- Capitalism and Alternatives -

The vanishing peasant

Posted by: Stoller on December 12, 1999 at 17:26:03:

In Reply to: U.S. Imperialism: A Primer posted by Porgie Tirebiter on December 11, 1999 at 21:26:35:


: You agree, and proceed to dispossess your small farmers of their land and turn them into wage laborers on large cash-crop farms. (In the Soviet Union under Stalin, this was called "forced collectivization"; under US sponsorship, it's called "modernization." But in order to have effective large scale agriculture of cash crops, you will need advanced farm machinery and the latest chemical fertilizers and insecticides. . .

It is interesting, this continual process of agricultural centralization.

I have long been of the opinion that the peasant---the proud, independent, dirt-poor, small land-holder---has been one of communism's most tenacious adversaries.

Yet observe how capitalism clears this world-historic figure from the stage. Observe how capitalism always turns the peasant into the proletariat.

And promotes the agricultural advances necessary for socialism to become possible, as well.

Everytime one more peasant is expropriated from the land, the spectre increases. . .




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