United States Peasants Vs 3rd World Peasants

[R_P_A_S]

everyone says The United States of America is "a melting pot" of many cultures, religions and races. Ok yes TRUE! But your typical American is clearly a white one. mainly with the usual traits: blonde hair blue eyes, etc. after all The U.S. independence was put together by all whites. thats cool and all. But whenever i think of farmers and/or peasants of Mexico, and other countries Latin American they just seem to me like they are hard working and poor. how come I dont have the same image on American farmers and peasants. to me it just seems they own the ranches and driver around big ass trucks and go mudding LOL. I don't know help me out here guys. or is it that the immigrants do all the actual work of the land?

help?
how could these immigrants who make up the farm workers ever rise up in a country that's "not theirs"

[Delta]

Originally posted by [email protected] 2 2006, 10:02 AM
I don't know help me out here guys. or is it that the immigrants do all the actual work of the land?

I don't work on a farm, but it's always been my understanding that the vast majority of manual farm labor is done by poor Mexicans who've come into the country. There are probably some small-scale farms where a white guy drives around his tractor, but I think the vast majority of farming is being taken over by large agricultural corporations.

[More Fire for the People]

There is a very small class of peasanty in America, perhaps only limited to the South. The capitalist equivalent of a field toiler is an agricultural worker — both undocumented and documented workers receive wages for their work. Peasants own the land they toil upon and make a living off of their own land.

[Janus]

Peasants generally don't necessarily own their own land but rather have to pay their landlords for it. This is one of the things that distinguishes them from 1st world farmers. Also, peasants are generally more subsistence farmers.


how come I dont have the same image on American farmers and peasants. to me it just seems they own the ranches and driver around big ass trucks and go mudding
They make a larger profit due to the fact that they live in a developed nation. However, many farmers are also loosing their farms due to debt and due to the incoming of the factory farms.

[R_P_A_S]

so is rare that we will see any american born farmers and ranchers out in the streets in case of a revolution or whatever?

[Janus]

It depends. Some probably will if the economy has really collapsed and they're pushed out of a job.

The problem right now, is that the countryside particularly in the US is somewhat reactionary and many rural based movements have always been racist or xenophobic. I'm not saying that can't change, it's just that there aren't all that many radical farmers in the Western world.

[southernmissfan]

There is no real peasantry in an advanced capitalist nation, at least not in any significant way.

[Seeker]

As a white, American farmer I feel compelled to post.

My farm is small (74 acres, with 5 acres cleared for farming - the rest we've decided to keep forested), worker owned (today there are 6 of us), and we don't make much money from farming. We pay the rent by selling seeds and distributing a seed catalog. We buy in bulk what we don't have enough land to grow, then package the seeds in tiny individual packets with a retail markup in price.

Unlike 3rd world farmers, we have access to capital (loans).

That gave us access to printing presses and internet servers.

The presses let us distribute our catalog all over White America while our on-line store lets people all over the world give us money without having to leave home.

White America has dollars to spend on our product, but who is going to trade with the unpublished peasantry in a country that does not have an excess of consumers with disposable income? Who knows that they have to option to do so?

Access to American consumers is a big difference. (other people have realized this too: http://www.caferebelion.com/catalog.html)
So is access to a global market via the internet.
Access to cheap transport of our products via the US Postal Service is one more big advantage.



So anyway, we grow a lot of the food we eat, and buy the rest with money from the seed business. We don't depend on the success of our crop to survive. Much of the labor that keeps our company going is out-sourced (either we hire someone to grow a certain seed, or we buy it from a larger seed company) because we don't have the time, equipment, or land to offer 700+ different varieties of seed on our own.

So that is one difference.

Then there is the equipment.

Our farm is still poor by American standards. Our tractor was built in the 1930's and only has two working implements (a plow and a disc), but most small farmers in White America have literally tons of labor-saving heavy machinery that 3rd world workers don't have access to. What is done by hand in Mexico is done with gasoline and steel in America. What is done by hand in America is done by Mexicans. Or people like me that have the luxury of not really needing to.

