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Well speaking of `we' at Berkeley who have strange ideas, allow me to point out that the proper parallel to the Russian or Ukrainian peasant-farmers are our own thousands upon thousands of migrant and Mexican nationals (serfs) who do most of the agricultural labor keeping California in the green and the gold. Many as `illegals' are quasi-stateless persons living in the privatized squalor of refugee camps (called agricultural stations) where they are technically allowed to send their children to public school and receive emergency room triage. Rest assured `we' civilized Californians are working hard to stop those abuses of our free market state largess.
Now, I am not positive, but `our' migrant laborers might actually envy the Russian peasant farmers of post-1991. Of course I've never been close enough to one of them to ask and I don't speak Spanish, but I have to assume some might relish the idea of land they could work and live on without the threat of incarceration and deportation, not to mention being poisoned to death or disabled by the petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
It is of course axiomatic that they are free to labor and die elsewhere---elsewhere being just about any other demi-feudal corporate estate or ranchero. Perish the thought, we ever under take agrarian reform in California. Why think of the tragic demise of all those traditional american family farmers like ConAgra, ADM, and Cargil.
What I find amazing in this whole thread is the idea that agriculture hasn't always been a vast collective undertaking, most often entirely ruled by the largest socio-political units available to a society, like government, landed aristocrats, feudal lords, village elders, tribal chieftains---or in our case transnational corporations. Some how there is the illusion that agriculture's natural base in free market idealism is some little entrepreneurial mom-pop family garden project. While I am sure there are some such examples everywhere, that family unit ideal has never accounted for the bulk of agricultural production any where, except in some ideologue's mind. Yes, agricultural families plant their own food crops, but these are smaller communal or village plots that serve as necessary auxiliary production to larger more monolithic tracks---mostly owned and operated by absentee socio-economic units, i.e. governments, corporations, or landed aristocrats. But that division between small scale local food production, and large scale estate systems hasn't changed since when, ancient Mesopotamia?---well Palestine, Jordan and Iraq actually. Never mind. Agriculture is and always was an economic undertaking of scale. It has always been centrally planned and coordinated by the largest powers that be primarily because it can not physically be done any other way.
So all this whinge-ing over `collectivization' versus `free markets' is just diversionary bullshit.
Chuck Grimes