Angela: >we are not in the 17th century, when it is still possible to be a >peasant outside capitalism. we are in the 20th C, where the condition >of being a peasant or on the land for most people is not so much rural >idiocy, but rural drudgery for sure, and an increasingly impoverished >one at that. why is there so much migration outside of these >communities now? forced migration is crucial, but so too is the >steady trickle of children and adults who go to cities looking for >work. you can complain that these people are lured by the hollow >promises of capitalism, but that does not explain why they might think >these preferable, why these promises take root. in order to explain >that, you will have to take account of things like the position of >women in these communities, of the rules of land inheritance, and so >forth. in short, you will have to take as a given these people make >decisions which are no more or less ideological than your own. I have no idea what you base these comments on. Is this something you read somewhere or is it based on first hand experience. You are posting from Australia, a modern industrial country with modern farming. My experience is in Central America and I can tell you that the revolutions of the 1980s which led to a major political crisis in the United States called "contragate" were primarily an expression of peasant resentment over loss of land. When you are a small self-sustaining farmer in Nicaragua, you don't go to Managua voluntarily. You only go because the land you were sitting on was sold to one of Somoza's cronies. Or outright stolen. In El Salvador, landless peasants took up arms to achieve land, just as they had done in 1932 under the leadership of the Communist Party guerrilla fighter Farabundo Marti. If you want to find out more about this period, I recommend books by Carlos Vilas, Robert Armstrong, George Black, Stephen Kinzer and Raymond Bonner. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