Some small farmers that are involved in Community Supported Agriculture (google it) do things by hand (they often require their customers to put in hours of work too). My farm is not typical. Look into CSA for a more average view of the white, American small farmer.

The huge monocrops of wheat and corn that make up a sizable percentage of America's GDP are grown by large agribusiness corporations. Like everywhere else, genetically modified "plants" with patents on them have driven away the competition. Law dictates that when pollen from The Corporation's GM plants gets blown onto a small farmer's field, pollinating his plants, the seeds those plants produce are owned by The Corporation and not the farmer that grew them. So if they grow GM wheat or corn near your farm, you are pretty much fucked and can't grow your own wheat or corn without being sued. The same is happening in south America with soybeans (along with a whole slew of other problems, such as entire villages being sprayed with airplane-delivered poison that the soybeans have been genetically modified to be immune to, and mercenaries driving out or killing anyone who refuses to be slave labor on the soybean plantations that are located on top of what used to be a family's farm).




there aren't all that many radical farmers in the Western world.

The least radical farmer that I've met was a Kerry supporter in '04. Americans that decide they want to be farmers (I'm not talking about employees of The Corporation) are generally ecologically minded folk that either don't care about politics or lean to the left. The rabidly racist, Bush-loving NASCAR fans of the stereotypical southern America generally don't farm. It is too much work, and does not leave enough time for drinking.

If the people took to the streets, you can bet that the farmer's zeal would not be matched. Every single one of them has been screwed bigtime by our government (more than most people have been screwed).

[R_P_A_S]

thanks for posting man! it was a good read.

[ComradeRed]

If the people took to the streets, you can bet that the farmer's zeal would not be matched. Every single one of them has been screwed bigtime by our government (more than most people have been screwed). Right, and if there was a movement to overthrow the government, who else would be involved?

Think about it: not only would leftists want to see the government overthrown but also the reactionary elements of society!

Is it really logical to coordinate efforts with these elements? Marx seems to warn against them:

Originally posted by Marx
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. --emphasis added, from The Communist Manifesto, Chapter One (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm).

How often have we seen peasent movements be reactionary? The American Civil War, to preserve slavery, isn't exactly a revolutionary war; nor is the interests of the peasentry of any Middle Eastern (or third world) nation.

There is always the romantic Maoist hope that "somehow" the peasent will "magically" become revolutionary, but the sad fact of the matter is that the peasentry is REACTIONARY.

It is only due to the material conditions of so-called "revolutionaries" in the third world (like Mao) that argue the "revolutionary element" of their respective societies "must" be the peasentry. Why? Becuause it's the only way they can win the war.

The idealism of such a notion is disguised behind the veil of Marxist-sounding jargon, but under the lense of materialism it's quite evident that such a pro-peasentry stance is reactionary.

[More Fire for the People]

There is always the romantic Maoist hope that "somehow" the peasent will "magically" become revolutionary, but the sad fact of the matter is that the peasentry is REACTIONARY.
The Maoist term for a peasant is a blanket term though. It covers a pre-capitalist working class [akin to slaves], serfs, and what is commonly considered peasants.

[Severian]

RPAS started almost the same thread a little while ago, and I gave some fairly in-depth info on working farmers in the U.S. (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53303)

If RPAS or anyone else wants the answers to those questions, I recommend following that link.


Originally posted by [email protected] 2 2006, 10:12 PM


If the people took to the streets, you can bet that the farmer's zeal would not be matched. Every single one of them has been screwed bigtime by our government (more than most people have been screwed). Right, and if there was a movement to overthrow the government, who else would be involved?

Think about it: not only would leftists want to see the government overthrown but also the reactionary elements of society!
What is this, assuming out of hand working farmers are reactionary? As Veronica Mars says, when you assume you make an ass out of....well, just you, actually.

Hostility to these exploited producers - and to others, like truck owner-operators - typically comes from the same privileged middle-class radicals who also have contempt for wage-workers. In contrast, when the SWP(in the U.S.), the Communist League in Britain, and some other parties made a sustained reorientation towards becoming part of the industrial working class - they also rediscovered working farmers. In part by working alongside some of those farmers, who've taken off-farm jobs to stay afloat.

