Abolishing The Difference Between Town and Country

[Creative Destruction]

I've been thinking on this for a bit, but I wanted to see what others thought of it. Marx makes pretty prominent in the Manifesto that the divisions between town and country should be abolish and agriculture should be industrialized. How would you envision that? It seems like to me, since the Green Revolution of the 1900s, agriculture has been pretty much industrialized and we've seen its toll on the environment undergoing that process. There are new technologies available, like hydroponics, aquaponics and aeroponics, that can make it viable to start urban farms. There have been some design contests to imagine things like urban skyscraper farms. (https://www.google.com/search?q=urban+skyscraper+farms&safe=off&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=7mtcUuK6CeO1igLHpYDQCw&ved=0CDcQsAQ&biw=1243&bih=704)

So, that's the first part: how should we pursue "industrializing" agriculture. I do not know too much about how the Soviet collective farm system ran, so I don't know if that would be a good example to work off of, but I know some Soviet ag "scientists" were not really scientists and kind of fucked up the program. Or, rather, the Soviet government fucked up the program by promoting them.

Second is how do we reconcile "small-town values" with the vision of abolishing "town and country." Is abolishing "town and country" even really something we should pursue anymore? I've grown up in small towns all my life and I'm mostly steeped in that kind of culture, and I'm not so sure if it is necessary to wrap it all up in a big ball. This could just be a misreading of what Marx meant, though. For me, personally, I enjoy being in smaller places or in the countryside rather than cities. I am not inherently antagonistic toward cities, but I do have a sort of base response to them. All the people, the cars, industry, all get my heart racing and makes me extremely anxious. I was probably the most depressed and drank the most I ever had while I was living in a major city for a period of time.

But yeah, just a couple things I'm kicking around. Would like y'alls response.

[Jimmie Higgins]

I'm interested in this general question too. There's lots to say or speculate about regarding this, but I think the main thing about "town and country" is that communities developed now around specific economic needs of capital. I think Marx was speaking more specifically about conditions during his day, but in a modern context I think there'd be things like creating infrastructure and services in underdeveloped rural areas and alternatively building communities in urban areas that aren't just grids of economic use zones, but are actually build around us (rather than us going to where capital needs us to be).

[vijaya]

I think this is an extremely important issue in Marxism and in society in general.

The massive expansion and continued growth of cities since the industrial revolution is still continuing today. This is accelerating because of the booming global population and the more profitable markets of Third World cities, people are being pushed from the country and cities are being squeezed.

In the West however, there's a bit of a different story. In Europe, I'm not sure about in North America and Australasia etc, but the middle classes, the petit bourgeois are spilling over into the 'country', in semi-urban suburbs. The wealthier they are the longer their commute from their rural, more peaceful elite community to the chaotic environment of the city. Meanwhile the cities remain largely impoverished by comparison, and there is little economy for the city-dweller to relocate to the country.

Then there's another dynamic to the city-country dichotomy; this is the more disadvantaged rural communities. The true rural farming communities. In Britain, for example, there are large rural areas which are sustained by a mix of agriculture and massive manufacturing bribes making the local population dependent on one large industrial facility, or farming. Only a small portion of the population lives in these rural areas (me being one), but they are vital to agriculture and are apart of important ancient communities. Then amongst the rural and the urban you have the small towns. Market towns, small towns, port towns, large villages and small cities etc. You've also got isolated towns and cities, take the fairly isolated city of Carlisle in Cumbria, England. It has a population of over 100,000 but isn't in the usual cluster of industrial cities like others.

Now to the issue of 'abolishing' these complex boundaries, from the megacities of China, the aging cities and villages of Britain, and the slums and bushlands of Africa, I think will take a great deal of time, although I am in favour of the breaking down of the city into 'villages'. A good (but dated) representation would be Morris' News From Nowhere, where London has become what we might call a 'garden city', with productive heaths and commons created upon cleared useless suburbs. Nowadays these possibilities of 'ruralising' the urban environment has been given a new possibilities by technology brought about through the increased awareness of climate change.

The phasing out of the boundary between city and country is dependent on millions of factors, and an important one is population control. I'd presume a mixed urban-rural environment would require a significantly decreased population otherwise the city would simply devastate the country. The best thing would be a more ecological urban design that would encourage the merging of rural and urban.

