Michael Pollak: >>Doug Henwood wrote: > > > How can you have electricity or hospitals (presumably with drugs and > > equipment) without large-scale production, and how can you improve > > the productivity of small-scale agriculture without the kinds of > > inputs made in factories? > > You can't. But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big > cities in the same country. Which India already has. You don't need to > depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs. They > can be produced in the cities. And even in little cities, for that > matter.
Yes, there is enough surplus, unemployed labour power in Indian countryside. Some of it can migrate to the urban areas and the rest can be employed in the countryside. There is enough of it, for both urban as well as rural development. > I don't see at all how an alternate development of the countryside > contradicts advanced industrial production. This seems like a false > dichotomy. Michael, I am not sure this is true of industrial crops such as cotton, oilseeds, sugarcane etc. The largescale manufacturing and competition (including the global competition) will have an impact on the mode of production in agriculture. e.g. Textile exports are the principal export commodity for many developing nations. The cotton cost is the most important element of cost in textile production ( The quality of cotton and the productivity/yields on cotton farms determines the price realisation for finished product and cost of cotton respectively.) The quota system ends in 2005 and there will be free global competition in textiles from 2005. The introduction of BT cotton, I suspect, is related to this scenario. >France preserved its peasant economy along with industrial > advancement in the 19th century. Marx said in the 18th Brumaire those > peasants were at a cul-de-sac of history. But they were still around a > century later. And then they won subsidies and they're still around > today. That's a much more gradual transition to urbanization. And it > doesn't seem to have been a bad thing. Yes, but there is a viewpoint which attributes the relative backwardness of French industry to the presence of French peasant economy. The largescale industrial capitalism requires concentration and centralisation capital. Jacobinism dosen't serve interests of the big bourgeoisie, particularly after 1848. One could even link it up (if memory serves) to Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Ulhas
