carol stack wrote an interesting book about this years ago. she pointed out that poor black families remain poor because they engage in practices that support their kin network. you see, what they do is abide by the principle of helping out the kin network when they come into money. win the lottery? you will be expected to share the dough. get an advance at your job? don't be surprised when relatives show up on your doorstep looking for a loan they'll never pay back. did you make it up and out? go to college? be prepared to take care of slew of ill and out of work relatives and the exhaustion will bring you down, at least psychologically.
for many conservatives, the answer was: they should start acting like white families and stop being so oriented toward helping out their kin network. they should aspire to bourgeois individualism and watch out for themselves. indeed, for many liberals, the answer was similar.
this is what you are saying when you say that rural people ought to move to the cities. it is a conservative claim that, while it pretends to a "cultural" and "historical" analysis (one based on a faulty premise that lacks empirical evidence anyway [1]) is not really structural at all because it does question the very values of bourgeois cosmopolitanism in the first place.
what you are saying is, look, you can overcome many of these problems if you just stop speaking and writing black english. you should stop valuing some of the things you value (such as your family and community). hey now, don't you know that people of color often tell each other to stop acting all white when they try to get good grades. they are just bringing themselves down, man. worse, they segregate themselves like all that and don't actually want to hang out with white people. no wonder they are poor.
total b.s. when applied to people of color. it's total b.s. because it does not call into question the very values you think are superior and THEN actually try to move beyond both those that supposedly bring people of color down, but also create a miserable existence for all of us who live in class society.
kelley
[1] your claims are about peasants and it is not clear to me that they apply at all. what marx would have called urban in his era might be consider "rural" today. Columbus Ohio to Marx would have been a bustling urban area. You also forget that what some are describing as rural is also known as a surburban bedroom community or, like plattsburgh and cortland, places that were once actually busy cosmopolitan areas compared to farming communities. to compare it to the lives of peasants with no means of mass communication and mass eduation just doesn't cut it. today, we have television and mass communication. we have a right of passage known as college, and fifty percent of all USer attend college.
finally, on your view, no one would have every wrenched themselves out of peasant life. so you'll have to come up with a better explanation as to why peasants have the attitude they have. IOW, you theory suffers from an inability to explain why rural communities modernize. it's one of the central problems with a functionlist thesis.