Futile, delusional and making a lot of sense? Is that dialectical, or just plain contradictory?
Ricky Page: 'Actually most anthropologist would agree that pessant economics is, because of direct access to food, is more secure than industrial workers- this was esp. true in the earlier periods of capitalist production.'
Yup - anthropologists (the epitome of aboriginal tourism) agree, but strangely people continue to migrate to the city. I am less convinced that peasant smallholdings are secure in food, though. In the one instance you rely on the soil, in the other, you rely on other people. The soil can be cruel, too.
Aren't there a few things mixed up here.
Subsistence farming is one thing, but not all 'back to the land' movements were really a return to subsistence farming. Many were - are - just hobby farming, as described in 'stuff white people like'. (Incidentally, Doug, what would be an example of where the blog goes wrong?)
There were big back to the land movements among economically secure urbanites, in the 1920s, again in the late sixties and early seventies, and I think something of a revival of hobby farming in the 1990s, too. Often these ended up in Paul Theroux-like misery. But sometimes the urbanites did indeed transform themselves into farmers (in the 20s, for eg). Working class londoners who had worked as itinerant hop-farmers over the summer months bought up small plots at knock-down prices after the war and made their own settlements 'plotlands' across Essex and Kent, though these were not often self-sufficient in food.
Still, those are very different choices from those imposed by economic necessity. There was a substantial shift of labour towards farming in the Second World War, when the disruption of food imports from the colonies made Britain (sorry to bore you with UK egs) more dependent on home grown produce. The government conscripted women into a 'land army' under wartime direction of labour regulations. Lots of people enjoyed their time in the land army, but others found it oppressive and unjust.
All of that is quite different again from the migration from town to city. I don't think one should ignore the two judgements that it was better to escape 'rural idiocy' (Marx) or that 'stadtluft macht frei' - Town Air makes a man free, which have a lot of common sense. Or, put another way, Delta Blues has its charms, but Chicago was better.