Increasingly effective public transport in the country would be a stepping stone to this 'abolishing the boundary'. But there are a whole array of approaches to how this could be achieved. As an environmentalist however, I'd be firmly opposed to any expansion of green belts and any deformation of the country by the increased population coming from the 'de-concentration' of the cities.

[Creative Destruction]

A side question: what makes you opposed to green belts as an environmentalist?

[the debater]

but in a modern context I think there'd be things like creating infrastructure and services in underdeveloped rural areas and alternatively building communities in urban areas that aren't just grids of economic use zones, but are actually build around us (rather than us going to where capital needs us to be).

Maybe this would tie into the whole local foods movement, and the objective of getting your food from local areas in order to save on transportation costs and pollution? The topic brought up by the OP is one of the major Marxist topics that I wonder about the most.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Maybe this would tie into the whole local foods movement, and the objective getting your food from local areas in order to save on transportation costs and pollution? The topic brought up by the OP is one of the major Marxist topics that I wonder about the most.In a sense, yes - but I think it goes way beyond the horizon of the current local food thing. I'm frankly pretty cynical about the current local food boosterism - but it could just be because it's a huge thing in the San Francisco Bay Area where it's been adopted as kind of a gentrification and marketing gimmick IMO. I don't doubt the sincerity of a lot of people who look to this because they are searching for alternatives to how things are currently produced, but I think radicals should maybe "push" the question a bit further and be really critical of some of the assumptions and hype.

But yeah on the bigger picture, it would be better to grow local, but imo "grow big" and not only eliminate lots of shipping, but also allow huge tracts of land now used in agriculture to return to an organic ecosystem which would also vastly improve the health of the planet and humans. I don't think it's possible under capitalism (maybe state-capitalism where the ruling class can invest in longer-term projects). At least it's disfavored by capitalism because big mono-cultures on cheap land returns an investment pretty easily, but to actually create the ability to farm in urban areas for the whole urban population would require a big effort, lots of long-term investment and development. So it's like oil: the infrastructure exists already for current destructive techniques, land is cheap (urban land is expensive and more profitable if used for things other than farming) and so capitalists will create a new dust bowl or worse before it becomes unprofitable enough that other methods would be favored.

Personally - and this is totally a wild blind guess - I think population areas would probably be sort of community-oriented and so they'd be less dense than contemporary cities, but they would be more condensed than modern suburbs (I mean everyone has their own individual lawn, a garage for individual cars that sit around unused most of the time and then all get used at once when people drive to work at the same time. I'm not against workers today having acess to this - they should because it can make life under capitalism a little less difficult, but it's pretty wasteful in terms of space and our own use of it in the big picture. Instead of atomized and duplicated lawns and such, you could have a much nicer common garden/park area that's maintained as a service (which would again eliminate duplicated efforts of everyone having to mow their own lawns and run water for plants). There are tons of possibilities and I think sometimes when there are kind of seperate communities within a urban area which are fully planned by a corporation or governmnet agency (like more modern college campuses) you see a lot of population being in a small area where it doesn't necessarily feel like everyone's on top of each-other all the time. In fact I think that a liberated population can do these things much much better than elite schools or corporate "campuses" or museums or whatnot today.

[Creative Destruction]

I've read summaries of Murray Bookchin and his social ecology, where he pretty much advocates the merging of town and country. I'm going to look a bit more into that when I have more time, but he might be a good jumping off point.

[Sperm-Doll Setsuna]

Abolishing the small village - concentrating populations in larger settlements with adequate services provided, the country will thus cease to exist. All the vile single-family sprawl and the auto-oriented developments will have to go, and vast 50 storey tower blocks shall rise without a hint of post-modern glass-atrocity from enormous public gardens, and walkways shall criss-cross the skies between the concrete building bodies. Electric railways and trams shall carry the bulk of traffic, and there shall be no daft hippie nonsense with local foods everywhere; if things need to, they will travel far, and people shall travel at no cost, travel as they please; the cities will be forests and parkland punctured by the vast housing blocks, and any road traffic as remain shall be grade-separated from the rest of the city. People who in agriculture will work short shifts and travel to work speedily from their residences, and the isolated backwards village will be a thing no longer.