Ngl, I take major issue with white conservatives crying genocide. Agribusiness isn’t intentionally going out of its way to eradicate a specific culture. White, Trump-supporting rural farmers are purely victims of capitalism, not a project of intentional elimination. There’s no grand conspiracy to put their kids in the boarding schools that native children were forced to go to.
There’s no grand conspiracy to put their kids in the boarding schools that native children were forced to go to.
Yes there is. I am forced to watch woman in my superhero movies. It’s no different than what they did to the natives
American farmers are in no way working class. Even the median small farm owner has upwards of a million dollars in assets (and less than 10% of that value in debt) and a yearly household income that exceed the national average. The author knows exactly what he’s doing when he conflates the plight of a bunch of white landowners with the poor farmhands and seasonal labor that they exploit.
Yep. Farm-OWNERS (not to be confused with the laborers they exploit) are capitalists. Land is one of the OG forms of capital and anyone who says otherwise not only doesn’t understand Marxism but economics in general.
Yeah, so much propaganda is based on the notion that farm-owners are the kindly, folksy old white men tending to their farms. They are the “good poors” the rest of us working class need to be more like. Hence why in the US, you see even a lot of upper-middle class white people choose to live in suburbs and buy pickup trucks so they can fake being poor.
Ugh I’ve posted a decent amount about this. Farmers are not people to blindly idealize. They can be good people that try to do the right thing. They pay their workers fairly, use minimal pesticides and herbicides, try to rebuild the topsoil, shit like that. I specifically worked for people like that because its important to my emotional wellbeing to know we’re trying to live with nature and not conquer and destroy it. But a shit ton of them basically fuck the earth to death at their feet until its barren and sell off when it goes fallow and wonder why all their kids don’t want to do the same. Sorry hoss, they won’t get the yields cuz you turned what was fertile ground into dust by overfarming. And a shit ton of them are reactionary fucksticks who whine endlessly about taxes. And don’t get me started on those “all hat no cattle” suburban dudes who get a truck so they can haul god knows what.
Having a quantity worth money doesn’t necessarily change your class. There are old working class people that are now millionaires because they bought a house in the 70s but they’ve worked a job for a wage their whole life and will almost certainly end up without that house near when they die. Being working class does not mean being poor, it’s about your relationship to production.
With that said, most of these “farmers” are actually farm owners that makes them at least petite bourgeois in character (just like anyone here self-employed to write code for a living) and many are actually employers benefitting from the (super) exploitation of others, particularly undocumented workers.
So I basically agree but I think it’s important to not forget that class is not about income or net worth.
In theory. In practice though, having more wealth does have an effect of which class that person will side with
In your example of the working class elderly with an expensive house, it is likely they will side with the bourgeoisie to further oppress the proles on the matters of rent/affordable property if it means retaining or increasing the value of their property
A wealthy coder for a megacorp often sides with the bourgeoisie because their access to capital affords them similar avenues of exploitation against the working class. Voting against labor laws for Uber/Doordash workers in order to keep their delivery fees down, pushing for more policing of the homeless to keep their property value up, advocating for increased surveillance of people because they’re paid in company stock and the more the tech sector grows, the higher their salaries will be pushed due to supply and demand of their job
Now compare that to a petit bourgeois coder who is living paycheck to paycheck and needs to also drive Uber on the side to keep them afloat
Naturally material interests have a great impact on the larger trends as well as an individual’s decisions, including whether to act against their own immediate property values or paycheck. They are part of the self-reinforcing system of capital that continually calls them back into the fold.
But it is more complex than a class determinism. Class traitors have always been important for the movement, for example, and so has been dragging along the working class that does not actually self-liberate very well on its own. Most successful revolutions have required a multi-class mobilization that includes the peasantry and a fight for national liberation. The leadership of communist parties has frequently been of the petite bourgeois or middle income earners. It is key to separate fighting for the working class and the exact extent to which someone is of it.
