists rather than peasants the central force in society.”²²

While the language of idleness – so prevalent in writings on the Colonies of Benevolence – was not absent from the Sent-Down Movement, the subject of concern differed. For Mao, rather than addressing idleness in the urban poor, agricultural labor was an antidote to bureaucratism, technocracy, and “bourgeois tendencies” among the urban educated classes. Indeed, in Maoist writings more broadly, when idleness was evoked, it tended to be attached to officials and bureaucrats:

[Bureaucratic officials] want others to read documents; the others read and they sleep… they are disinclined to do extra things… They seek pleasure and fear hardships… [their] home and its furnishings become more and more luxurious… They eat their fill every day; they easily avoid hard work.²³

Beyond Weberian critiques of bureaucracy in the West, Maoist critiques of bureaucracy connoted not only their modern rationalistic manifestations, but also the Chinese imperial bureaucratic system. Of particular concern was the tendency for the imperial bureaucracy – and by extension the Communist one – to set the educated population apart and advance them at the expense of commoners.²⁴

Paralleling the language of sending educated urban youth “down” to the countryside, the Maoist critique of bureaucratization was often articulated in terms of the distance between the “up” and “down,” where “up” was linked to bureaucratic officialdom and “down” was linked to everyday reality and the masses: “At the highest level there is very little knowledge; they do not understand the opinion of the masses… the top is divorced from the bottom.”²⁵ What would produce proximity between the top and the bottom, in the language of Maoist policy, was the “mass line” of twofold participation: the sending of administrators and technical specialists “down” to the masses to perform basic non-specialized labor, and processes in which the masses are invited upward to participate in decision-making. Rather than Weberian bureaucratic ideals of efficiency through specialization, “skilled personnel are supposed to be willing to leave comfortable and familiar posts for terms in manual labor or work for which they have not been trained.”²⁶

The role of agricultural labor in removing the distance between elite and lower classes, and in bringing forth revolutionary consciousness can also be understood in part through Marx’s approach to labor as an original site of alienation and class difference. If labor was to provide a theory of property for Locke, it would provide a theory of value in Marx – specifically, the production of surplus value. For Marx, surplus value was created by the embedding of manual labor into the commodity form. By the resulting concealment of the original relations of production, this congealed labor would come to be devalued in the process of capitalist exchange.²⁷

In the context of the Sent-Down Movement, re-encounter with material production under non-capitalist conditions would thus imply a re-orientation in one’s understanding of value. Whereas the Dutch colonists were to cultivate a desire for surplus value through crop production and top-down incentives, the Chinese sent-down youth were expected to learn directly from peasantry, who were both more seasoned in agricultural work and considered by Mao to be more politically revolutionary than the urbanites.²⁹ Alongside reeducation through agricultural labor, then, the very meeting of educated youth and peasantry was to induce transformation.³⁰ Echoed in the visual prominence of the encounter between the two figures in Aspiration in the Mountain Village (Figure 2) as well as in photographs like this one (Figure 4), the student and the peasant would come – visually and politically – face-to-face, one learning from the other. While revolutionary reeducation was emphasized for the urbanites, the peasantry was to benefit from the book learning of the former, featured visually in the photograph by the presence of the “little red book” of Quotations from Mao Zedong.

The transformative potential of agricultural labor in the Sent-Down Movement, then, can be understood – at least at the level of political ideals – through the capacity of manual labor and encounter with the peasant to bring educated urbanites “down,” diminishing the gap between high and low, minimizing bureaucratization and specialization. At the same time, such images also obscure a central element of the plan, given their role in recruitment. The urbanites who lived in “comfort” were to grow more revolutionary in part from the difficulties of rural life. The smiling faces and resting postures, in both the photo and the poster above, heighten the sense of pleasure in revolutionary participation, while minimizing Mao’s written mentions of the harshness of rural conditions.

Rural Labor as Corporeal Technology of the Subject

Amid moral indictments of the “able-bodied unemployed” in Europe, articulations of the industrious subject in the Colonies echoed liberal discourses of productive virtue: the working body would become a moral, self-disciplined body.³¹ Moreover, the allocation of family farms and the production of “simple” commodities would not only offer practice in private land ownership and voluntary self-willed labor – central to Lockean formulations of civil society – but also produce desire for surplus value perceived as lacking among the idle poor.

By contrast, portraits of the revolutionary subject in the Sent-Down Movement implied a Marxian labor theory of value and Maoist articulations of two-way participation. Given political indictments of bourgeois tendencies among urban educated classes, the laboring body was rendered a revolutionary, politically rectified body. For increasingly technocratic classes, participation in collective agriculture and the encounter with peasantry and the harshness of rural life were to diminish the distance between mental and manual labor, between upper and lower classes.

Divergences between the two campaigns are echoed in their imagistic counterparts. While both take up older landscape motifs familiar to their viewers, Maoist era posters and photographs feature the encounter and merging of roles between educated urbanites and peasantry. Images of the Dutch Colonies feature the enclosure of orderly land, the emergence of industrious virtue among the relocated urban poor, and the gaze of patrons. In short, the same corporeal technology – agrarian labor – was taken up to produce two contrary subjects.³² In the Colonies, rural labor was to produce a moral, industrious, proto-capitalist working body, through the instillation of desire for surplus value. In the Sent-Down Movement, it was to produce a revolutionary, anti-bourgeois laborer, through contact with harsh conditions, manual work, and the peasantry.

Notes