Re: the take off as a take off from Marx

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> "In this penetrating study of a problem of global importance, Seavoy
> insists that development economics is a failed discipline
> because it does not recognize the revolutionary difference between
> subsistence and commercial social values.  Seavoy demonstrates that
> commercial labor norms are essential for producing assured food surpluses
> in all crop years and that an assured food surplus is essential for
> sustaining the development process.  The commercialization of food
> production is a political process, as in the term political economy.  **If
> peasants have a choice, Seavoy shows through historical case studies, they
> will not voluntarily adopt commercial labor norms. Central governments
> must overcome peasant resistance to performing commercial labor norms by
> various forms of coercion, including what has historically been most
> effective: depriving peasants of control of land use by foreclosure and
> eviction for excessive subsistence debts.**  Coercion is most effective
> when it is linked to money rewards for peasants who voluntarily transform
> themselves into yeoman cultivators or farmers."

Marx himself quoted similar people to a similar effect, e.g., Wakefield. It
fits with European colonial policy, which sometimes imposed money taxes on
peasants to force them to go commercial. It also seems to the trend of
development policy, for example, in Mexico, where I heard that the
neoliberal PRI government (pre-Fox) wanted to liquidate the peasantry as a
class (and I don't see Fox as changing things, though I could be wrong).
Peasants want to pursue a risk-minimizing survival strategy, like those
French peasants that Brenner talks about and Louis pooh-poohs. To
proletarianize them takes force, as in the English enclosure
movement/agricultural revolution.

To be fair to Rostow, however, this is not what he was talking about when
he discussed the "take-off." His emphasis is on urban development and
aggregates such as the saving rate. One of the big criticisms of Rostow
(though not by Brad) is that he downplays agriculture, though of course
that was very common in 1950s development thinking.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine