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4 Contemp. Crises 1 (1980)

handle is hein.journals/crmlsc4 and id is 1 raw text is: Contemporary Crises 4 (1980) 1-26 1 © Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, Amsterdam - Printed in the Netherlands STATE, CAPITAL AND LEGITIMATION CRISIS: LAND AND WATER IN CALIFORNIA'S IMPERIAL VALLEY BILL BARCLAY JANET SCHMIDT DICK HILL Agribusiness in California's Imperial Valley faces a legal challenge to its very existence. For almost four decades the large growers in the Valley have relied upon irrigation water from the All American Canal built by the federal government as a part of the Boulder Canyon Project. Federal reclamation law states clearly that no individual is to receive water from federal projects for more than 160 acres of land. Yet average farm size in Imperial County approaches 700 acres and more than 75 percent of county farmland is in holdings of 1,000 acres or more [1]. Today court suits brought both by Valley residents and by land reform groups elsewhere in California have forced the Department of the Interior to take steps towards the enforcement of reclamation law. Effective enforcement of the law would fundamentally alter the social relations of agrarian production both in the Valley and throughout much of the rest of western agriculture. The roots of this crisis lie within the nature of capitalism as a mode of production whose internal development is driven by the twin forces of competition and class struggle. Politically these twin forces generate two contradictory class imperatives, the need to reproduce the social relations necessary for continued capital accumulation and the need to legitimate capitalism as a form of social organization. Because the capitalist state, as a crystallization of class relations [2], is structured by these societal contra- dictions, state policy reflects the contradictory demands of accumulation and legitimation [3]. On the one hand, then, social policy must aid capitalists in their search for profits, for accumulation of capital is the basis of prosperity and growing state tax revenues. On the other hand, social policy must also justify this aid in the name of the public good. The legal challenge to the agricultural capi- talists of the Valley has placed these imperatives in antagonism to each other San Diego State University, San Diego, Cal., U.S.A.