Rainbow Pie (Joe Bageant) p84
‘Organising for war’ had taught industrialists and government agencies the best ways of organising the American population and its resources toward heavier and more profitable production, both of which lay in worker aggregation and concentration. Consequently, the post-war migration was pushed by planning decisions made by the nation’s industrial and financial power-holders, and was made policy by the US government in the drive toward maintaining its status as a capitalist industrial super-state. Such policy also solved another problem. Historically, farmers tended to be some of the most hardcore populists, and had often sided with the Wobblies and other socialist movements during hard times.
In the winning of World War 11, along with increased industrial capability and profits, US capitalism had accumulated an immense amount of another kind of capital with the American public – moral capital. The Soviet communists had gained the same in Russia. Both spent that capital industrialising their nations at the expense of traditional farmers, though to different degrees. Stalin starved and shot Kulaks who did not produce enough grain to finance his communist state’s industrial goals. We caused ours to move where they could be more directly manageable and profitable to the interests of a rapidly emerging corporate state.
The US post-war rural out-migration was initiated – though in a different way and for different reasons – by the same corporate-financial powers that caused the earlier tragic migration of workers in search of work during the Great Depression.
Tgk1946's Blog 