Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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at the ratification of the US Constitution, roughly 90 percent of the population worked in agriculture; by 1910 it was 35 percent; today it is a mere 1 percent. But globally, the process has accelerated over the neoliberal period as farmers worldwide were subject to international competition due to “free-trade” regimes and structural adjustment policies. According to World Bank data, as recently as 1991, 43 percent of the global workforce still worked in agriculture, but in 2022 that number had fallen to 26 percent.
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proletarianization. This is a process of expropriating the direct producers from the land and any other “means of production” so that they have to sell their labor power on the market for a wage to survive.
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this is a profoundly “ecological” process of trading a mode of life where people depend directly on land for survival to one in which they must rely on the uncertain whims of the market.
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The problem, of course, is that the Russian Revolution took place in a heavily rural peasant country where depeasantization had hardly commenced, and the assistance with economic development that Lenin and the Bolsheviks originally hoped would come from revolutions in the rich capitalist world never came. The question of how to industrialize and what to do with the peasantry haunted the Bolshevik leadership throughout the 1920s until Joseph Stalin chose a particularly coercive path of forced collectivization. We can hope, but only speculate, that a less violent and destructive path to industrialization might have been pursued (call it a “just transition” for the peasantry).
✏️ Q: How is what Lenin was hoping to happen (but never came to pass), different from what Stalin did with collectivzation? A: Lenin envisioned a more democratic and rational approach to land reform, aiming for the socialization of land that would empower workers while aligning agricultural practices with modern methods. In contrast, Stalin’s forced collectivization was a coercive, violent process that sought rapid industrialization at the expense of the peasantry, leading to widespread suffering and disruption rather than the cooperative engagement Lenin had hoped for. q: What was the forced collectivization that stalin did? a: Forced collectivization was a policy implemented by Stalin in the late 1920s and early 1930s aimed at consolidating individual landholdings and labor into collective farms. This process involved the state taking control of agricultural production, leading to widespread disruption, famine, and suffering among the peasantry, particularly in Ukraine. The goal was to increase agricultural efficiency and produce surplus grain for industrialization, but it resulted in significant human and economic costs. 🔗 View Highlight
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socialist planning of land use would have to remain carefully attuned to ecological constraints and the requirements of sustainability. And those living on or near lands designated for social use should have more democratic weight in collective decisions. Indigenous and peasant communities could retain control over their own land and resources and set the terms of engagement and trade with larger-scale global production systems.