> KARL MARX:
>
> "Capitalist production, by collecting the population in great centres, and
> causing an ever-increasing preponderance of town population, on the one
> hand concentrates the historical motive power of society; on the other
> hand, it disturbs the circulation of matter between man and the soil, i.e.,
> prevents the return to the soil of its elements consumed by man in the form
> of food and clothing; it therefore violates the conditions necessary to
> lasting fertility of the soil. By this action it destroys at the same time
> the health of the town labourer and the intellectual life of the rural
> labourer. But while upsetting the naturally grown conditions for the
> maintenance of that circulation of matter, it imperiously calls for its
> restoration as a system, as a regulating law of social production, and
> under a form appropriate to the full development of the human race. In
> agriculture as in manufacture, the transformation of production under the
> sway of capital, means, at the same time, the martyrdom of the producer;
> the instrument of labour becomes the means of enslaving, exploiting, and
> impoverishing the labourer; the social combination and organisation of
> labour-processes is turned into an organised mode of crushing out the
> workman's individual vitality, freedom, and independence. The dispersion of
> the rural labourers over larger areas breaks their power of resistance
> while concentration increases that of the town operatives. In modern
> agriculture, as in the urban industries, the increased productiveness and
> quantity of the labour set in motion are bought at the cost of laying waste
> and consuming by disease labour-power itself. Moreover, all progress in
> capitalistic agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the
> labourer, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility
> of the soil for a given time, is a progress towards ruining the lasting
> sources of that fertility. The more a country starts its development on the
> foundation of modern industry, like the United States, for example, the
> more rapid is this process of destruction. Capitalist production,
> therefore, develops technology, and the combining together of various
> processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all
> wealth-the soil and the labourer."
>
Marx's view of the matter is more "dialectical" than this suggests. The following claims immediately precede the passage quoted:
"In the sphere of agriculture, large-scale industry has a more revolutionary effect than elsewhere, for the reason that it annihilates the bulwark of the old society, the 'peasant', and substitutes for him the wage-labourer. Thus the need for social transformation, and the antagonism of the classes, reaches the same level in the countryside as it has attained in the towns. A conscious, technological application of science replaces the previous highly irrational and slothful way of working. The capitalist mode of production completes the disintegration of the primitive familial union which bound agriculture and manufacture together when they were both in an undeveloped and childlike stage. But at the same time it creates the material conditions for a new and higher synthesis, a union of agriculture and industry on the basis of the forms that have developed during the period of their antagonistic isolation. Capitalist production ... " (Capital, vol. 1, p. 637 [Penguin ed.])
Ted -- Ted Winslow E-MAIL: WINSLOW at YORKU.CA Division of Social Science VOICE: (416) 736-5054 York University FAX: (416) 736-5615 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario CANADA M3J 1P3