(1978). On Facilitating Networks for Social Change ... - INSNA

- 3 7 -. . . Thesis Summaries, cont'd .the world wheat market . As the world price emerged, the migration of labor operated to make it continuallyfall . Instead of acting as a corrective mechanism to adjust supply to demand, the world pricesimply reflected the continued increase in supply from the new areas . Moreover, the falling priceaffected peasant and capitalist production in old producing areas in such a way as to increase emigrationand exacerbate the price fall . The movement of labor within the commercial formation displaced thecorrective mechanism of the market in two ways : it helped to reduce the labor supply and raise wagesthroughout the juridical structures of old producing areas ; and it increased the number of simplecommodity producers in new areas .Peasant production either succumbed to more efficient simple commodity production or reverted to alower level of commodity production . Landless laborers in rural areas increasingly had the option ofmigrating to cities within their own or different juridical structures, or to the agricultural coloniesin the new areas for which recruitment became widespread and intense . The actual options in a particularlocale were closely connected with the local process of the transformation of agricultural production .Whether or not other forms of wheat production emerged simultaneously, the fragmentation of peasantholdings into plots too small to provide subsistence and other obligations took on new significance asthe movements of commodities and people changed . The maintenance of below-subsistence plots wasincreasingly possible as the income of the household could be supplemented by wages earned by its members .As Kautsky argued in The Agrarian Question in 1899, this supplement to the wage, in turn, allowed forconsiderable flexibility in the employment of labor-power by capital in all branches of production(Banaji, trans ., 1975) . Wolf (1969) has shown that a similar relation existed among the development ofcommercial agriculture, the formation of a class of wage laborers, and the fragmentation of subsistenceplots in Puerto Rico . As we saw, allotments on capitalist wheat farms in England was an alternative toraising wages . Burawoy (1976) has shown a similar relation between below-subsistence agriculture andflexible wage labor for migrant laborers in contemporary southern Africa and the United States . To theextent that this pattern prevailed, migration to nearby employment was encouraged . It depended upon theopportunities for employment within the juridical structure, and thus the development of wage labor inall branches of production . This, in turn, depended upon the support the state was able to provide forthe emergence and re-production of capitalist relations of production throughout the juridical structure .Yet this pattern was only a matter of degree . Whether or not peasants had the option of wage laborto supplement production of subsistence or cash crops, and whether or not the pattern of landholdingallowed them to revert to a lower level of commodity production, they emigrated in large numbers to theareas of new European settlement . Similarly, wage laborers in the cities of Europe emigrated, as didwage laborers in the declining capitalist wheat producing regions of Europe . Moreover, emigration wasnot stopped by direct state actions to protect wheat producers . Throughout the era of the world marketboth protected and unprotected juridical structures in Europe provided emigrants for the commercialformation in labor . The sole exception, France, had a declining rural fertility in this period (Price,1975) . Whether the wheat production being undermined was efficient or inefficient, some people werebeing made redundant relative to the means of employment within the juridical structure as a whole . Andwhether the simple commodity producers colonizing the new territories of the expansionist states inAmerica and Oceania came from juridical structures with efficient or inefficient agricultural production,they continued to participate in the lowering of the world price .The undermining of peasant and capitalist forms of wheat production, then, was closely tied to themovements of labor within the commercial formation as well as to the world price . The great movementsof population from the different regions of Europe followed, as we have seen, a sequence : Great Britain,the Northern continental countries, and then the regions of eastern and southern Europe . To some extentemigration followed patterns of natural increase, but only insofar as they intersected with the reorganizationof agricultural production, the alternative sources of employment within the juridicalstructure, and the recruitment activities of states and capital for agricultural colonists in the areasof new settlement (see Thomas, 1973 : 155-174) . The first great transformations of wheat production inEurope in the 19th century had been the emergence of capitalist production, particularly in Britain, butalso in Germany . These countries were also the main source of people for the commercial formation inlabor prior to the emergence of the world wheat market . As some of them began to produce wheat for theemergent world market, increasingly on a simple commodity production basis, the price fell . Peasant andcapitalist producers who had done well in the period of the continental market were under increasingpressure, and the bases for their reproduction were increasingly undermined . As labor was freed fromdecomposing capitalist and peasant units of production, it faced different conditions in differentjuridical structures . In the national states of northern Europe wage labor in manufacturing was increasingat a much greater rate than in the imperial states of eastern Europe, or in the southern region ofItaly . Labor had little opportunity in the latter regions to maintain partial agricultural productionor to find employment in industry . The recruitment activities of the states and private groups seekingsettlers in new territories were increasingly successful there, and decreasingly successful, despitepolicy to the contrary, in the countries of early emigration .