Socialism and Subsistence

Both of my books, "Retreat" (2020) and "The Garden" (2025) had an aspect of left-wing politics to them. However, in sympathy to the research material (as opposed to bringing a forced perspective to bear on it) it wasn't appropriate to explore this in detail in the books. The lens of Eastern philosophy through which I surveyed the terrain, and which that generation favoured, gave a wider and more illuminating perspective on the counterculture than politics would have provided. This short blog-post survey of some carefully-selected books can be viewed as a political supplement to "The Garden." In "Retreat" left-wing politics were mainly expressed by focus upon the Freudian-Marxism of theorists Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown. In "The Garden", the twentieth-century strand of self-sufficiency represented by Helen and Scott Nearing, and to a lesser degree the ideas of John Seymour, had a background in Socialism. Centering on Helen and Scott Nearing's work in homesteading in "The…