Agrarian Policies in Communist and Non-Communist Countries
Neimeyer, Gerhart
virtually automatic suacess at twenty yards. Now team A's kickoff specialists jog on to the field, as do team B's kickoff receiving specialists. If team A's kicker does his job well (and he...
...Though acfually the majority (as proved by Ohio State University Poll results), they sit in the grandstands of life and let the liberals run with the boll...
...Finding that peasants under compulsion do not incline to work, the Chinese first mobilized their women, separating them from their family responsibilities and thus turning over daily living functions to the Communes...
...This is the action sport...
...Within six months a group of faculty Fagins had converted me into a raving radical, who shoutnd God is dead and the establishment doomed...
...Fifth, having inflicted a perennial backwardness on their own agriculture, both regimes have had to adjust their industrial programs so that the Chinese, for one, had to abandon their priority for heavy industry and give preference to industry serving the countryside...
...Stenerson holds that Social Darwinism permeates his views...
...what might be called the "'inner contradictions of Communist-run economies...
...He knows exactly how everyone on his team bats against every pitcher in the league...
...As Angell says, "onl~/ baseball, with its statistics and isolated fragments of time, permits so precise a reconstruction from box score and memory...
...While drama critic on the Baltimore Morning Herald, Mencken wrote the first book on George Bernard Shaw to appear in this country (1905...
...He may well be the only author who ever obtained royalties oy collecting and republishing the brickbats hurled at him (in his book entitled M enclceniana, a Schimpflexicon ). What are Mencken's most enduring contributions to American culture...
...He knows the sacrifice is overated because "statistics show that a man on first with nobody out has a better chance of scoring than a man or second does with one out...
...Among the scattered peasants, such groupings are wholly inconceivable...
...Communist rule, far from bringing about the "'realm of freedom," has caused not only the appearance of new crimes but also a new mode of exploitation...
...Fourth, having removed the main incentive for careful farming, they had to pressure the peasants through political, economic and bureaucratic ways of intimidation which to begin with resulted in the enormous man-made calamities (the famines in Russia of 1931-32 and in China of 1959-61), and then left a permanent regression of agricultural productivity so that both formerly rich countries now must import grain for their own subsistence...
...And what an amazingly wide range he encompassed: politics, literature, music, linguistics, the social and natural sciences and metaphysics...
...From our perch we can sometimes see three or four or more such geometries appearing at the same instant on the green board below us and, mathematicians that we are, can sense their solutions even before they are fully drawn...
...It laid the ground for his lovehate relation to America...
...Stenerson points out, "his -theoretical determinism was at odds with his faith in individual initiative, his libertarianism, and his belief mat the small group of truthseekers can bring about a limited kind of progress...
...Well, the thesis was wrong...
...The German-American community of Union Square, where he was raised, ingrained in him family pride, common sense and an appreciation of hard work and thrift...
...The dogmatic eyes of Communists have been riveted on the "'class of the proletariat," industrial labor...
...This book, like its subject, is neat, pretty, satisfying...
...How rich a legacy Mencken bestowed by this identical bawdy twanging of his own lyre...
...Thus the prime condition of highly productive agriculture is the loving attitude of peasants, and nothing can procure this attitude as well as the~family ownership of the land, a fact which the Chinese acknowledged more than two thousand years ago as the Ch'in rulers introduced private property of land...
...This is the thesis developed in depth over a number of years by Karl A. Wittfogel who has thereby made a major contribution to the study of...
...As an expert at controversy he enjoyed being attacked...
...They do not plat, meet, write, speak or elect anyu, e. They seem to think democracy is a spectator sport...
...Thirdly, after they took the land away from the farmers, they made a concession in granting them small plots for private cultivation but then repeatedly snatched these back, or changed their size, so that this small vossession never appen ed even as secure as the rights of medieval serfs...
...Yet at times, Mr...
...Moreover, throughout a wide variety of social systems, farm operations "were not controlled by the state but by a variety of small and large private owners or possessors...
...Wittfogel, for having put your finger on the leastknown of Communism's "inner contradictions !" [ ] Gerhart Niemeyer Gerhart Niemeyer is a professor of government at Notre Dame Darling of the gods Mencken, Iconoclast from Baltimore by DonaM C. Stenerson University of Chicago Press, $7.95 H L. MENCKEN, newspaper reporter, magazine editor, political and literary critic, was once called by Walter Lippmann the most influential private citizen of America...
...i i , I1~ 360...
...College or Univ 18 the Alternative May 1972 be reversed and that they had to send mechanics, engineers, students and professionals to handle milk pails on the farm...
...Constant exposure to the sprawling lustiness of street life made him appreciative of things American and disdainful of secondhand culture derived from abroad...
...A fine, precise writer, Angell possesses the subtlety which we baseball fans fervently believe derives from extensive scrutiny of baseball...
