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: : You agree, and proceed to dispossess your small farmers of their land and turn them into wage laborers on large cash-crop farms. (In the Soviet Union under Stalin, this was called "forced collectivization"; under US sponsorship, it's called "modernization." But in order to have effective large scale agriculture of cash crops, you will need advanced farm machinery and the latest chemical fertilizers and insecticides. . .: It is interesting, this continual process of agricultural centralization.
: I have long been of the opinion that the peasant---the proud, independent, dirt-poor, small land-holder---has been one of communism's most tenacious adversaries.
: Yet observe how capitalism clears this world-historic figure from the stage. Observe how capitalism always turns the peasant into the proletariat.
: And promotes the agricultural advances necessary for socialism to become possible, as well.
: Everytime one more peasant is expropriated from the land, the spectre increases. . .
Spectre of what? Communism, or fascism? The various militias of the United States often contain ex-farmers who lost it all to the bank and agribusiness. I don't see those people drifting to the left. If anything, they equate agribusiness and the banks, along with the U.S. government, of conspiring to steal the land and place it into the hands of a small, elite group, and they readily call this process...communism.
