There's a massive literature on all this - mostly from '75-'90 - tied to the ag/rural/dev't side of the modes of production debate, most extensively developed in The Journal of Peasant Studies. Basically, the final conclusion is that there are too many factors involved to make strong statements based on anything as abstract and isolated as "household" or family or peasant or small-holder farms.
On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:02 PM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> [WS:] It is relevant in this context to mention the work of the
> Soviet rural economist Av.V. Chayanov (executed by NKVD) who studied
> household farms empirically. If memory serves he argued that
> household farming will is incapable of producing surplus beyond
> household consumption, and also was a proponent of rural handicraft
> cooperatives instead of urban industries. Similar ideas were
> implemented by Mao during the cultural revolution and - in more
> radical form - by Pol Pot who aimed to convert urban population &
> economy to a rural one.
>
>
> In this light, the question is not what are merits or demerits of
> agricultural production, but in what social context. Household
> farming is a rural utopia - that is benign pipe dreaming if
> entertained by hip urbanites, but it can be quite reactionary, as
> Barrington Moore observed in _Social Origins of Dictatorship and
> Democracy_ pp.484ff. His remarks on "Catonism" can be found here
>
> http://books.google.com/books?id=Ip9W0yWtVO0C&pg=PA492&lpg=PA492&dq=catonism+moore&source=bl&ots=-fdqwBRT0U&sig=HARLtxOyI7Yjwxb6UZytL-2keZ0&hl=en&ei=y1K3TPNJgaCUB9Hj3MAM&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CBwQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false
>
> Wojtek
>
>
> On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 1:44 PM, James Heartfield
> <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:
> > Eric Beck: 'Trying to escape it, however futile and delusional the effort
> might be, makes a hell of a lot of sense.'
> >
> > 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.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> >
>
> ___________________________________
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>
-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319