...It deals with national issues and personalities and offers insightful, original and sometimes offbeat reviews of current books...
...The Chinese developed a permanent "'labor shortage," despite the enormous growth of their population...
...This year four of his pitchers may win twenty or more games (only the 1920 White Sox had four such pitchers) and the Orioles may win one hundred or more games for the third season in a row (a feat matched only by the 1929-31 Athletics...
...While no political resistance should be expected from the embittered peasantry of Russia and China, their enduring passive resistance has thrown agriculture into a state of permanent crisis that is the Achilles heel of Communist management...
...Again the pitcher studies his task - - the projection of his next line through the smallest possible segment of an invisible, seven-sided solid (the strike zone has depth, as well as height and width) sixty feet and six inches away...
...Campus liberals do their homework well...
...Wittfogel points out that in their fixati,m they overlooked or minimized two basic differences between industrial and farm labor...
...The most pithy and comprehensive statement of his ideas is contained in Agrarian P o l l , s and Problems in Communist and NonCommunist Countries...
...Now, with abrupt gestures, he gives it enormous speed and direction, converting it suddenly into a line, a moving line...
...He gives an example of intense watching: "The pitcher, immobile on the mound, holds the inert white ball, his little lump of physics...
...This the Chinese overlooked when, mouthing Stalin's slogans, they proceeded to an accelerated collectivization and semi-military organization not because they felt that their agriculture was ripe for it but solely because they had built sufficient "political strongholds" in the countryside and thus felt confident that they could, put the peasants under effective pressure...
...would have called him) holds that Mencken was neither an original nor a systematic thinker...
...he wants to be made secure in his wallow...
...Prohibition, the rope for agitators no bawdy twanging of lyres...
...Then both speciality squads leave in a sea of substitutions...
...Such action involves a remarkable lot of thinking, and that is where Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, takes charge...
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...Now everyone knows that industrialization requires a steady reduction of farm population and the migration of workers from the countryside to the cities...
...The Alternative would be a fine magazine if you'd cut the cursing and name-calling...
...What have me Comnmnists done to agriculture...
...Mencken made no pretense of being consistent...
...What is less known, however, is that the Comnmnists have on their part instituted a new alienation in a branch of production where it did not exist in Marx's time and does not exist in the non-Communist world: the alienation of the peasant, through a system that interl~oses politico-bureaucratic organization between the tiller and his land...
...Its southern traditions helped shape his political orientation...
...his first book was Ventures Into Verse (1903...
...Young liberals (or rndiclibs) control most studenl governments for the simpJe reason that they act to support their beliefs...
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...was Marx's ultimate indictment of a social system that interposed private property and market requirements between the worker and his life activity...
...Here are his main points: Throughout recorded history, in all Civilizations, successful agriculture has not been essentially based on large farms...
...What the Communists have done to agriculture thus has "no parallel among the .major civilizations of history...
...Spire T. Agnew "...stands almost alone among a welter of New Left, radica~ and revolutionary publications...
...No anti-Communist revolutionary upheaval will arise from this state of affairs, though...
...Still, this is not unimportant when one bears in mind that armies usually are composed of farm boys, and that without overabundance of farm products there can be neither industrialization nor sustained warfare...
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...Where man's labor is controlled by others through the power of employment which property confers, man finds himself estranged from his own productive activity, and his life subject to alien powers...
...Under totalitarian rule, even city people find it well-nigh impossible to group together with others of like mind...
...Second, they have organized the tillers of land army-like into brigades, *'large production brigades," teams and squads, within The Alternative May 1972 17 larger command units called collective farms, communes or state farms...
...Simultaneously, the fielders hasten toward that .r point of meeting with the ball, and noth the base runner and the ball, now redirected, race toward their encounter at the base...
...Professor Stenerson's...
...The unimaginative and ignoble man," Mencken maintained, "likes the grayness, as a worm likes the dark...
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...This is a challenging book, full of controversial views and deductions~ and it will really stir up the Menckenites...
...His prejudices were the themes of his art, not the building blocks of a coherent system...
...So runs the central justifying thesis of Socialist Revolution...
...Readers of Weaver's essay may decide that the talent looks so good because it is so well managed...
...This was the difference which Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin overlooked a.s they postulated that "'societal development in agriculture is taking the same road as in industry...
...Secondly, there is a profound difference between the type of labor-extensive production of grains characteristic of Russia, and the labor-intensive cultivation of such heavily irrigated crops as rice...
...We all know that the system of production without private property they have established in Marx's name has failed to eliminate the root condition about which Marx complained...
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...The industrial worker, Marx's well-nigh exclusive concern, has come no closer to his own labor process and its product in Soviet Russia than in other industrialized countries...
...In Russia, plowing, sowing and reaping can be done by a few and relatively simple operations that lend themselves to a certain degree of large-scale organization, but the second type calls for repeated weedings, transplantings and other variegated operations that must be performed individually...
