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Nice To Hear Ideas for Research and Future
by dbp Monday May 09, 2005 at 02:12 PM
nuovotierra@yahoo.com

We Await a Declaration from President Hugo Chavez,

Felipe Quispe and the Conaie of their Unification in the Fight for a Broadly Implemented Agrarian-Based Socialism that Places the Indigenous and Peasants at the Center of Development!



In Latin America, the proletariat -- Marx's industrial wage-workers -- constitute the top quarter of income earners. In many economies the informal sector represents as much as half the workforce. The truly marginalized are the tenant farmers and other agricultural workers along with the jobless or underemployed urban slum-dwellers. But Marx considered the agricultural workers of his day to be hopelessly reactionary, and the urban lumpenproletariat to be hopelessly degraded into beggars, criminals, and "scabs."



Previous efforts by revolutionaries have failed mostly because of Imperialist threats, but also because Socialism's view of human nature as either naturally noble or almost totally malleable is fallacious. While many do respond unselfishly and heroically in crises such as war and natural disaster, such behavior cannot be sustained in a large-scale way as a regular day-to-day routine. Insofar as populations can be conditioned to behave selflessly, they are also reduced to regiments of biped ants.



An economic system is best founded on the assumption that people are basically self-centered. And the art of government, Archbishop Temple observed," is the art of so ordering life that self-interest prompts what justice demands."



This critique owes a lot to Michael Novak (see his book Will It Liberate?} Novak takes liberation theology seriously and seeks genuine dialogue, but he is disappointing, in what he fails to say. (This may be why he is perceived as an apologist for gringo capitalism.) While he speaks of the need to use the taxing power in Latin America to promote and maximize economic creativity rather than repress it, nowhere does Novak offer a model of such enlightened tax policy -- and nowhere does he advance any concrete suggestions as to how to address the land question. Yet the two, tax reform and land reform, are indeed intimately connected; true liberation demands both.



As Nicholas Berdyaev put it,



"A society that chose to be based solely upon grace and declined to have any law would be a despotic society.... It is impossible to wait for a gracious regeneration of society to make human life bearable." As a citizen of the spiritual order, the Christian lives under grace -- and is not restrained by power or authority. But in this life he or she is also, inescapably, a citizen of the secular order, where power must be checked by power and political means employed to serve the ends of grace, moving the world closer to a likeness of the Promised Land. -- Adapted from the Poverty in the Wasteland: The Preferential Option for the Poor.

http://www.landreform.org/wp5.htm









A Peasant Life Defined



We stand for jobs for all, a full program of public works, and the sliding scale of hours to find jobs for all available workers – be it seasonal or full time. Since this directly confronts the capitalists' need to reduce wages in order to raise the rate of profit, we insist that the demand is valid as a human need, independent of considerations of profitability. The wealth needed for these measures can be obtained only by violating capitalist property: Nationalize the Banks and Industries Without Compensation! Orient available resources to farming systems of several types.



And We Stand For A Renewal of rural society and the re-establishment of independent and democratically planned peasant communities.



Peasant life and their behavior of working primarily for what they need is the lifestyle that can survive on the planet through global warming and the Imperialist wars.



"Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?



And why do you worry about clothing?

Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you… you of little faith?



Therefore do not worry, saying, "What will we eat?' or "What will we drink?' or "What will we wear ?"

– Jesus of Nazareth (somewhat over-rated, but a powerful and enduring rebel)



Jesus and all of the teachings of the Bible say: "grow your food, drink from the well, spin your wool, but do not crave security in these things, do not seek to accumulate more than you need. Trust in God and his call to share with those less in need, his call for solidarity, love and a community of equals. Jesus was a peasant and he preached the desirability of peasant behavior.



Political Economy of Peasant Production: Why Peasants are Good; Why We Must Adopt and Celebrate Their Behavior



I. The consumption-labour balance principle.



Because peasant production is orientated towards use value, work is intensified until the gains from any further increases in work input are outweighed by its drudgery. Once a peasant household does enough work to ensure an acceptable standard of consumption for the family as a whole, it will not work any harder. Thus the amount of work done by the individual working members of a household is inversely related to the number of dependent consumers they have to support. The higher the ratio of non-working children to workers there is in a household, the harder the productive members will have to work.



