Big business and the state Book

This is a book-long defence of the 'Mann-Dickinson thesis', which essentially argues that the continued persistence of family farms in the advanced capitalist societies is a result of certain features specific to agriculture as a form of production rooted in, and inseparable from, natural processes.

These unavoidable natural features of agricultural production and marketing - perishability, the non-identity of 'production time' and 'labour time' in animal gestation and the maturation of crops, inhospitable geography, etc. - can act as barriers to continuous capitalist investment and centralising rationalisation, along the lines of what occurred historically in capitalist manufacturing. This - along with historically specific social factors - allows for the continued survival of non or pre-capitalist forms of agricultural production alongside industrial capitalism.

At the same time, the continuous advances in technology generated by capitalism as a mode of production have allowed for the partial minimisation and/or supersession of these barriers - for example the development of tractors, genetically modified crops, in vitro fertilisation of livestock, the development of synthetic fibres, etc.

The main empirical section of the book then is a case study of American sharecropping in the 'Old South' between WW1 and WW2, which illustrates both the social and natural factors which militated against the capitalist rationalisation of cotton production in this region, as well as the eventual supersession of these factors in the wake of the Great Depression and the rise of a global market in synthetic fibres, which gradually led to a "quiet revolution" that established the hegemony of capitalist methods of production - mechanisation, wage-labour, and genetic engineering - within the sector.

A crucial text for thinking about the unique challenges that agriculture poses as an economic sector - both under capitalism and any other form of social organisation.