Originally posted by
[email protected] 27 2006, 12:14 AM
they all are either latin american immigrants and or mexican-americans.
That better describes farm workers, which is something else. Farmworkers are wage-workers - part of the proletariat - the part which is located in rural areas and work in agriculture. They're also important, but apparently not what you're asking about.
A past thread with some info about farmworkers (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=43276)
What do you guys think is the % of actual 'all american-white U.S. citizens who work their land. keep in mind. not own it as some rich ranchers do. but who actually work someone elses fields?
Those categories aren't so useful IMO, whether talking about peasants in other countries or working farmers in the U.S.
Most farmers in the U.S. both own and work their own land. Well, own on paper...they may be so deep in debt that you could say the bank owns it. They are exploited by the banks, and by the agribusinesses that they buy and sell from.
Others are tenant farmers, exploited by the landowner. I don't have statistics to hand; they probably could be found with effort but the USDA isn't in the business of aiding Marxist analysis of class relations in agriculture.
Most are white, since you mentioned that, but there's also an important fight by the few remaining Black farmers against USDA discrimination, which has all kinds of historic resonance. In California and some other places, there are also Latino and Asian farmers.
They may not be "downtrodden" or poverty-ridden enough to fit a peasant stereotype, but stereotypes are usually misleading anyway. And probably give a misleading idea of the peasantry historically and in other countries.
Like peasants historically, farmers are a spectrum of classes. They have more or less land, more or less debt. Some employ more wage-labor than family labor (small capitalist farmers), others only a little wage-labor (maybe at harvest); many employ no wage-labor at all. Many working farmers have off-farm jobs to stay afloat and are exploited as wage-workers themselves.
So the traditional communist categories of rich peasant, middle peasant, poor peasant - and the political approach the early Communist International recommended to each - are sometimes loosely applicable; the boundaries are fuzzy....as they always have been.
Working farmers receive no attention from most leftists, which explains the prevalence of mistaken concepts and superficial impressions.
But U.S. agriculture remains of tremendous economic importance - the world's biggest exporter of farm products. And most agricultural production in the U.S. - especially bulk food products like grain and soybeans - is still done by working farmers, not "corporate farms."
(I might point out this is true to a lesser - or sometimes greater - degree in other imperialist countries as well. France, for example, is also a major agricultural producer with many working farmers, who are still called peasants.)
Ever-increasing debt and frequent foreclosures have led many working farmers to predict they'll all be forced off the land and replaced by corporate farms. Yet this hasn't happened. As some working farmers continue to be forced off the land, fewer families work larger amounts of land - subject to more intense exploitation and more direct control by agribusiness.
To give some idea of what traditional peasant property is like - especially the distinctions within the peasantry - you can't beat Lenin. from "to the rural poor" (http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1903/rp/3.htm#v06zz99h-377) and Landownership in European Russia. (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/agrprogr/ch01s1.htm#v13pp72-220) That picture is unique to a place and time; but the method of analysis is more broadly applicable.)