I've spent some time over the last few days working my way through a long narrative about the United States.
"But," you ask, "I thought your project is about the Soviet Union and corn?"
It is. But that's where this gets interesting. One of the side-effects of the deepest freeze of the Cold War was that other than a scant few embassy personnel, confined to Washington and New York, as well as a few others, even Soviet government officials did not visit the United States between 1946 and 1955. One of the first events that reestablished contacts between the two rivals was an exchange of delegations, consisting of agricultural administrators and specialists on the Soviet side, and a smattering of researchers and regular farmers on the American side, in the summer of 1955.
The Soviets were interested in learning about American methods of cultivating corn. I know, I've read about it in excruciating detail. However, enmeshed in this narrative about this most mundane of topics is a whole host of fascinating observations about the society, economy, and culture (ca. 1955) of the United States, especially of the half-dozen or so states in the Midwest where the Soviet delegation spent the bulk of its time, including Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
The document itself runs to nearly five-hundred type-written pages, in three thick, bound volumes. As far as I can tell, no one has read them in decades, but they make for fascinating reading.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I've noticed, right off, is that they - much, I imagine, as their American counterparts - saw what they expected to see. If the Americans who visited saw poorly dressed, poorly housed, overworked peasants working underdeveloped, under-mechanized farms, then the Soviet delegations saw dark forces behind the facade of American abundance.
This is especially true in terms of the social relations that the Soviet delegation noted in its report: They drew from official American statistics a falling number of farms, falling percentage of the population occupied in agriculture, and an increasing size of the farms that remained.
These trends were quite real, representing the origins of the social and economic change in the American Midwest that gave rise to such phenomena as farm crises of the 1980s, and responses like Farm Aid. This same trend has resulted in the increasing size of industrial farming, or agro-business, and the decline of the family farm as the basic unit of American agricultural production.
What these Soviet observers did, in accordance with their own presuppositions, is put this into a Marxist-Leninist framework. Thus we learn that the crisis of overproduction, farmers' debt, and increasing concentration of land and other capital is an unassailable law of capitalism.
The key passage on this issue:
"The concentration of production, the supplanting of small farmers by the strong ones, yet again confirms Lenin's maxim that the basic and chief tendency of capitalism is in the displacement of the small producer both in industry and agriculture.
During our travels around the USA and Canada, we personally saw many ruined and neglected farms, regardless of the fact that our trip crossed through the very richest regions.
We asked them to show us the very best farms - and they showed us such farms, though they represented them as average. And when we requested again that they show us the best farms, then they turned out to be, as a rule, worse than those they had shown earlier. Of an especially unsatisfactory appearance were the farms that we visited by chance, outside the plan. If on the farms that they showed us according to the plan had abundance and provision, then on the farms where we were able to look around outside the plan, the farmer was able to offer us only water from the tap, but not a soft drink or a good lunch. [It should be noted, here, that this is a crowd of at least 25 people, not to mention a gaggle of reporters, showing up unannounced.] Along the way, we saw farms with fields that were overgrown with weeds. We tried, of course, to study the best farms, where it was possible to find the methods and practices of farm management which might be useful for our farms, but along with that, we saw the dark side of farm life in America. We personally saw what it means in real life the line of statistics on the reduction in the number of farms in the USA - it is the ruining of the small farmers-laborers, the transfer of their land, buildings, and livestock into the hands of the larger farmers, who possess the means of production."
But there's more. On that, perhaps, next time.
"But," you ask, "I thought your project is about the Soviet Union and corn?"
It is. But that's where this gets interesting. One of the side-effects of the deepest freeze of the Cold War was that other than a scant few embassy personnel, confined to Washington and New York, as well as a few others, even Soviet government officials did not visit the United States between 1946 and 1955. One of the first events that reestablished contacts between the two rivals was an exchange of delegations, consisting of agricultural administrators and specialists on the Soviet side, and a smattering of researchers and regular farmers on the American side, in the summer of 1955.
The Soviets were interested in learning about American methods of cultivating corn. I know, I've read about it in excruciating detail. However, enmeshed in this narrative about this most mundane of topics is a whole host of fascinating observations about the society, economy, and culture (ca. 1955) of the United States, especially of the half-dozen or so states in the Midwest where the Soviet delegation spent the bulk of its time, including Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska, and South Dakota.
The document itself runs to nearly five-hundred type-written pages, in three thick, bound volumes. As far as I can tell, no one has read them in decades, but they make for fascinating reading.
Perhaps the most interesting thing I've noticed, right off, is that they - much, I imagine, as their American counterparts - saw what they expected to see. If the Americans who visited saw poorly dressed, poorly housed, overworked peasants working underdeveloped, under-mechanized farms, then the Soviet delegations saw dark forces behind the facade of American abundance.
This is especially true in terms of the social relations that the Soviet delegation noted in its report: They drew from official American statistics a falling number of farms, falling percentage of the population occupied in agriculture, and an increasing size of the farms that remained.
These trends were quite real, representing the origins of the social and economic change in the American Midwest that gave rise to such phenomena as farm crises of the 1980s, and responses like Farm Aid. This same trend has resulted in the increasing size of industrial farming, or agro-business, and the decline of the family farm as the basic unit of American agricultural production.
What these Soviet observers did, in accordance with their own presuppositions, is put this into a Marxist-Leninist framework. Thus we learn that the crisis of overproduction, farmers' debt, and increasing concentration of land and other capital is an unassailable law of capitalism.
The key passage on this issue:
"The concentration of production, the supplanting of small farmers by the strong ones, yet again confirms Lenin's maxim that the basic and chief tendency of capitalism is in the displacement of the small producer both in industry and agriculture.
During our travels around the USA and Canada, we personally saw many ruined and neglected farms, regardless of the fact that our trip crossed through the very richest regions.
We asked them to show us the very best farms - and they showed us such farms, though they represented them as average. And when we requested again that they show us the best farms, then they turned out to be, as a rule, worse than those they had shown earlier. Of an especially unsatisfactory appearance were the farms that we visited by chance, outside the plan. If on the farms that they showed us according to the plan had abundance and provision, then on the farms where we were able to look around outside the plan, the farmer was able to offer us only water from the tap, but not a soft drink or a good lunch. [It should be noted, here, that this is a crowd of at least 25 people, not to mention a gaggle of reporters, showing up unannounced.] Along the way, we saw farms with fields that were overgrown with weeds. We tried, of course, to study the best farms, where it was possible to find the methods and practices of farm management which might be useful for our farms, but along with that, we saw the dark side of farm life in America. We personally saw what it means in real life the line of statistics on the reduction in the number of farms in the USA - it is the ruining of the small farmers-laborers, the transfer of their land, buildings, and livestock into the hands of the larger farmers, who possess the means of production."
But there's more. On that, perhaps, next time.
