> Alan wrote:
> >unequivocally arguing that increased agricultural productivity under
> capitalism is an unalloyed good verges on
> farcical when advanced by someone who calls themsevels a Marxist.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> I don't think anyone argued anything like that. Clearly, saying that
> it benefited humanity is different from saying that it didn't have
> problems (which is what I wrote in my post!). I am quite aware of the
> problems of capitalist agriculture and no one said that there weren't
> problems.
>
Dude, I SO wasn't responding to you. In fact, I was quite clear that I was responding to James. Read this at tell me again that no one was making the argument you say no one was making:
James H: Shane and Alan think that Brad is wrong to point to increased agricultural productivity as a gain. They could not be more wrong. There are four billion + people living today - two out of every three in the world - who would not be, but for the gains in agricultural productivity over the last 110 years.
An American farmer in 1900 fed seven people; today his great grandson feeds 96 people. World grain output rose from 400 million tons in 1900 to 1.9 billion tons in 1998. The spectre of soil exhaustion has been threatened over and over again since Malthus' day, but in fact yields per hectare have contined to rise ever since (from 1.1 tons to 2.7 tons between 1981 and 2000).
The threat to food has not come from soil exhaustion, but from policies of land retirement adopted by the big producers like the European Union which has retired 3.8 million hectares under the set aside scheme. World wide land area re-designated as national park - where farming is not forbidden, but discouraged - has grown from 2.4 million sq KM to 18.8 million sq KM between 1962 and 2003. In 2005 those managed land retirement schemes began to force food prices upwards.
>
> There is simply no way to explain the demographic boom that occurred
> over the last 200-300 years other than giving credit to capitalist
> agricultural productivity advances. Without that than what is it that
> makes capitalism so different? Why has it expanded so rapidly,
> altering the lives of billions of people in a short historical time
> period? Why couldn't feudalism do this?
>
Wait a minute, you are saying that capitalist increases in agricultural productivity led to population growth because of all the extra food that was suddenly and then sustainably around? Have you ever read anything Marxist or feminist on population? I know capitalism has done a great job developing productive forces, while impoverishing production relations to untold levels and crushing cooperation - both a force and relation, but it strikes me as one of the most unbelievably ridiculous assertions I've ever encountered to argue that the population growth resulting from enclosure, the alienation of labor and the imposition of hegemonic wage labor relations overproduction of agricultural commodities.
See this summary from the 1844 Manuscripts:
Capitalist laborers are estranged/alienated/separated from 1) nature (they are forced off the land and craftsmen no longer own their own tools/machines); 2) the products of labor (the capitalist disposes of the commodity wage laborers produce and controls the reinvestment or expenditure of any profits); 3) their actions within production (capitalists or managers largely determine the place, pace and relations between productive practices); 4) their own social/universal species-being (this is as much about the realization of social as it is our individual potential, something effectively forestalled by productive specialization at work – among other things); 5) other men (if you are a free agent on the job market and the market is saturated what impetus to do you have not to seek to undercut those employed when you are unemployed? What impetus, time, or energy do you have to develop quality social relations within the workplace or at home?); and 6) public space (as it is privatized… “He is at home when he is not working and when he is working he is not at home,” and you can easily think of the way that gendered divisions of labor and the power dynamics of reproduction, child-bearing and child-rearing emerge along these lines.)
If you want to attribute the demographic consequences of all this to the glorious increase in agricultural productivity capitalism generated, be my guest, you and James can try but I don't think too many people are going to join your revolution. By the way, be sure - you and James - to start your efforts among the ever-expanding urban slums across the global south, I'm sure people there won't be able to constrain their enthusiam when you tell them how much they should celebrate the glories of capitalist agricultural productivity.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, you were not saying its all good but read what James wrote and what you wrote and think if this reaction is actually over the top.