>>What broke up the share cropping system in America was the tractor as that, which was fundamental. Not by itself. Nor is this to say the sharecropping system was preordained. The property form could have attained another shape as a land of independent farmers in the South. <<
I agree mechanization in the 1930s and 40s accompanies the end of the sharecropping 'system' in the South, but if you want to ignore the real agricultural production and bread baskets of all the rest of the US when you do this, you are not really looking at the transformation of agriculture in the US. The South was dominated by a small white elite (which was actually somewhat mixed race in some 'Old South' areas) controlling a vast system of subsistence farming that locked in huge numbers of both poor whites and poor blacks, who migrated to the cities and to the north and its cities for work. In the NE and MW, farming co-ops did as much to transform the sort of relations you want to abstractly gaze at. And these had long been much more productive than most of the South, which made its money on crops you couldn't grow elsewhere (cotton, tobacco, etc.). Southern sharecropping (which actually made its way into the border states too)--and even peonage-- was a sytem that 'enslaved' poor black and poor white alike (in a state like Tenesseee the majority of sharecroppers were white) lasted about 75 years and, because so much of it concentrated on the overproduction of monocrops (and cotton especially), it destroyed the Southern agricultural environment. With or without the tractor, that system was doomed. Its collapse had, I believe, as much to do with the change in 1930-40s as the mechanization (and there is the overlapping collapse of the 'dry belt' agriculture). For those who had to hire themselves out as 'cotton pickers' at harvest time in order to try and make end's meet, the mechanized cotton harvester didn't really eliminate this labor until from the 1950s on, long after the system we are talking about had collapsed. I found this highly interesting: http://www.inmotionaame.org/print.cfm;jsessionid=f8301774171271575679964?migration=9&bhcp=1 Out of the Rural South As with most migrations, there were several factors that drew African Americans out of the South and into cities throughout the nation. Poverty, the lack of educational facilities for the children, rigid segregation and discrimination, and limited opportunities were all among the reasons that led some to look North. But the most important was the massive collapse of Southern agricultural employment. The principal factors contributing to this economic disaster were great declines in the prices of sugar, tobacco, and especially cotton, coupled with the negative effects of federal policies designed to rescue Southern planters (at the expense of the workers) and the restructuring of commodity production that followed. With the onset of the worldwide depression, cotton prices fell from 18 cents a pound in 1928 to less than 6 cents a pound in 1931. Despite crashing prices, demand was suppressed further by continued high production that bloated surpluses; in the face of the price collapse, farmers harvested a record crop in 1933. Cutting production seemed to be the only solution. The Roosevelt administration achieved this by paying farmers to reduce the land planted and by buying up surpluses already on the market. Although the U.S. Supreme Court declared the initial program, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, unconstitutional, a revised system was put into place during the late 1930s and achieved the same ends. Farm owners now received direct subsidies for taking land out of production, as well as so-called parity payments that reimbursed the difference between the actual cost of production and the market price of their product. The owner's tenants and sharecroppers were to share in the benefits of crop reduction. In practice, however, most tenants and croppers were excluded from most, if not all, of these subsidies. In addition, the New Deal's reduction in acres planted meant that fewer workers were needed to make a crop. This initial reduction was made even worse by mechanization. For the longest time, Southern planters - in control of a captive, cheap, and intimidated labor pool - had little reason to mechanize; but now, with subsidies providing the capital and parity payments guaranteeing a profit, they began to use tractors. Although labor needs ballooned at harvest time, they could be met by turning former tenants and croppers into temporary wageworkers. CJ _______________________________________________ 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