...Listening to his father discuss the family cigar business made him conscious of belonging to the managerical class and colored his views of labor, business and economics...
...From his editorial chair, as earlier with The Smart Set (1914-23), he led the rebellion against the puritanical sham and fake of the nineteenth century's genteel tradition...
...the batter and fielders are also transformed into fluidity, moving and converging, and we see now that all movement in baseball is a convergence toward fixed points - - the pitched ball toward the plate, the thrown ball toward the right angles of the bases, the batted ball toward the as yet undrawn but already visible point of congruence either with the ground or a glove...
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...Farm labor, by contrast, has its nature-appointed times and intervals, and is characteristically performed by ~tillers each of whom carries on a number of different operations, so that the whole requires a man who personally cares...
...he craves certanties to protect him - - a simple and gross religion, safety for his precious money, no wild ideas to craze his wife...
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...All the same, even though they largely increased the amount of irrigated land, the total agricultural product failed to go up, and all they could do was, dollar in hand, come shopping for grain in Canada...
...Scientists speak of the profoundly moving esthetic beauty of mathematics, and perhaps the baseball field is one of the few places where the rest of us can glimpse this mystery...
...It's much-the same with student bodies...
...In time, these and other lines are drawn, there are on the field...
...His essay (and it is his...
...Not much has changed in academe since then, Most effective activists still lean to the left...
...Campus conservatives have no clout...
...And he knows how much of baseball strategy revolves around base running and preventing base running...
...This book, which is not a conventional biography, begins with the mature Mencken at the height of his influence as editor of The American Mercury...
...Weaver believes homework is important...
...The Chinese have so mismanaged their agricultural patrimony that in their country this process had to The Alternative: A Chic Discussion Piece The'Alternative is an insipid journal of polarizing iconoclasm whose style is intellectual, argumentative and satiric or so they say...
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...His social and political views ranged from conservatism to Jeffersonian liberalism to distrust of democracy...
...When this did not remove the "'labor shortage," they began to order masses of city folks into the countryside to help with the chores...
...tanciea acing a poet...
...If one hundred m.p.h, pitches are action, and if huddles and measurements and jogging substitutes are not action, then baseball must have five times more action that football...
...CORRESPONDENCE To the Editor: In 1930 i arrived at Kent State, wide-eyed and innocent, a true-believer in God and Man...
...the ball, a line again, is redrawn to the pitcher, in the center of this square, the diamond...
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...Yet the Herr Professor (as H.t,.M...
...It is neat, it is pretty, it is satisfying...
...This '~ shortage" simply means that those who live on the land do not devote themselves sufficiently to the tasks that have to be done, and this in the country that prior to Communism had the highest developed art of farming in the world...
...But he lived in Baltimore, not New York and not even "tile inconvenience of commuting to New York for several decades could persuade him to move away...
...Baseball, Angell says, "is intensely remembered because only baseball' is so intensely watched...
...Their discontent thus will express itself more in sullenhess, careless work, poor cooperation and initiative and a brooding resentment of their masters, the Party and bureaucratic cadres...
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...Stenerson next treats Mencken's experiments in short story writing, in a chapter which first appeared in Mencekniana...
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...First, industrial labor can be organized into a continuous stream of small specialized operations, as has been done along the perpetually moving conveyor belt...
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...it is not "as told to" anybody) is a chewy, no-nonsense introduction to the thinking that has made him spectacularly successful...
...7 George F. WiU Planting People Agrarian Policies and Problems in Communist and Non-Communist Countries edited by W.A...
...First, they have forced it into the mold of large, even gigantic units, bureaucratically controlled, in the hope of thereby parallelling the development of industry...
...It is the business of the artist to blast his contentment with the sounds of joy...
...Compel the farmers they did, but theresulting regression of their agriculture was even worse than that of the Russians...
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...Douglas Jackson University of Washington Press, $15.N M AN IS ALIENATED from himself if he is not the master of his own labor process and its fruits...
...He insists that "baseball is just a game of common sense" which is no doubt true, just as it is true that, as his record shows, not all common sense is equally cornm o i l . Roger Angell's "Baseball in the Mind" is a light masterpiece, a love song to baseball sung by a fan with perfect pitch (no pun intended...
...Stenerson then reverts to the formative years of Mencken's boyhood and early newspaper days...
...This was followed by the introduction to United States reaaers at the German philosopher Nietzsche, to whom he felt akin, although Mr...
...Betty Adler Betty Adler is the editor o~ Menckeniana, a journal concerned with H L. Mencken which can be ordered by writing the Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore, Maryland, and her work has appeared in the Baltimore Evening Sun...
...again the batter considers his even more difficult position, which is to reverse this imminent white speck, to redirect its energy not in a soft parabola or a series of diminishing squiggles but into a beautiful and dangerous new force, a force of perfect straightness and immense distance...
Vol. 5 • May 1972 • No. 8