Those working farmers/wage-workers obviously are semiproletarians - and other working farmers are also exploited producers. There are also capitalist farmers who exploit hired labor and tenants of course - that was also true of peasants historically.

Historically, organizations of working farmers in the U.S. have usually been allied with the working class. Especially "Farmers' Holiday" and other attempts to "strike" by holding back farmers' products from the processors, demanding a better price. They are exploited by the same capitalist who exploit our class; there is plenty of objective basis for common action.

The Farmer-Labor Parties marked the closest workers in the U.S. have come to breaking with the capitalist parties on a mass scale, too.

For something more recent, take a look at the Black farmers' fight against USDA discrimination.


How often have we seen peasent movements be reactionary? The American Civil War, to preserve slavery, isn't exactly a revolutionary war;

WTF? Where do you get the bizarre idea the Confederacy was a peasant movement? Not from Marx, that's for sure. He pointed out that the "poor whites" were hostile to the Confederacy - ever heard of West Virginia? - and it was the plantation owners who pushed through secession by fraud and terror against the small farmers and other pro-Union elements.

This kind of thing is part and parcel of the typical middle-class leftist sneer at working people - they locate the source of reaction among the benighted, unwashed, drunk masses, not among the wealthy and educated.

Marx and Engels pretty clearly did favor an alliance of workers and working peasants - they just rejected the idea that peasants, or any other class, could play a revolutionary role independent of the working class. See The Civil War in France, where Marx explains the benefits the Commune could have offered the peasantry, and Engels' book on the Peasant War in Germany.

Parts of Seekers' posts were interesting and maybe informative; but he's pretty clearly not part of, and has little contact with, typical agriculture but rather producing seeds for a niche markets. The bit about drunk, lazy Southerners is also a deeply fucked-up prejudice; it's what's always said by the privileged about the....not so privileged.

When he says "he huge monocrops of wheat and corn that make up a sizable percentage of America's GDP are grown by large agribusiness corporations." That's simply false -it would be a totally unprofitable investment for them. In fact, most grain and other major crops are grown by working farmers - who are exploited by agribusiness suppliers, buyers...and by the banks.

(And if it was true, then who are the wage-workers operating the combines? Why are they assumed to be "reactionary" or at least of no intererest to most leftists?)

[R_P_A_S]

Originally posted by Severian+Aug 3 2006, 09:23 AM--> (Severian @ Aug 3 2006, 09:23 AM) RPAS started almost the same thread a little while ago, and I gave some fairly in-depth info on working farmers in the U.S. (http://www.revolutionaryleft.com/index.php?showtopic=53303)

If RPAS or anyone else wants the answers to those questions, I recommend following that link.


[email protected] 2 2006, 10:12 PM


If the people took to the streets, you can bet that the farmer's zeal would not be matched. Every single one of them has been screwed bigtime by our government (more than most people have been screwed). Right, and if there was a movement to overthrow the government, who else would be involved?

Think about it: not only would leftists want to see the government overthrown but also the reactionary elements of society!
What is this, assuming out of hand working farmers are reactionary? As Veronica Mars says, when you assume you make an ass out of....well, just you, actually.

Hostility to these exploited producers - and to others, like truck owner-operators - typically comes from the same privileged middle-class radicals who also have contempt for wage-workers. In contrast, when the SWP(in the U.S.), the Communist League in Britain, and some other parties made a sustained reorientation towards becoming part of the industrial working class - they also rediscovered working farmers. In part by working alongside some of those farmers, who've taken off-farm jobs to stay afloat.

Those working farmers/wage-workers obviously are semiproletarians - and other working farmers are also exploited producers. There are also capitalist farmers who exploit hired labor and tenants of course - that was also true of peasants historically.

Historically, organizations of working farmers in the U.S. have usually been allied with the working class. Especially "Farmers' Holiday" and other attempts to "strike" by holding back farmers' products from the processors, demanding a better price. They are exploited by the same capitalist who exploit our class; there is plenty of objective basis for common action.

The Farmer-Labor Parties marked the closest workers in the U.S. have come to breaking with the capitalist parties on a mass scale, too.

