Let's move everyone from the cities to the rural countryside - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15128119
I propose evacuating everyone from the urban cities and moving them to rural areas. Then the bankers, foreign controlling agents, and parasitic bourgeoisie can be rid of and/or split up and sent to the countryside also so it's impossible for them to organize, and they can be re-educated to be farmers instead like most everyone else. Most people would work in the fields to grow food to be shared equally by all, while a would be needed scattered across the countryside to produce the tools and other supplies needed to farm and live. Since life would be far more simple, virtually everything could be produced within the country borders, with not a lot of need for foreign imports and exports, reducing parasitic exploitation towards and from others at the same time.

We can instill measures of population control so the need of cities isn't needed at all, and food isn't fought over but abundant. Economists and other scholars with PhD's with expertise can figure out the best methods to run the country/countryside this way, and everyone would be better off.

What does everyone thing of this idea?
#15128127
The Chinese tried this under Mao and it was a complete failure. Today, digital communication and home offices make it possible to move from the city to the country side for an increasing number of people. The result will be that even more nature will be destroyed because city people want the comfort of the city in the country side. They aren't prepared to live a natural life. They will turn the country side into the city. Nature will not survive.
#15128181
While I understand that some conservatives want to get rid of cities and return us to some golden age when America Was Great Again, it will not happen. Urbanisation is steadily increasing, and denser living reduces our environmental footprint.

Yes, destroying the cities would get rid of a lot of the “bankers, foreign controlling agents, and parasitic bourgeoisie” (which is what we call Jews now, I guess? Or at least, Soros) but most of us immigrants could live just fine in rural areas.

Personally, I think we should ban cars in the city and make public transit free, and then ket people move as they will.
#15128191
Black Consequense wrote:You'll never be a land lord, Igor. At best you'll probably be third rate Kulak, before an Aussie Stalin takes out the trash.


Oh, that'd be something to see, an 'Aussie Stalin'. The closest I can think of is Bob Katter: a nationalist who advocates for old school labour policies.


Image

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Katter
#15129162
Unthinking Majority wrote:
I propose evacuating everyone from the urban cities and moving them to rural areas. Then the bankers, foreign controlling agents, and parasitic bourgeoisie can be rid of and/or split up and sent to the countryside also so it's impossible for them to organize, and they can be re-educated to be farmers instead like most everyone else. Most people would work in the fields to grow food to be shared equally by all, while a would be needed scattered across the countryside to produce the tools and other supplies needed to farm and live. Since life would be far more simple, virtually everything could be produced within the country borders, with not a lot of need for foreign imports and exports, reducing parasitic exploitation towards and from others at the same time.

We can instill measures of population control so the need of cities isn't needed at all, and food isn't fought over but abundant. Economists and other scholars with PhD's with expertise can figure out the best methods to run the country/countryside this way, and everyone would be better off.

What does everyone thing of this idea?



Just for the sake of illustration, there's this, not that I think it should be the norm....


Sunken greenhouse wraps home & feeds suburban antifragile co-op




Once COVID is over urban dwellers are going to *want* to urban-dwell.


Pants-of-dog wrote:
While I understand that some conservatives want to get rid of cities and return us to some golden age when America Was Great Again, it will not happen. Urbanisation is steadily increasing, and denser living reduces our environmental footprint.

Yes, destroying the cities would get rid of a lot of the “bankers, foreign controlling agents, and parasitic bourgeoisie” (which is what we call Jews now, I guess? Or at least, Soros) but most of us immigrants could live just fine in rural areas.

Personally, I think we should ban cars in the city and make public transit free, and then ket people move as they will.



Everyone should be issued their own Spot the robot to ride horseback on, everywhere. (grin)


Igor Antunov wrote:
Yes feudalism sounds sweet. Let's.



Why stop the romanticism *there*?

[irony]

Why not take things back to *barbarian* days, to reduce our lifespans, eking out an existence from whatever the ground has to offer, and foraging, and hunting, or killing others to take their stuff? Sweet.[/irony]
#15129232
Pants-of-dog wrote:While I understand that some conservatives want to get rid of cities and return us to some golden age when America Was Great Again, it will not happen. Urbanisation is steadily increasing, and denser living reduces our environmental footprint.

Yes, destroying the cities would get rid of a lot of the “bankers, foreign controlling agents, and parasitic bourgeoisie” (which is what we call Jews now, I guess? Or at least, Soros) but most of us immigrants could live just fine in rural areas.

Personally, I think we should ban cars in the city and make public transit free, and then ket people move as they will.

Well, this is not my not my proposal, it was that of Pol Pot and his well-educated cadre of communists. It killed about 1/3 of the population of Cambodia. Congrats, you passed the test.
#15129241
Unthinking Majority wrote:
Well, this is not my not my proposal, it was that of Pol Pot and his well-educated cadre of communists. It killed about 1/3 of the population of Cambodia. Congrats, you passed the test.



You mean pro-Mao *Stalinists*.

