This is part 3 in a 19 part series responding to a critique of the environmental movement by Ross Wolfe. His blog, with the original post is linked to in the title.
Covered in this post:
Covered in this post:
The environmentalist movement (EM) has a false, fetishized view of the rural life.
Points made to support your line of thought:
- The EM wants a kinder capitalism (one of small, local business)
- The EM views farmers as selfless and hard working
- Marx and Engels called the rural ideal "the idiocy of rural life"
Firstly, the kinder capitalism is not false. It comes in many forms, all of them focused on the empowerment of the lower class / working poor (aka proletariat, to use wording you may be more comfortable with). Time Magazine cites the New Economics Foundation in stating that local purchases are twice as efficient at bolstering the local economy. In the blog Food System Factoids blogger Tim Crosby shows the economic impacts of a state supported food program called Jersey Fresh, outlining how the local food initiative has a 1:54 Return on Investment! The quality of life policy think tank livablecity did an economic impact analysis of local vs chain retailers and found a significantly positive impact can be made by spending the exact same amount of money in local retails that one would have at a chain store.
How does "local economy" empower the lower classes? By enabling them to compete on relatively equal footing when / if they go into business for themselves (aka acquire the means of production). This is also in line with Marx's theory of incremental revolution. The "kinder capitalism" is also known as "Socialism". Also, more money that stays in the local community the more money that will be (and is) invested in local businesses and start-ups. In other words a virtuous cycle of local investment and development / empowerment of the local lower classes.
Secondly, the concept that the EM believe farmers are working selflessly for the benefit of the masses is... well... unfounded. I have never come across / talked with / heard anyone in the EM talk about farmers as being "selfless". Everyone knows that farmers, like everyone else, need income, and have families to feed. No one I have spoken with expects farmers to give their produce away, nor do they expect to get it for at-cost. Everyone expects the farmer to make a profit when selling locally.
The examples Mr. Wolfe uses to show the evils of farmers (farmers agreeing to burn their cotton crops to increase the value, then each goes and grows it again hoping to capitalize on the potentially higher prices) are only truly effective when done on a large scale. This would require a handful of megafarms (the larger, industrialized farms commonplace today) or hundreds of smaller farmers. It is easy to get a handful of people on-board to price-fixing schemes, but when you start to look at hundreds, many of whom have personal relationships with their clients, the challenge becomes much greater!
Also, Mr. Wolfe, I am under the impression you have never worked on a farm a day in your life; I have. My mother was dating a farmer when I was 6 and 7; at 6 years old I was put to work on the farm. The work was crazy easy and very fun... feed the chickens. My mother helped me at first, but I quickly wanted to do it myself and grew to really enjoy watching the chickens scramble for their grain allotment. It was the kind of farm most people think of when they think "farm". It was a mixed farm with grain, cattle, chickens, and a home-quarter that supplied all the vegetables and meat for the household. I remember watching Walter (my mom's boyfriend) while he worked. From the time the sun was up until after it had set he was mending fences, tending animals, seeding, harvesting, tending the vegetable plots, etc. It is hard work, especially when you do it in a sustainable way. Farm owners are considered businessmen, and therefore have no health benefits, no time off, no sick leave, and no pension or retirement plan.
Mr. Wolfe, I challenge you: if you think you can handle 12-18 hour days with about the same net pay as you make as a Manager at McDonalds, go right ahead. Put your money where your mouth is. Otherwise, do not infer that an entire class of people are corrupt, lazy capitalists with little more concern than their next big scam. Such generalizations are unscientific, and thus un-Marxist.
That brings me to my final comment. Mr Wolfe states in his blog "But that doesn't stop activists from calling for a return to this paradise that Marx and Engels called 'the idiocy of rural life' ". The hyperlink it to the original text that Mr. Wolfe is MISQUOTING. The full context is as follows:
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The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilised ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.
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Given Marx's hatred of the "bourgeoisie" it can be inferred that anything they have done is "bad" in Marx's eyes. Also given Marx's propensity for biting sarcasm (as he was writing for a non-academic audience and therefore tried to keep his readers engaged), it is reasonable to assume that he is saying here that the country being subjected to the rule of the towns is considered a negative thing by Marx, and thus it is sarcasm when he mentions how the "bourgeoisie" "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life." The rest of this quoted paragraph re-enforce the supposition of Marx's sarcastic tone when he refers to the "idiocy of rural life".
The paragraph directly following the one quoted above further re-enforces Marx's hatred for the towns, and therefore love of the rural areas.