For something more recent, take a look at the Black farmers' fight against USDA discrimination.


How often have we seen peasent movements be reactionary? The American Civil War, to preserve slavery, isn't exactly a revolutionary war;

WTF? Where do you get the bizarre idea the Confederacy was a peasant movement? Not from Marx, that's for sure. He pointed out that the "poor whites" were hostile to the Confederacy - ever heard of West Virginia? - and it was the plantation owners who pushed through secession by fraud and terror against the small farmers and other pro-Union elements.

This kind of thing is part and parcel of the typical middle-class leftist sneer at working people - they locate the source of reaction among the benighted, unwashed, drunk masses, not among the wealthy and educated.

Marx and Engels pretty clearly did favor an alliance of workers and working peasants - they just rejected the idea that peasants, or any other class, could play a revolutionary role independent of the working class. See The Civil War in France, where Marx explains the benefits the Commune could have offered the peasantry, and Engels' book on the Peasant War in Germany.

Parts of Seekers' posts were interesting and maybe informative; but he's pretty clearly not part of, and has little contact with, typical agriculture but rather producing seeds for a niche markets. The bit about drunk, lazy Southerners is also a deeply fucked-up prejudice; it's what's always said by the privileged about the....not so privileged.

When he says "he huge monocrops of wheat and corn that make up a sizable percentage of America's GDP are grown by large agribusiness corporations." That's simply false -it would be a totally unprofitable investment for them. In fact, most grain and other major crops are grown by working farmers - who are exploited by agribusiness suppliers, buyers...and by the banks.

(And if it was true, then who are the wage-workers operating the combines? Why are they assumed to be "reactionary" or at least of no intererest to most leftists?) [/b]
ohh shit! u know what I did. only reason i made this one up is because i thought that the website didnt let me post it due to some computer glitches

[Tarik]

I always pay attention to don't confuse, Peasant and Farmer, I think it's the good word (I'm not sure).
The first one survive with his land, he depends on it.Whereas a Farmer doesn't depend on the land, he lives on the sale of its products.

[Severian]

I just did some looking around for statistics on number of farmers, subsistence vs market-based farming worldwide, etc...and found remarkably little.

I did find one useful page (http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FarmandRelatedEmployment/ViewData.asp?GeoAreaPick=STAUS_United%20States&YearPick=2002).


United States farm and farm-related employment, 2002
Farming:
Farm proprietors 2,188,957
Farm wage and salary workers 885,989

So there are about 2 and a half times more farmers than farmworkers. Consider the implications: most of those farmers cannot have even one permanent employee - they are more exploited than exploiters.

There are probably a small percentage of the farms with employing a large percentage of the wage-workers. But most of the total labor force in agriculture is not wage-workers.

Especially if each "proprietor" is one farm - with a family working it.

It's also interesting to consider the number of workers in farm-related industries - part of the economic importance of farming.

Tarik:
"I always pay attention to don't confuse, Peasant and Farmer, I think it's the good word (I'm not sure).
The first one survive with his land, he depends on it.Whereas a Farmer doesn't depend on the land, he lives on the sale of its products."

But if that's the definition, are there many peasants are there left in the world?

"Subsistence farmer" is technically defined the same - they eat their crop, rather than sellling it. I went looking for stats on their numbers worldwide, or even in a single country, and couldn't find any.

But the pages I did find, discussing subsistence farmers and their problems - all mentioned issues about prices of their crops. For example (http://www.issues.org/22.1/p_polaski.html) So, if they're selling their crops, are they subsistence farmers by the official definition?

Or are people - including some experts - continuing to use an obsolete term, when really they're talking about small farmers - who sell at least part of their crop on the market? In context, that appears to be true.

I notice Tarik's from France - I know small farmers there are often called peasants, still. But they're producing crops for sale, right?

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ Since you "scratched my back" in my Kautsky thread, I'll scratch yours by referring directly to the PDF (alas, since the wiki was edited to delete the section "Role in Food Production") in regards to industrial farming:

U.S. Farms: Numbers, Size, and Ownership (http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/EIB12/EIB12c.pdf)

The means to end food scarcity are long since already here, since Kautsky's time (with the potential added bonus of surplus production for the ethanol BAND-AID solution to carbon emissions from cars).

