1. Petit Bourgeois Political Economy
Smaje claims that an important part of his project in Small Farm Future is to “sketch an adequate political economy” for a peasant-based future (247). But unfortunately the sketch he provides is disappointingly hazy, inconsistent and underdeveloped. Ideas that are floated in one chapter are quickly undermined in the next. We are told, for example, that this future is “post-capitalist” but capital still freely circulates and poses a threat to his small farm future. Even the idea that the book provides an “adequate” political economy is retracted towards the end when Smaje pivots to describing his project as a “scoping exercise” and as something “vaguer” than a developed political program (255). Making sense of Smaje’s political economy is made harder still by his rhetorical tic of saying that something is “probably,” “likely” or has been the case “historically” without providing evidence or citation:
the idea of a small farm future is currently marginal to mainstream thought, it’s probably the best future now available for most of humanity (10)
I can’t pursue that debate here, but it seems likely that in a small farm future there would be more local artisanal production supportive of the agricultural economy and pursued alongside it. (203)
what secure property rights in farmland have generally meant historically is the opportunity for well-being and a complete life. (175)
in this kind of supersedure situation, large-scale landholding by wealthy absentee landowners would probably come to seem unattractive (240)
Probably. But maybe not.
Smaje is of course writing speculatively about an uncertain future and so some conjecture will be necessary. But what many of his likely’s and probably’s do is circumvent some of the thornier issues raised by his political economy while suppressing visions of the future that oppose Smaje’s romantic estimations of private property, individualism and patriarchy. What repeatedly drops from view for Smaje is a future as we would like to see it: collective, feminist, decolonized and eco-communist. A future that we think is still just as “likely” as any other.
This lack of clarity around Smaje’s political economy is made worse by the fact that Small Farm Future shows little awareness of a set of discipline-defining debates that took place in critical agrarian studies and development studies in the 1970s and 1980s regarding the question of petty commodity production and the so-called “peasant economy.” Neither does the book take the time to situate itself in relation to the primary texts that inform these debates: Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question, Lenin’s The Agrarian Question in Russia, and Chayanov’s The Theory of the Peasant Economy.
This is surprising — even disappointing for us as followers of his work — because Smaje’s well-regarded blog is full of posts that show a rich understanding of agrarian political economy. Yet without a proper grounding in these debates Small Farm Future feels like a step backwards for Smaje. The book often stumbles through the thicket of over a century of agrarian political economy, retreading well-worn paths, and assuming what often needed to be explained.
What is clear is that Smaje’s political economy is constructed around a romanticized image of a “reconstituted peasantry” (255). The family farms Smaje envisions reproduce themselves to some extent through the unwaged labor of their household members. What they produce in excess of their needs is then sold, as commodities, to other farms, landlords, rural artisans and merchants. In turn, peasant farmers buy the resources, tools and fabrics that they are unable to produce on-farm.
Smaje thinks that the result is a peasant-based, local, and ecologically sustainable future. We think Smaje’s political economy suspends us somewhere between petit bourgeois utopia and neo-feudal dystopia. Smaje believes that as the climate crisis escalates, states as we know them will “probably” collapse leading to the “likely” emergence of “supersedure states.” The idea of a “supersedure state” is borrowed from the world of beekeeping. Usually, when worker bees determine that a queen bee is declining in productivity they will create special queen cells and raise a new one. Smaje likens this to political “succession” in the human world. A new monarch. A general election. A supersedure situation occurs when a colony’s queen bee dies unexpectedly. When this happens worker bees improvise a new queen out of worker bee cells. Queens raised in this way are usually weaker but they are preferable to no queen at all. Transposing this into the human world Smaje imagines that supersedure states, small improvised autonomies, will form out of necessity as the power of states to control their territory declines. Such supersedure states, he thinks, will function as republics where disagreements are resolved by “rational debate” (171). Within the rural areas of these supersedure states sit privately owned or rented commodity producing farms, a parasitic landlord class and artisanal merchants.
If this sounds a bit like the fiefdoms of medieval Britain or the city-states of Feudal Italy, that’s because it is. The world of Smaje’s Small Farm Future looks more like the one that Machiavelli knew, replete with “republics or principalities,” than the world as we know it today. But whereas peasants have historically been a dominated class, in Smaje’s future they will somehow be granted as much power as their landlords, who will benignly extract a lower rent from their tenants than they otherwise could out of a sense of civic duty:
landowners might find that serving their local society and selling land or renting it on favorable terms to small-scale tenants is the most attractive possibility. This, after all, is what many of their medieval and early modern forebears did. (240)
They might. But they probably won’t . Either way in Smaje’s small farm future landlords will still “reap where they never sowed.”
We think this scenario is both patently exploitative and anti-ecological. Smaje, however, claims that private property, capital and class divisions can be made compatible with an ecologically regenerative “post-capitalist” future by putting in place a series of measures to contain capital’s contradictions. In keeping with the book’s petit bourgeois outlook the principal contradiction Smaje is concerned with isn’t the fundamental one between capital and waged-labor but the tendency for capital to accrue in the hands of a select few, eventually creating an unfairly advantaged monopoly holding class who seek future accumulation at the expense of both nature and the rest of society (188, 202). To avoid this, Smaje proposes “a world in which rural capital (but not necessarily rural capitalism[!]) is created at relatively local levels by commercial or semi-commercial farmers working alongside local industries and merchants in ways that serve a modest local prosperity” (61).
Perhaps the best way to make sense of this solution and the measures Smaje implements to achieve it is through Lenin’s theory of peasant differentiation. In The Agrarian Question in Russia Lenin observed how capital’s penetration into the Russian countryside had increasingly differentiated the peasantry into three distinct classes. Poor peasants, who struggled to meet the requirements of subsistence or “simple reproduction” and who were thus susceptible to proletarianization. Middle peasants, who could meet the needs of simple reproduction. And rich peasants, who were able to meet the needs of simple reproduction and engage in expanded reproduction by buying land or hiring waged-labor from among the poor or middle peasants.