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Discourse exclusively on the basis of historical materialist methodology.
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By Paradigm
#14754005
The Communist Manifest calls for:
Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.


It's no secret in political sociology that America, at least, is divided much more along urban-rural lines than by "Blue States" and "Red States." In the wake of Trump's election, there has been no shortage of thinkpieces about the left's neglect of the "white working class." This is misleading, as the white working class people in urban areas did not, by and large, support him, while rural whites, including many petit-bourgeois whites, did. The urban-rural divide is very real, and it seems to only get more severe. Many of the remaining factories are not in big cities, but in rural areas where they provide the only jobs for the majority of people in town. When those factories close, entire towns are devastated. Meanwhile, in China, it seems the government has to deal with a new peasant uprising every week as farmers get left behind while the rest of the country advances economically.

So I guess I'm just curious what people think about applying Marx's concept today. The "combination of agriculture with manufacturing industry" has, to a large extent, already been achieved through agribusiness, but does not seem to have helped the plight of farmers. As for more equitable distribution of the population across the country, I'm not sure how feasible that is or what it's supposed to look like. I do see a need for some sort of blending of the two, but if anything, I would imagine it going in the reverse direction, with more urban forestry, vertical farms, community gardens, and the like, making cities more green and wild more so than filling in the countryside with industry. In any case, it's an issue I rarely see Marxists address these days, yet it seems more pertinent than ever.
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By AFAIK
#14800006
Promoting commuting may be an option.

There are farmers who live in the suburbs so that their families can enjoy the local amenities whilst they go to work on a farm 5 miles down the road. There are telecommuters who work from some picturesque village for 2 weeks and then fly to London to spend 1 week in the office. Digital nomads have made a permanent break from the office and can work from any wi-fi connection in the world.

And there are super commuters. Initially these people just kept moving further and further out of town to escape all the crime, pollution and other races and some companies followed them and established edge cities so that the workplace would be close to the workforce. Post 2008 selling your house isn't possible and finding a job is hard so people endure long and arduous commutes since the alternative is to stay put and suffer unemployment.

I think as the internet grows faster and more reliable and gadgets allow for more immersive interaction telecommuting will become more viable and popular. You can set up a bunch of big screen TVs around a conference table and have a meeting with the life sized images of your colleagues sat in a conference room on the other side of the country (Tip- mount the TV sideways so you view people in portrait mode). Strapping a smartphone to your face could allow you to step into my virtual office and we could scan ourselves with lasers and create a computer generated animations of ourselves.

There's a professor in Japan who created a robotic version of himself so that he could lecture students in different campuses without having to travel back and forth. There's also talk of doctors being able to remotely control robo-surgeons over the internet and someone recently made a holographic phone call in S Korea over a 5G network.

If anyone can take all those anecdotes and craft a coherent policy I'd be eager to hear it. :lol:

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