[PEN-L:28675] Re: Vandana Shiva

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

At 2:16 PM -0400 7/27/02, Michael Pollak wrote:
> But you can have an extensively settled countryside and big
> cities in the same country.
> <snip>
> You don't need to
> depopulate the countryside in order to produce the goods it needs.

Where do urban and suburban wage workers come from, then, if not from
the depopulated countryside?  Urbanization and proletarianization
have always meant that former peasants and landless agricultural
laborers come to cities and become wage workers, etc.  The only
differences have been whether the processes of urbanization and
proletarianization were slow or rapid; whether the processes were
organized by capitalist primitive accumulation or socialist state-led
modernization; and what proportions of the formerly rural population
could be incorporated into the nation's labor force as wage workers,
shafted into the informal sector (petty trading, drug dealing,
prostitution, etc.), or forced to emigrate to richer nations (often
to remit money to support those trapped at home).  There has been no
exception to this historical pattern.
--
Yoshie

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