On Fri, 26 Jul 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Grinding flour is a synecdoche for a society characterized by a large > pesantry producing very low-tech goods in households and small > villages. That style of production is inconsitent with being nonpoor. Calling it a synecdoche assumes what is to be proven: that it is impossible to make small scale farming more productive if capital, science and technology were devoted to that end. There are a million things that need to be built in the countryside: homes, road, electricity -- and a million services -- schools, hospitals, distribution of goods -- that could employ labor in an advanced division of labor that was still flexibly and locally grouped, as we see today in say home building (which has yet to be replaced with the factory production of homes, although they are getting better). Do you think it is conceptually impossible to say double or triple the productivity of subsistence farming? Which would free up labor to do those other tasks, which would be paid for with money which would buy the surplus locally produced food? While the farmers themselves would enjoy more security because in a bad year, they'd still eat, while their food would bring higher prices. I'm not an economist, but I don't see why such an alternative route is logically ruled out. Does it violate some kind of economic law of entropy? Mainstream economist would say there can't be an alternate scheme because TINA. But you can't say that. So what's your reasoning? Maybe you're right about mills. Maybe it's more profitable to sell grain and use the money to buy flour. But I'm not sure I see why that has to be true. Normal higher processing adds value and increases market power. And it would seem that leaving workers with a decommodified food source yourself should give them added market power. No? I'm not saying I have an alternative scheme. I'm just saying I don't understand the conditions of its impossibility. Especially in an era when production doesn't have to be as centralized as it once did. I'm willing to admit it's a chimera if it is. I just want to know why. Is it because you think the division of labor is the sine non qua of productivity? Maybe that's true. How would you answer the argument, of Michael Perelman and others, that synergy of inputs and outputs can be an alternate source of land productivity -- and one which an advanced division of labor removes and then has to make up for? And that this is also a source of productivity which can be improved by the application of science and appropriate technology. Michael