(Capital-C 'Communism' is just *branding* -- that's what the Stalinists called their brand of revisionism. Today it's also called 'Marxism-Leninism'. But it's all based on *Stalin* who invented the revisionist idea of 'socialism-in-one-country', which does *not* call for proletarian revolution, for workers-of-the-world socialism.)
#15129250
ckaihatsu wrote:You mean pro-Mao *Stalinists*.

(Capital-C 'Communism' is just *branding* -- that's what the Stalinists called their brand of revisionism. Today it's also called 'Marxism-Leninism'. But it's all based on *Stalin* who invented the revisionist idea of 'socialism-in-one-country', which does *not* call for proletarian revolution, for workers-of-the-world socialism.)


Pol Pot and his cadre were France-educated Marxists who tried to remove and destroy the parasitic bourgeoisie and foreign agents in the cities and move everyone to the country to collective farms via a centralized command economy, and murdered all those who opposed. Also murdered every minority group they came across. Guess you could call them brutal Maoists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot#P ... l_ideology
#15129368
Unthinking Majority wrote:Well, this is not my not my proposal, it was that of Pol Pot and his well-educated cadre of communists. It killed about 1/3 of the population of Cambodia. Congrats, you passed the test.


Yes, my family helped settle a refugee family from Cambodia at the time. The mom made the best egg rolls. We were working with a socialist refugee program at the time.

Mind you, right now it is Trump supporters and the right who are vilifying city dwellers.
#15129442

Millions were forcibly removed from the cities to undertake backbreaking work in remote rural areas—one estimate suggests one in ten of Shanghai’s population were sent out of the city.293



China: from the Great Leap Forward to the market

China’s official image in the 1950s and early 1960s was of a land of smiling peasants and overjoyed workers, joint leader of the Communist world with the USSR, steadily moving towards a socialism of peace and plenty. It was an image carried in thousands of left wing papers across the world.

The US had its own rival image of China. It was of the biggest Red Menace of them all, a land of organised hate, a society in which hundreds of millions toiled mindlessly at the command of those at the top, even closer to the nightmare world of George Orwell’s 1984 than Russia. This image played a powerful role in US propaganda in support of the war in Vietnam. The US claimed that China was intent upon expanding its influence south and destroying freedom. If it succeeded in Vietnam the other countries of south east Asia would be next, falling like ‘dominoes’ until nowhere in the ‘free world’ was safe.

Neither image accorded with the realities of life for the fifth or more of the world’s people who lived in China. US propaganda ignored the growing schism between Russia and China from at least the mid-1950s. By the early 1960s Russia had cut off aid and withdrawn thousands of advisers from China, and the two countries were denouncing each other’s policies at international meetings.

Official Chinese propaganda glossed over the class divisions in the country and the extreme hardship in which most of its people lived. On taking control of China’s great cities in 1949 the leaders of the People’s Liberation Army had followed a policy of uniting all classes, including a section of capitalists, behind a programme aimed at economic reconstruction. In the early 1950s this gave way to a programme of industrialisation, loosely modelled on that pursued by Stalin in Russia and likewise aimed at accomplishing what capitalism had done in the West. Many industries had been state-owned under the Kuomintang regime or been confiscated from their former Japanese owners. The state now took over most of the rest, but paid their old owners fixed dividends (so there were still millionaires in ‘Red’ China). The apparatus of state control was staffed, in the main, by members of the educated middle classes, with most of the officials of the Kuomintang period left in place.There was land reform in regions dominated by landlords, but the better-off peasants were left untouched. The condition of the mass of workers remained much as before.

These measures produced considerable economic growth—12 percent a year according to official figures for the years 1954-57. But this did not get anywhere near the official aim of catching the advanced industrial countries, and a section of the Chinese leadership around Mao Zedong began to fear that unless desperate steps were taken China would subside into being one more stagnating Third World country. In 1958, against the opposition of other leaders such as the president Liu Shoqi and Deng Xiaoping, they launched a ‘Great Leap Forward’ aimed at ultra-rapid industrialisation.

Heavy industry was to be made to grow much faster than before by every district setting out to make its own iron and steel. Millions of new industrial workers were to be fed by removing individual plots from the peasants and forcing people into huge ‘People’s Communes’. In 1958 and 1959 it seemed the ‘leap’ was being made successfully. The official industrial growth rate was almost 30 percent a year, and across the world enthusiasts for Chinese Communism hailed the ‘communes’ as the dawn of a new era. In 1960 reality struck home. China did not have the technical equipment to make the communes viable, and merely herding the peasants together could not overcome centuries-old traditions which set one family against another. Grain output dropped catastrophically and many millions died in famines. The new locally-based industries were of a low technical level, extremely inefficient and damaged the overall economy by using up resources. The Great Leap Forward turned into a disaster for which the mass of people paid a terrible price. Willpower alone could not overcome centuries of stagnation and the de-industrialisation caused by imperialism.

