>Specifically, in 1921 America roughly 21 > million horses were deployed as the primary energy source in farming. 1921 > was after the advent of "Fordism," and well after the invention of the > gasoline power engine, but the impact of the industrial revolution would not > reconfigure the social organization of agricultural labor until roughly 1939 > or what is called the mechanization of agricultural. The shift of the > population from agriculture to industry - the city, occurred in this time > frame > although the industrial revolution began well over a hundred years before > the mechanization of agriculture.
CIs and the UAW. Careful guys, this thread has a huge potential for self-humiliation built into it. Horses enabled the first stages of mechanization of agriculture. Have you ever seen how they still do all those procedures on an Amish farm? To quite an extent mechanized, much of it horse-powered (which reminds me to add horses to that list of animals the human animal has co-evolved with -- wolf-dogs, granary cats and horses). The motorized mechanization of American agriculture also took place before 1939 in wheat production. Another interesting aspect of this is that the sort of industrial capacity to build the very large agricultural machines also led to a mechanization of warfare (although in its invasion of Poland, the German army relied to quite an extent on horse-drawn quartermaster). I think the other change you need to look at here is the shift to chemical fertilizers instead of having more self-sufficiency on farms as 'business units'. If you had a lot of horses, cattle, pigs and chickens you had your own fertilizer. But with the 'green revolution' came a shift to chemical fertilizers, separating animal husbandry from the basic farm unit to quite an extent. You still see older style farming among the Amish and Mennonite communities, but that is not to romanticize them--they are awful polluters of the Chesapeake Bay, Ohio River and Lake Erie because of their heavy use of cow and horse shit combined with farms that lack greenbelts around the streams and hedgerows to enclose fields. To quite an extent Amish farmers have themselves become post-mo farmers, minus the tractors and motorized harvesters. The shift in industrial production isn't so much from the MW to the rest of the world, as it is from the UK, US, UK and Soviet Union, to Japan, Germany and now China, India and Brazil. And workers in the US, even if they do manage to organize, face huge obstacles to accomplishing anything in terms of improving their lot in life if they are put into competition--all under American-dominated global capital--with workers who produce under conditions that are reminiscent of the Pittsburgh area circa 1900. CJ ELT in Japan http://eltinjapan.blogspot.com/ Japan Higher Education Outlook http://japanheo.blogspot.com/ We are Feral Cats http://wearechikineko.blogspot.com/ _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
