Life & Wisdom Quote by Herman Gorter

Gorter’s sentence reads like a calm inventory of rural adequacy, and that’s precisely the trap. By stacking practicalities - a plot of land, decent transport, a route to market, the fallback of subsistence - he sketches a peasantry that is poor but not desperate. The subtext isn’t pastoral sympathy; it’s political bookkeeping. If people can “mostly provide their own food,” their hunger won’t automatically ripen into revolt. If “excellent means of transport” ties them to markets, their grievances get braided into commerce, not insurgency.

Coming from a poet who moved through socialist and communist currents in the Netherlands, the line carries a cold strategic intent: diagnosing why a certain class may be hard to mobilize. The phrasing is tellingly unromantic. “Possess a piece of land” signals property, however tiny, as a stabilizer. Even “at the very worst” is a kind of condescension dressed as reassurance, implying a floor beneath suffering that blunts radical urgency.

Context matters: late-19th and early-20th century Marxists argued over whether peasants were revolutionary allies or a conservative ballast. Gorter’s language sits in that debate, treating material conditions as levers of consciousness. The irony is that the “excellent” infrastructure that seems to improve life also integrates peasants into the very system radicals aim to overturn. The line isn’t praising rural resilience; it’s explaining, with clipped pragmatism, why comfort-by-a-thousand-small-safeties can be counterrevolutionary.