This is the challenge of socialist organizing. To recognize the contradictions and synthesize to find a valuable path forward. We cannot have a strict claim about income and class, nor even a personal moralization about prole vs PMC vs petite bourgeois because if we do so we will fail to retrieve use resources available to us. Simultaneously, we have to measure this against becoming beholden to bourgeois interests via using those resources and create a bulwark against it. There is no success in a hard dichotomy (e.g. socialists that end up just being a reading group because no one is sufficiently prole) nor in naively allowing bourgeois interests to capture your project (the politically uneducated cannot make decisions in your org nor can employers, e.g.).
In other words, this is a case where we have to attempt to struggle within contradiction in hopes of resolving it towards a favorable synthesis for working class liberation. To recognize your valid points and still try to mobilize the less-prole in our favor and spread consciousness and build our orgs in unfavorable conditions. Homeowners are partially bought off by real estate dynamics so we need to carefully use them and build from them how we can while guarding against the capitalist response to recapture those who begin dallying with socialist thinking, for example.
Finally, I also think this is a good criticism to use when it comes to deciding how to allocate your efforts. It is not necessarily strategic to focus efforts at the people least likely to come to your side due to material interests. If your org puts all its efforts into organizing white techbros you’ll be inefficient. But if a white techbro becomes politically educated and wants to struggle in their workplace and, say, fight against Zionist occupation via their proletarian aspect, it is foolish to shut that down.
Anyways you’re making good points and I’m not really contradicting them. Just trying to share the direction I’m trying to get at since I’m not sure if I’m explaining it well.
American farmers are in no way working class
Change farmers to “farm-owners” and you are correct. But not because of this:
Even the median small farm owner has upwards of a million dollars in assets
The space program is not the highest human accomplishment.
I at least like this line. But look, this is fundamentally just settlers being devoured themselves. For a few hundred years the enormous frontier of newly-annexed land made possible the existence of small farms. Now consolidation happens and land is priced at non-settler rates. There are only off ramps and no on ramps to holding a small farm, as people get old and sell to whatever big ag company is offering the most because their kids or grandkids don’t want to live rural.
The solution is land reform, a term utterly alien to the US. The idea that land ownership could be reshaped according to democratic priorities instead of who has the most money is desirable but I do not know how to get there. I do however suspect that a large coalition of aggrieved white farm owners does not lie along that path.
The US killed even liberals in Latin America over mild land reform
Tl;dr: what no class consciousness does to a mf
I live in Henry County, Kentucky, which I can remember as a part of a thriving agricultural region with many small family-run farms and flourishing local economies. Now, as in every place I know in rural America, the small towns here are dead or dying, much of the farmland (long priced above the reach of farmers) is consigned to toxic, continuously cropped large acreages of corn and soy beans; communities and families are breaking up. The education system prepares our young people to leave, and they are leaving. Other problems are addiction, depression, bad health, poverty, and the boredom with rural life that is induced and expected. At present we are suffering a solar panel land rush and a Bourbon boom land rush, which further increase land prices, go after the best farmland, and turn neighbor against neighbor. I believe I have given a fair representation of the plight of rural America, a land of worsening problems that it did not cause and cannot solve, from which urban America derives its food, clothing, and shelter, plus “raw materials.” For these necessary things rural America receives prices set in urban America. For the manufactured goods returned to it, rural America pays prices set in urban America
Yeah, those are all real problems.
Because I have watched for half a century and more the decline of my own community and others like it everywhere in rural America, along with the increasing ecological and cultural damages of industrial agriculture, I have made a practice of reading newspaper and magazine articles by Democratic or leftward experts of politics and economics, hoping that I would see an acknowledgement, first of the economic importance of the natural world, and then of the importance of the land-use economies of agriculture, forestry, and mining, by which the goods of the natural world are made available for human use.
You’re right, the Democrats aren’t interested in addressing real issues.
committed a sort of cultural genocide
Everything I don’t like is genocide
counties that were at least 85% white and earned less than the national median income—i.e. rural counties
Um… Entirely incorrect. There is a popular and bizarre sleight of hand where “rural” is used to mean white. Indian reservations and most counties along the Mississippi River immediately come to mind as examples of objectively rural counties which are nowhere near 85% white but face all the economic issues listed in the article. Reactionary Settlers though