Also, I'm siding with ComradeRed here, with one exception. Peasants are indeed revolutionary in regards to ending feudalism, either through bourgeois capitalism or the accelerated primitive stamocap route. However, they are REACTIONARY in regards to socialist revolution and the following incarnation of the DOTP in the form of revolutionary stamocap:

Free Trade vs. Small Farmers (http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4179)


The 20th century was a terrible blight on small farmers everywhere. In both wealthy capitalist economies and in socialist countries, farmers paid a heavy price for industrialization. In advanced capitalist countries like the United States, a deadly combination of economies of scale, capital-intensive technology, and the market led to large corporations cornering agricultural production and processing. Small and medium farms were relegated to a marginal role in production and a minuscule portion of the work force.

The Soviet Union, meanwhile, took to heart Karl Marx's snide remarks about the “idiocy of rural life” and, through state repression, transformed farmers into workers on collective farms. Expropriation of the peasants' surplus production was meant not only to feed the cities but also to serve as the source of the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital for industrialization.

Today, perhaps the greatest threat to small farmers is free trade. And the farmers are fighting back. They have helped, for instance, to stalemate the Doha round of negotiations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). This tug of war between farmers and free trade is nowhere more visible than in Asia.

[KC]

how come I dont have the same image on American farmers and peasants.

Because the majority of farming in the United States is corporate factory farming. The vast majority of "farmers" are either proletarians working for a company for a wage or bourgeois for owning the factory farm. The "family farmers" aren't peasants but simply petty-bourgeois. There is no American peasantry.

[RedCommieBear]

Originally posted by ComradeRed+August 03, 2006 06:11 am--> (ComradeRed @ August 03, 2006 06:11 am)Is it really logical to coordinate efforts with these elements? Marx seems to warn against them:

Marx
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat. --emphasis added, from The Communist Manifesto, Chapter One (http://marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm).[/b]
Because let's face it, nothing has changed since Marx penned those words 159 years ago.

Seriously, a reality check is due. You say the working farmer is somehow inherently reactionary, yet I really have yet to see you provide any proof. points out, working farmers in the United States have supported leftists struggles (Farmer-Labor Party, other progressive elements), are indeed exploited, and are not to be thrown away. I think this quote may even be sig worthy material.


This kind of thing is part and parcel of the typical middle-class leftist sneer at working people - they locate the source of reaction among the benighted, unwashed, drunk masses, not among the wealthy and educated.

And by the way, just quoting Marx is not an arguement in and of itself; explaining why he was correct is. No wonder people think Communism is a religion. You quote Marx like the religious quote their text. We are not Marxists because we hold him to be an infallible prophet, we are Marxists because we use his analysis. It's a living science that's allowed to change.

Edit: Decided to edit this a few months later simply because I had a statement I wanted said, and didn't want to start a new thread. This thread, of which I'd already posted in, seemed like a good place to put it. I added the last part about not analysis, and edited a few word while I was at it.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Zampanò@May 13, 2007 09:31 pm

how come I dont have the same image on American farmers and peasants.

Because the majority of farming in the United States is corporate factory farming. The vast majority of "farmers" are either proletarians working for a company for a wage or bourgeois for owning the factory farm. The "family farmers" aren't peasants but simply petty-bourgeois. There is no American peasantry.
It's remarkable how some people keep repeating this even after statistics to the contrary have been posted.

[KC]

It's remarkable how some people keep repeating this even after statistics to the contrary have been posted.

Perhaps I missed these statistics, as I didn't read the entire post. What statistics are you speaking of?

[Raúl Duke]

A question: What if the famers (oppose to farm wage-laborer) is sub-contracted by a corporation to produce crops?

By this I mean a small farmer who owns a farm and yet has a contract to make crops for x company to get y amount of money or z amount of shares of profit, etc.

After all, the factories in the 3rd world are mostly sub-contrators hired by major corporations to make their stuff, that's why the corporations sometimes gets away with the awful working conditions; since, they're not their factories.