The leadership reacted by shunting Mao away from the levers of power and returning to a more measured approach towards industrialisation. But this policy was hardly a great success. Industrial output was lower in 1965 than in 1960. While the labour force grew by 15 million a year, the number of new jobs grew by only half a million, and the 23 million college graduates found it hard to find meaningful employment.291

As the problems accumulated, the group in the leadership around Mao Zedong once more felt that only urgent action could break the impasse. This time they believed they had found an agency to carry it through—the vast numbers of young people whose hopes were frustrated. In 1966 Mao and a coterie of supporters, including his wife Jiang Qing and defence minister Lin Biao, proclaimed the ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’.

China, they said, was being held back by the ‘culture’ of those running the structures of the party and the country. These people had become soft and lazy. Such tendencies had already led Russia ‘down the capitalist road’ of de-Stalinisation, and they could drag China back to its old ‘Confucian’ ways. It was the task of youth to stop this by mass criticism of those obstructing Mao’s policies. The Mao group shut down all education institutions for six months and encouraged 11 million college and high school students to carry the criticism from one region to another on free rail transport.

The ‘Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ was in no sense proletarian and in no sense a revolution. The workers were expected to keep working while the students staged mass rallies and travelled the country. Indeed, part of the message of the ‘Cultural Revolution’ was that workers should abandon ‘capitalistic’ worries like bonus rates and health and safety issues, since these were ‘economistic’, and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was sufficient motivation for anyone. At the same time the students were instructed not to interfere with the functioning of the military and police apparatus. This was a ‘revolution’ intended to avoid turning the state upside down!

The student ‘Red Guards’ were encouraged to unleash their frustrations not at institutions, but against individuals who were deemed to have shown insufficient revolutionary zeal. At the top this meant targeting those who had disagreed with Mao at the time of the Great Leap Forward. Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others were forced from office. At the local level it meant scapegoating low level figures of minimal authority who were thought somehow to embody ‘old ways’—schoolteachers, writers, journalists, clerks or actors. The atmosphere of irrational persecution is conveyed vividly in the memoirs of former ‘Red Guard’ Jung Chang, in Wild Swans, in scenes in the film Farewell, My Concubine about an Beijing opera performer and victim of the Cultural Revolution, and in the novel about a group of intellectuals, Stones of the Wall, by Dai Houying.

But the Cultural Revolution was not just an irrational outburst. The frustrations which Mao exploited were real enough. And, because of this, Mao could not keep control of the movement he had initiated. Rival ‘Red Guard’ and ‘Red Rebel’ groups emerged in many towns and many institutions. Some were manipulated by local state and party apparatuses. But others began to attract young workers, to raise questions affecting the lives of the mass of people and, in Shanghai, to get involved in major strikes.

Mao now tried to stop the movement he had initiated only months before, and called upon Lin Biao’s army to restore order in each locality. It was a move which prompted some of the students to turn against the whole social system. A group in Hunan denounced ‘the rule of the new bureaucratic bourgeoisie’. Others made criticisms which laid the ground for the ‘democracy wall’ movement of the 1970s.292 Decisive action by the army brought the ‘Red Guard’ movement to an end, aided by the faith the mass of students still had in Mao himself. Those who had begun to express their feelings through the movement, in however distorted a way, now paid a hard price. Millions were forcibly removed from the cities to undertake backbreaking work in remote rural areas—one estimate suggests one in ten of Shanghai’s population were sent out of the city.293

However, the end of mass participation in the Cultural Revolution was not the end of the turmoil in China. In 1970 Lin Biao, Mao’s designated successor, suddenly fled the country for Russia amid talk of a failed coup, only for his aircraft to crash close to the Soviet border. The early part of the 1970s saw central power concentrated in the hands of Zhou Enlai, who brought back the previously disgraced Deng Xiaoping as his designated heir. Mao’s wife and three collaborators (the ‘Gang of Four’) briefly regained control in 1974, purging Deng again and reverting to the language of the Cultural Revolution. Huge demonstrations to commemorate the death of Zhou Enlai showed how little support they had, and they were overthrown and imprisoned after Mao died in 1976.

Much of the left around the world had enthused at the Cultural Revolution. In many countries opponents of the US war in Vietnam carried portraits of Mao Zedong as well as the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. The trite sayings in the Little Red Book of ‘Mao’s thoughts’ were presented as a guide to socialist activity. Yet in 1972, as more US bombers hit targets in Vietnam than ever before, Mao greeted US president Nixon in Beijing, and by 1977, under Deng, China was beginning to embrace the market more furiously than Russia under Stalin’s successors.

The Western media saw such twists and turns as a result of wild irrationality. By the late 1970s many of those on the left who had identified with Maoism in the 1960s agreed, and turned their backs on socialism. A whole school of ex-Maoist ‘New Philosophers’ emerged in France, who taught that revolution automatically leads to tyranny and that the revolutionary left are as bad as the fascist right. Yet there is a simple, rational explanation for the apparently irrational course of Chinese history over a quarter of a century. China simply did not have the internal resources to pursue the Stalinist path of forced industrialisation successfully, however much its rulers starved the peasants and squeezed the workers. But there were no other easy options after a century of imperialist plundering. Unable to find rational solutions, the country’s rulers were tempted by irrational ones.



Harman, _People's History of the World_, pp. 572-576

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