Cheers, Ken Hanly
----- Original Message ----- From: Ted Winslow <winslow at yorku.ca> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 1:18 PM Subject: Re: Industrial agriculture
> Mark Jones quoted K. Marx:
>
> > 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
> --
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