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Gifts from The Morning Star
Plaw Hatch Farm and Tablehurst: a socialist countryside prefigured?
These twin Sussex co-ops selling their produce directly to locals offers a glimpse of a future of sustainable, democratised food production – all in harmony with nature, says DAVE BANGS

MOST socialists who love the countryside and nature will have ideas about what a socialist countryside would be like. They may have model projects that they think prefigure that future.

For myself, those ideas would include the return of land-based labour on a large scale to the countryside and the long-term replacement of giant cities by a settlement pattern that combines the advantages of urban and rural living.

Something, maybe, like the pattern of the best of the old South Yorkshire coalfield, where industrial mining villages were scattered in a lacework of woods, rich farms of corn and pasture, lakes, small meandering rivers, grazing marsh and moor.

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