Chris wrote: >At 14/04/02 12:57 +0200, Hugh wrote: > >> The key might well be the land question. If Chavez pushes through >>a real land reform and even (which is most unlikely) nationalizes >>the land, then all hell will break loose all over the continent. > > >I presume Hugh's intervention was mainly for the benefit of Dave and >others, since he thinks certain things will go over my head.
I specified the Marxist-Bolshevik concepts Chris has a quite false understanding of. The bourgeois-democratic issues of land, national self-determination etc on the other hand are right up his alley -- or should be. >But could he say more, (for the benefit of others) about the >interesting question of land? While it is a rather special category >of the forces of production, the increasingly intense processes of >globalisation perhaps give it a new signficance. What is its >relation to bourgeois democratic and to socialist revolutions? Land is the primary basis of rent as an economic category. And it's a monopoly. The great violation of all indigenous peoples (such as Native Americans north and south, and Australian aborigines), apart from genocide, slavery and rape, has been the confiscation without compensation of their land. In Australia the form of confiscation and settlement was even consciously planned on the basis of principles of political economy (see Capital 1, the chapter on the new colonial system). To avoid the American free-for-all and the tragedy for capitalists of all workers grabbing their own parcel of land to live off, thus removing the main supply of urban factory labour, the Brits, at Wakefield's urging, made sure all the land was parcelled out pretty damn quick into privately owned ranches as vast as the scarcity of owners required. The so-called urbanization of the postwar period has really been one great proletarianization process of the small and medium-sized peasant farmers of the world, in which they've been driven off their subsistence holdings, where the power of the market was minimal, into the slums of megalopolis. The beneficiaries have been the big landowners and agribusiness, and of course the industrialists of the cities, often imperialist capitalists. The relevance to revolution is simple. The screaming injustice of vast wealth in agribusiness and land dealing as opposed to starvation, (semi-)slavery and forced emigration among the rural masses needs to be redressed. >And concretely why would all hell break loose over south America if >there was a real land reform? Do the masses really want their own >land even when they are living in cities? Given the choice of starving, crime and prostitution in the city versus a patch of land of your own where you can produce enough to live on and even something to sell, an awful lot of people would go for the smallholding. Especially those with living memories of successful village production. A lot of European emigrants to the US chose the life of a small farmer against that of an urban wage slave. And anyhow, there are still huge rural populations of landless and rightless people, who are occupying land this very day, without waiting for a revolution to give them the signal. If there was a successful land reform in Venezuela this movement would explode throughout the continent, from Mexico to Argentina. >How would the nationalisation of land differ from a radical land >redistribution? It would make possible large-scale planning of cooperative efforts in irrigation, mechanization, land and forest conservation, etc, in a way that redistribution wouldn't. A redistribution would just start the whole vicious cycle of centralization and concentration of land-owning over again. Nationalization would also make the tearing up of the reform by reactionary coup-makers that much more difficult, as we have seen in the case of the ex-SU. So, in other words, it's too bad this whole complex of land policy, the proletarianization and the slums, etc, is so widely ignored. I don't know why such reactionary bourgeois politicians as Fox, Duhalde and Toledo failed to swallow the CIA line on the Venezuela coup, but I would cheerfully speculate that fear of an uprising of the poor, and especially the rural poor, had a lot to do with it, especially in the case of Mexico and Peru. There was good reporting of events in the Brazilian press by the way, and of course, Brazil shares a long border with Venezuela. Oh, and the impact on Colombia of a rural uprising, or a radical land reform, in Venezuela, would be something to see... FUERA EL FMI! NO AL PAGO DE LA DEUDA! Cheers, Hugh _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
