That’s the description. But why?
Let me lay out a few explanations. None of them explain what happened to my full satisfaction; nonetheless, each of them rings true.
Modernizing faith. U.S. farm policy has explicitly aimed to industrialize agriculture. Virtually throughout its history, "progressive" farmers and agricultural experts have viewed "modern" forms of production to be desirable. James Scott observes that "modernization" claimed to rationally apply science to human problems in order to improve the human condition; this was, however, more a faith than a testable proposition. It became the dominant ideology of the twentieth century; all counter-voices were silenced by its overwhelming power. This faith, in the United States, linked modernism with capitalism as a liberating program.
Misfit between capitalism and crop production. Farming, particularly crop production, does not yield to the rationality of capitalist economics to the same degree as other branches of industry. It is necessarily connected to natural cycles, it uses labor and equipment very unevenly through the year. There are natural limits to the degree to which it can shorten production time, one of the major tools to make ever more efficient and profitable use of capital.
Commitment to small government freeholding. Many of the people who bought land and developed America’s farms sought farm ownership as a foundation of freedom. Coming from the shadow of the dissolving European feudalism, they rejected strong social controls over their personal actions.
Yet, embedded in a developing capitalist economy, they met their neighbors as competitors, often fierce competitors, for land, for markets, for labor… Although moralities differ from ethnic group to ethnic group, except for the non-conforming sects like the Amish, all accept the basic tenets of free-holding, competitive production. They lack, therefore, any strong basis for imagining and acting upon alternative forms of social organization that might mitigate the misfit between industrial capitalism and free-holding farming–if such exist.
continued
Let me lay out a few explanations. None of them explain what happened to my full satisfaction; nonetheless, each of them rings true.
Modernizing faith. U.S. farm policy has explicitly aimed to industrialize agriculture. Virtually throughout its history, "progressive" farmers and agricultural experts have viewed "modern" forms of production to be desirable. James Scott observes that "modernization" claimed to rationally apply science to human problems in order to improve the human condition; this was, however, more a faith than a testable proposition. It became the dominant ideology of the twentieth century; all counter-voices were silenced by its overwhelming power. This faith, in the United States, linked modernism with capitalism as a liberating program.
Misfit between capitalism and crop production. Farming, particularly crop production, does not yield to the rationality of capitalist economics to the same degree as other branches of industry. It is necessarily connected to natural cycles, it uses labor and equipment very unevenly through the year. There are natural limits to the degree to which it can shorten production time, one of the major tools to make ever more efficient and profitable use of capital.
Commitment to small government freeholding. Many of the people who bought land and developed America’s farms sought farm ownership as a foundation of freedom. Coming from the shadow of the dissolving European feudalism, they rejected strong social controls over their personal actions.
Yet, embedded in a developing capitalist economy, they met their neighbors as competitors, often fierce competitors, for land, for markets, for labor… Although moralities differ from ethnic group to ethnic group, except for the non-conforming sects like the Amish, all accept the basic tenets of free-holding, competitive production. They lack, therefore, any strong basis for imagining and acting upon alternative forms of social organization that might mitigate the misfit between industrial capitalism and free-holding farming–if such exist.
continued
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