[lbo-talk] What is socialism?

[Alan Rudy]

In the Imperial Valley in 1945 there were still 3000 farms in the Imperial
Valley, in 1974 there were about 800.
This decline is almost exclusively due to agricultural concentration,
whereas a good portion of the decline in San Fernando and Orange Counties
was tied to suburbanization.  I remember from Margaret FitzSimmons'
dissertation, with Walker (who I got to know pretty well once) as an
advisor, that a similar shift occured in the Salinas Valley.  A shift that
combined ag concentration and suburban displacement occured in Santa Clara
County.
The Central Valley was always massive units - though, even there, we know
from Goldschmidt's classic, As You Sow, that a decent number of communities
were still comprised of family-owned smaller farms in the 1940s.
The reification of "back east" is pretty silly, too, since the plains were
different than the midwest which was different from the northeast, which was
different from the mid-Atlantic.
You are exactly right about the agribusiness at 11 larger point, it just
doesn't need to homogenize all of California's history... something
McWilliams didn't do, when he wrote about Factories in the Field he was
explicitly writing about the Central Valley.  This is not to deny that small
farms in CA needed seasonal migrant labor at harvest time, nor is it to deny
that large numbers of them existed because of capitalist irrigation schemes,
nor that there weren't therefore more capitalistic than plains, midwestern
and eastern farms.  Its just to be more historical and less hyperbolic.

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 1:26 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:


> At 05:55 AM 10/15/2010, Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>  Beware... there were a great number of family farms - even in places like
>> the Imperial, Salinas and San Fernando Valleys (as well as Orange and
>> Santa
>> Clara county) - in California at one time before massive federal and state
>> irrigation systems.
>>
>
>
> But, as you also say, it was never like back east.  And how many is "a
> great number"?  The larger point is that California agriculture, by far and
> for a long time, is agrobusiness with the volume at 11.  (I'm going off The
> Conquest of Bread by Richard Walker--- see below.)
>
> btw Walker co-wrote a paper on California as pivot of the current recession
> that I linked to here last week.  I highly recommend it.  Walker is one of
> the crew of lefty geographers at Berkeley that Chuck ran into at the Harvey
> lecture.  A brief version of this paper was in LBO a couple issues ago, and
> I have it on good authority that a further worked-up version is forthcoming
> in New Left Review.
>
> Here's the link again: <
> http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/pubs/reports/Walker_93.pdf>
> http://metrostudies.berkeley.edu/pubs/reports/Walker_93.pdf
>
>
> http://www-geography.berkeley.edu/peoplehistory/faculty/R_Walker.html
>
> The Conquest of Bread
> 150 YEARS OF AGRIBUSINESS IN CALIFORNIA
>
> California agriculture has been described as ‘one of the wonders of the
> world,” an ever-evolving cornucopia, supplying one-third of the table food
> consumed by Americans. The earth’s most intensely farmed non-tropical
> landscape, California exemplifies capitalist agriculture in its purest and
> most advanced form. Indeed, many of the defining characteristics of 21st
> century world agriculture – such as irrigation districts, subcontracting,
> petro-farming, feedlots, biotechnology and concrete dams – were pioneered in
> California.
>
> Nevertheless, as geographer Richard A. Walker argues in this pathbreaking
> and comprehensive account, California’s practically miraculous manipulation
> of nature has been purchased at the price of epic environmental degradation
> and ferocious exploitation of labor. Unlike the Midwest, California’s
> history of ‘manufacturing green gold’ has been built upon an entirely and
> purely capitalist model from its origins and without precedent, setting a
> historical vanguard. Ironically agribusiness has drained and poisoned the
> waters, reengineered plant and animal species, created toxic and saline
> wastelands, and forever transformed the iconic landscape of the Golden
> State.
>
> California’s ‘factories in the fields’ (in the famous phrase of Carey
> McWilliams), have defeated every attempt by land reformers, family farmers
> and farm laborers to improve an exploitative social system. Three
> generations after Steinbeck, and despite the heroic struggles of Cesar
> Chavez, the overwhelming majority of California’s farmworkers are still
> trapped in seemingly continual poverty, subject to the unchecked power of
> the growers and prey to racism and discrimination. The squalid housing and
> unsafe working conditions in the fields that shocked the country in the
> 1930s persist in California’s rural valleys in the early 21st century.
>
> As Walker points out, it is ironic that this paradigmatic socio-economic
> system – California’s state-of-the-art corporate agribusiness – has been
> relatively neglected in modern agrarian studies. THE CONQUEST OF BREAD
> redresses the balance from a unique viewpoint that focuses on both history
> and geography, and on the evolution of agribusiness and on its organization.
>
> Walker thus provides the reader with an overview of the crop specialties
> and commodity networks that make California such an unparalleled green
> machine. Simultaneously he exposes the evolutionary links in the food
> change, showing how a continuous emphasis on productivity and high-speed
> growth have allowed the state to outpace agriculture elsewhere.
>
> Full of thunder, paradox and surprise, THE CONQUEST OF BREAD offers general
> readers and specialists alike an unprecedented wide-angle view of California
> agriculture. Walker deftly decodes an agro-industrial landscape that even
> most Californians sometimes find inexplicable and mysterious.
>
> THE NEW PRESS
> $27.95 CLOTH, 382 PAGES
> 1-56584-877-2
> OCTOBER 14, 2004
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319