Antifada's History is a Weapon 10.2: 'Farm Aid 1985' w/ Matt Christman EXTENDED PREVIEW
This Wreckage
Sean KB and AP Andy
4.2 • 970 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2021
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
HIAW is back with our tenth episode! In this one we wonder: what are the roots of the poverty of rural life in America?
The American Dream always included self-sufficiency and independence and nothing represented this more than the family farm. This form of petty commodity production used to be a backbone of 'middle class' life in America, but now less than 2% of the population engages in it. Alongside we have seen an opiate epidemic, material deprivation, deaths of despair and more. What can political economy tell us about the rural crisis?
Part 2 of 2.
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Music: Eddy Huntington - USSR Disco Vaporwave
Suggested Readings:
Ellan Meiksins Wood - The Origins of Capitalism: a Longer View
Jainus Banaji - Theory as History
Gred Grandin - The End of the Myth
Ed. - The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe
Charles Post - The American Road to Capitalism: Studies in Class Structure
G.M. Tamas - Telling the Truth About Class
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This signals the end of like the intensive human labor aspect of southern agriculture at this point with the ability to |
| 0:16.8 | to have an automated process for doing that all these generations of people |
| 0:21.5 | bent over picking cotton for 16 hours a day |
| 0:24.4 | are all the sudden replaced which means of course that those people in the south |
| 0:28.8 | white and black whether in Appalachia or whether in Mississippi or they're in Texas, all of a sudden guess what? |
| 0:35.8 | They're not needed anymore by the big landowners. |
| 0:38.0 | They're not needed to be tenant farmers any longer. |
| 0:40.5 | So they get proletarianized. |
| 0:43.0 | One more example of people being kicked off the land |
| 0:47.0 | through the revolutionization of capitalist agriculture. |
| 0:50.0 | And those people, of course, |
| 0:52.0 | whether they're Appalachians or whether they're black Americans, |
| 0:55.0 | flood into the cities. Because where else are you going to go if you're a military now? |
| 0:59.0 | You've been living on the land for generations. There's no fucking work there. |
| 1:02.0 | You don't have your means of subsistence. You're not going to live off the little garden. So you're going to flood into the cities and the post-war period as there's a growing massive Fordist industrial system rising in the United States. |
| 1:14.6 | Yep, it's the perfect, oh, what a coincidence. |
| 1:17.0 | There's all these factories that need people to work in them. |
| 1:19.8 | You can do that now. |
| 1:29.4 | The Great Migration, it's cool right? I mean we talk a lot about how shall I say this delicately there was a pull and there was a push factor. We talk about Jim Crow, which was as we know a disgusting brutal system of racial caste system that existed in the south. That was one part of the issue |
| 1:46.2 | is that coming back from World War II, |
| 1:48.0 | black Americans saw they didn't have to live like this |
| 1:51.0 | under a racial caste system anymore and start to fight for their freedom, |
... |
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