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The bourgeoisie keeps more and more doing away with the scattered state of the population, of the means of production, and of property. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property in a few hands. The necessary consequence of this was political centralisation. Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.
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So, Mr. Wolfe has mis-quoted Marx to bolster his own views and claim it was backed by Marx. This is unprofessional and misleading. I will take this chance to mention another group that mis-quotes their philosophers and leaders to back up fringe or opposing views is the same group that Marx called the "opiate of the masses"(paragraph 4). Think about that for a moment Mr. Wolfe.
If you read the entire Manifesto, you will see that Marx credits the bourgeoisie for their extraordinary revolutionary role in history, for overturning the last vestiges of feudalism and freeing Europe from the rule of aristocratic and clerical interests (the First and Second Estates). He praises the bourgeoisie for advancing freedom and providing new opportunities for emancipation, and lauds the extreme efficiency and technological acceleration set in place by the capitalist mode of production. He thinks that it's good that trade is become globalized, he wants a WORLD revolution, after all. He also likes the predominance of the town over the countryside, and the dependence of barbarous nations on the more civilized.
ReplyDeleteBut to be sure, he points out with devastating critical acuity the limitations imposed by bourgeois society, how they do not live up to their own liberal promise of liberty, equality, and fraternity. He shows how the new mode of production unleashes vast industrial forces, but at the expense of the health and livelihood of a vast class of urban workers. Marx demonstrates how even though some new freedoms have been achieved, new forms of domination are introduced under capitalism in a veiled form. But there's no way he wanted a return to a pre-capitalist (feudal) mode of home production, which he considered essentially brutish and medieval. He even devotes a section of part 3 of the Manifesto to a devastating critique of aristocratic "socialists" who advocate a return to the land, to the "natural order" of peasant relations.
Marxism wants to abolish the antithesis between town and country wholesale, not by subsuming one over the other, but through the negation of this antagonism through a new synthesis. Or as Engels explains it in The Housing Question:
Only as uniform a distribution as possible of the population over the whole country, only an integral connection between industrial and agricultural production together with the thereby necessary extension of the means of communication – presupposing the abolition of the capitalist mode of production – would be able to save the rural population from the isolation and stupor in which it has vegetated almost unchanged for thousands of years. It is not utopian to declare that the emancipation of humanity from the chains which its historic past has forged will only be complete when the antithesis between town and country has been abolished."
Engels' low appraisal of the provincialism of the countryside was shared by Lenin, who also emphasized the need to eliminate the antagonism between town and country:
ReplyDeleteWe must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of the land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease and barbarism.
Marx furthermore stated emphatically that the private ownership of land would be abolished and that the agricultural process would be nationalized and centralized on an ever-vaster scale. In a memorandum written in 1869, he wrote:
Agriculture, mining, manufacture, in one word, all branches of production will gradually be organized in the most effective form. National centralization of the means of production will become the natural basis of a society composed of associations of free and equal producers consciously acting upon a common and rational plan. Such is the goal to which the great economic movement of the 19th century is tending.
I could go on and on with more of these quotes, but the point is that when they described the "idiocy of rural life," they weren't just being sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek. They meant it in terms of the incredible lack of education and the illiteracy and unculturedness of the countryside. Rural life is a bleak existence indeed.
I am also unaware that Marx had any theory of "incremental revolution." In fact, he emphatically denied the attempts of such reformism in his Critique of the Gotha Program. Marx wrote that revolutions must occur in the most advanced capitalist nations, where industrialism had spread the furthest. Certainly not in a country that had reverted back to some prior mode of "kinder, gentler" capitalism.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, it has been awhile since I read the works of Marx et al. I was once a part of the Communist Party of Canada, and very interested in their teachings.
ReplyDeleteHowever, that said, as wise as they were for their time; their time was 150 years ago. The world has changed technologically since then. Also, we have gained new knowledge and understanding of the way the eco-systems and resource management works.
So, while it is important to be guided by the PRINCIPLE of emancipation and equal distribution of wealth and power advocated by the great thinkers of the last millennium, it is important to remember that science has shown us new and amazing things.
Marx et al asked some powerful questions and proposed some solutions that may have worked given the technology they had access to at the time. However, guided by those every questions scientists of every walk and political stripe have engaged in research answering the question of how humans can continue to live on this planet without destroying it.
Also, I do not want to focus too much on the question of what Marx et al did or did not say, partially because I am rusty, partially because I think you are misinterpreting to suit your interests; but mostly because that is not what this site is about.
ReplyDeleteThis site is about how humans can live sustainably in the world of today and into the future.