(p)opulism

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Dec 26 08:00:23 PST 2000


Doug Henwood wrote:


> But I also don't understand how "family
> farming" - which can be very big, no? involving migrant employees and
> futures contracts, no? - squares witha socialist worldview either. To
> the inevitable annoyance of Carrol - who's out there in farm country
> - I'm putting these out mostly as questions, even if there isn't a
> question mark ending every sentence.

Even if it's very small it is apt to involve migrant labor. My grandfather was just barely surviving in the '30s but he would have families of migrant workers living in tents, living in half of a garage (with dirt floor), what have you. Most images of farming seem to be of grain farming. That does allow a fair degree of leisure and limited extra labor in harvest.

But the real objection to family farms is their isolation. In most parts of the world (in the past) peasants lived in villages, and went out to their land. Hence peasants were less subject to "the idiocy [i.e. privacy] of rural life" (note: Marx never accused the *people* of being idiots) than do the isolated farmsteads of the U.S., Canada, etc.

Incidentally, I would be interested in seeing someone write a critique of Colin Duncan, "The Centrality of Agriculture: History, Ecology and Feasible Socialism" in Socialist Register 2000. It seems to be written in utter innocence of the industrial grounds of even neolithic farming, but he can't really be that silly.

Carrol

P.S. Yup. To my annoyance. The point is anyone should be able on any topic they are interested in to risk a few positive observations off the top of their head -- and such observations are far more apt to trigger discussion than empty questions.



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