Once the consumer-worker ratio improves, these people can ease off. This isn't the gist of Chayanov's model because it doesn't pay attention to the way peasant behaviour is linked to the conditions under which peasants produce — in the case of Russia, peasants were faced with land scarcity, and most of them lacked alternative possibilities of employment (though this was not true of regions around the new industrial cities). When these conditions don't hold, Chayanov's model doesn't work very well. Given those conditions, he assumed that peasant households' economic behaviour is determined, in the first instance, by the need to achieve some minimum standard of consumption or income, and that peasants would respond to problems in achieving the minimum by working harder on the farm...



Peasant Needs and Dilemmas

What is this minimum standard of consumption? In the first place, annual production in agricultural societies has to include what Eric Wolf called a "replacement fund": seed corn has to be put by for the next sowing, and tools or draft animals may need to be replaced. So some part of present production goes towards reproducing the conditions for future production. An obvious indicator of crisis in peasant communities is when people eat their seed corn or slaughter their animals.



There is something else to take into account in defining minimum standards of consumption (as well as the replacement fund). As Sahlins puts it, human beings do not simply have to 'provision' their bodies: they also have to 'provision' their social relationships. Marriage and other social rites de passage involve additional household production. So peasant households can only reproduce themselves as social entities over time by producing a little extra to satisfy their social obligations. We might call this a 'social reproduction' fund. The amount of resources dedicated to social expenditures which are obligatory in a peasant community may be a significant proportion of the community's total production. Fiesta sponsorship in Latin America may cost the equivalent of a whole year's income.



Not all household production of surplus is to do with meeting household obligations in communal social life. In the case of peasants, the most significant social cause of surplus production is the fact that peasants are obliged to pay taxes to the state and rent or other dues to landlords, churches and other ruling class institutions. A basic dilemma facing peasants is how they can continue to make a basic livelihood for themselves given all these other demands upon them to produce surpluses for dominant groups in a larger society.



A New Agrarian-Based Socialism will remove these burdens and only require peasants to pay taxes (a surplus) based upon the guidelines for spending locally that they themselves have decided in Popular Assemblies.



Peasants response to these problems appears to be perverse by the standards of capitalist economics. They might, for example, produce more when prices fell, which is hardly good business. The key to understanding the peasant farm is the fact that it is a unit of consumption as well as a unit of product, and that it did its producing by using family labour. This enables the peasant farm to behave in ways that made no sense to capitalists but made good sense to peasants.



A Different Economic Logic

Consider the following examples of how peasant economic logic can be different from capitalist economic logic in ways that have consequences for public policy.



Increasing output when market prices fall



Family labour is not paid. So extra work does not add to the money costs of production. Peasant labor costs can only be measured subjectively, in terms of drudgery and hardship. If family needs remain unsatisfied, then the cost of working harder will be less than the satisfaction derived from producing a little more, however much toil and sweat it takes.



Suppose, for example, that the peasants have to meet some of their necessities by selling part of their harvest, or that they have to pay a fixed tax in money. If the price of their crop falls, their income falls. Assuming they could only just meet their needs for cash previously, then they can only either reduce their consumption or produce more of the crop, to earn the same total income at the lower price. In capitalist terms, they may be operating at a loss: that is, if they actually had to pay for the extra labour in money, then the extra value of the total product might be eaten up by the increase in production costs. And capitalists have to have a worthwhile profit left over after meeting the wage bill.



But if peasants are willing to increase their rate of self-exploitation, they can survive in a depressed market. As a result of this, peasant family farmers have succeeded in driving capitalist farmers using wage-labour out of business, by producing more and creating further downward pressure on prices.



They can only do this when the burden of tax and rent upon them is not so crushing as to make it impossible for them to meet their basic needs after paying their taxes and rent. This happened in colonial South East Asia — prices were low and tax and rents so high that peasant farmers often went under. In large parts of continental Europe, however, it was more often the big capitalist farmers who went under when industrial manufacturing interests persuaded their governments to lower tariffs against grain imports from the USA, Argentina and Russia in the late 19th century. This is why much of European agriculture was dominated by smallish family farms rather than big wage-labour farms until the 1960s. It is rather striking that large-scale plantation capitalism seems to be concentrated in protected or monopoly markets and in Third World regions where wage-levels are low.



peasantlife.blog.com

add your comments


on oil your wrong
by Burr372 Tuesday May 10, 2005 at 01:32 PM

So you can run cars on coal can you? oil is the main way to power the world and if the us does start switching to coal the oil corporations will be pissed off and we all know what happens next.

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