On Sat, 27 Jul 2002, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big cities in > > the same country. <snip> You don't need to depopulate the countryside > > in order to produce the goods it needs. > Where do urban and suburban wage workers come from, then, if not from > the depopulated countryside? >From the people freed from the soil, as a explained in my previous post. I'm not saying no one should be release from soil. I'm saying there is a difference between releasing 75% of them and releasing 95% of them; and that there is a difference between developing the economy so as to employ them semi-locally as opposed to dispossessing them and driving them into the cities. I think all we have here is a semantic difference, and on a literal reading of the prefix, I guess it's my fault. I was using "de" population to mean removal of most of the population through dispossession. You are using it to mean any feeing of the population. That cleared up, I don't think we disagree: > The only differences have been whether the processes of urbanization and > proletarianization were slow or rapid; whether the processes were > organized by capitalist primitive accumulation or socialist state-led > modernization; and what proportions of the formerly rural population > could be incorporated into the nation's labor force as wage workers, > shafted into the informal sector (petty trading, drug dealing, > prostitution, etc.), or forced to emigrate to richer nations (often to > remit money to support those trapped at home). That is the exactly the qustion. Not whether or not, but how. The question is whether a large increase in gradualism (with its attendent good effects on the welfare of the population ) could be achieved without sacrificing growth in their economic wellbeing (with its obvious bad effects on their welfare) under alternative schemes of rural development that are theoretically possible but have not yet been tried. Or whether all such courses are theoretically impossible and TINA. Also whether the 19th century American model of agriculture is superior to say the 19th century French, both in itself and as a model for a developing country. I.e, whether its greater division of labor and industrialization and export orientation, at the cost of lower per acre volume and nutritional content, and higher production of waste products and higher import needs for petroluem products, is obviously a better package deal for all concerned than its lower division-of-labor cousin. It's a question of relatives, not absolutes. As well as largely consisting at this point of historical counterfactuals and speculation about possible (alternative) futures. Michael
