The structure of capitalist agriculture is an extension of the relationship of the owner of the company to wage labour. The farms are worked by people who do not own the land; they are not even renting it in most cases. The machinery like the tractors, harvesters, etc. are also not owned by the farming workers.
With the advent of farm machinery, it is now possible for large farms to be worked with a far higher productivity than in the recent past. There is far less labor in producing, for example, a potato, than ever before. The farms are a thousand acres or more, owned by a corporation, the workers basically wage labour, just like their proletarian cousins in the city.
A job in farming has become tending large machinery; driving a tractor, unloading trucks full of potatoes, etc. In many cases it is even beyond manufacture; workers are not using tools in skilled labour positions, rather are unskilled using machinery a child could learn to use.
The fact there are still small farms changes nothing about this. At best we can say it is remarkable that anyone can compete with the large farms that own and work most of the land.
The family farm, like the family grocery store, is becoming a memory. Those people left on the land have to make a hard decision; will they invest in large machinery in hopes competition with the corporations is possible? If they do not it may mean having to work in a town at a factory as well as farming. Or having to get credit to try to compete, knowing most people who attempt to compete with the corporation end up failing, and having to move \to the city.
The people left on the land may own a home and a car, but that is about the extent of the things they own. They do not own shares in the company they work for on the land, or industrial shares in joint stock companies. They are basically propertyless, like all wage labour.
There is a clear racial divide, in the north the farms being white owned. There are migrants though, often Mexican, who work sometimes legally or illegally on the farm. Needless to say they do not own the land they are working. They make the profits for the owners of the farms, they work hard, often for a small check they send much of back home to family as a remittance. It is their wage labour that creates the surplus value, which is the purpose of the operation to capitalists.
In this respect it is strange to hear the same bourgeoisie who control the farms coming out against migrant farmers. In the southwest it is common for farms to be worked by Mexicans, many of whom cross the border daily to work the fields. Without these low paid workers, it is questionable how many farms could even operate.
Yet constantly the republican bourgeoisie tries to remove migrants, and builds ramparts on the border, to stop immigration north. It looks like an Indian reservation, a demilitarized zone, and the army is even deployed there. All this to stop the same people who create the surplus value on the farms.
The landowners are overwhelmingly republican bourgeois, like the owners of urban factories. They supported Donald Trump as president , as he represents the owners of the means of production, as opposed to wage labour. The more concentrated ownership becomes on the land, the stronger corporations who own the land become,
This creates a rural population only one step removed from moving to the city. Those displaced by modern machinery stay out of the city only at the large farm owners’ mercy. They are a sort of unemployed army of workers of the land, like their urban counterparts of the city , who are also living check to check precarious positions as for their employment.
Unions of farm workers are rare, rebellion can lead to removal from the job and a transition to life in the big city. The lack of political organization of the wage labour on the farms is mercilessly taken advantage of by the landowners, who squeeze maximum surplus value out of workers, many of whom are recent arrivals from Mexico.
Production is for commodities; the workers do not work for their own food, at least not on purpose. They may eat potatoes they farmed, but their job is not to feed themselves, it is social labor. It is abstract labour, for society, controlled by the owner of the land.
It may be unfortunate, but large scale farming seems inevitable with the advent of large farm machinery. Competing with the potato harvester looks futile for a small farmer. It’s like returning to small business from monopoly; a futile endeavor. You cannot go back to a simpler time, even though the republican bourgeoisie seems to want a return to a past era, to “Make America Great Again”, when small businesses sold the groceries.
As far as large farms go, cooperative ownership is replacing capitalist ownership. Already there are large cooperative grocery stores, owned by the workers, selling the produce of cooperative production.
This isthe logical answer to the large scale corporations control of the land, employee ownership of large farms. With the ownership of farms no longer a mom and pop operation, unions mean for wage labour its emancipation from work that is sort of a mix of manufacture and large industry, on machines he does not control, to realization it is his own labour that is responsible for the machinery around him, and the state of the land.
The division of town and country has become stark, with the large farm starting immediately adjacent to the suburban worker’s dwelling. He owns no chickens or gardens, yet there is land all around him, often lying vacant. He has no gardens or land to speak of. The division between town and country could not be more evident.
It is this division which is also a product of the corporations owning the farms. They seem to be worried the workers will not be producing commodities, and will instead produce their own food. It’s like a fetish; any labour not subsumed by the social production of commodities is the target.
This barrier must be broken, and with it large scale private property on the land. When the proletariat is unleashed on the land a new stage of material and social development will have been reached. The city and the country will no longer be so divided, The two will merge into a fluid mesh, with city and country division becoming less obvious.
Nicholas Jay Boyes
Milwaukee Wisconsin
American Democratic Republic
9 17 2025
Ecological Era 