by Steven Stoll
What makes someone a capitalist? If the owner of the shoe repair shop near Fordham University on Columbus Avenue in New York City reinvests some of his net profit in leather and new tools, does that make him one? If the owner of the nail salon a few doors down adds some of her income to a retirement account that includes corporate stock, is she just like Warren Buffett? Braudel said no. To argue otherwise blurs categories by equating modest proprietors who consume most of their surplus value in order to maintain themselves and their businesses with corporations that continually expand internationally, innovate technologically, invest in countless other industries, and have no stake in the places where they operate. Is this just a difference of scale? Maybe, but at some level a quantitative increase becomes qualitative. Walmart in 2017 (11,500 stores, $470 billion in sales) and in 1962 (one store, $100,000 in sales) operated in entirely different ways. The nineteenth-century mountain household described in the following pages sometimes paid wages for labor and sometimes used money to buy land. But merely because they needed to survive in a society increasingly organized around money did not make them capitalists.
Capitalism is now so replete in the social order that some see it as having come from the natural order. Since its first century, its advocates have misattributed the motives and aspirations that it instills to universal human propensities. When markets appear to set rents and wages, the effect is to displace the rule-making power of people and institutions to an indifferent and mechanistic universe. When people buy and sell commodities, they appear to be working for their own betterment even if they are really satisfying imperatives set by others. This is how capital shapes our very identities. Our occupations derive from it whether we generate it or not, command it or not, manage it or not. Capital requires every institution to function in its favor and our constant consent, even though it is indifferent to human needs. “The worst error of all,” writes Braudel, “is to suppose that capitalism is simply an ‘economic system,’ whereas in fact it lives off the social order, standing almost on a footing with the state.”48
“A new way of life spread over the planet,” wrote the historian Karl Polanyi, “with a claim to universality unparalleled since the age when Christianity started out on its career.” Capitalism makes powerful demands on people and environments. It needs constant inputs of geographical space and dependent labor and justifies this taking by asserting its own necessity and inevitability. But what about all the people who lived in its path but didn’t want to become part of it? How did they organize themselves and why does it matter? The conflict we will explore in the southern mountains will not be clear without a sense of the internal logic of makeshift economies. Being an agrarian in England or West Virginia or Mali or anywhere else promised very little in comfort or security from any number of hardships. But it did promise one thing: autonomy from the tyranny of money.49
* * *
MOST OF THE PEOPLE who have ever lived grew their own food. We know them as settlers, peasants, campesinos, smallholders, or generally agrarians, all words for country people. They have included Natufians in the village of Jericho in 8500 B.C.; Roman peasants on the frontiers of Gaul in A.D. 1000; Scots-Irish ridgetop farmers in West Virginia throughout the nineteenth century; escaped African cassava cultivators in their Caribbean provision grounds circa 1750; Cherokee gardeners in the upland South before their forced removal in the 1830s; Indonesian rice planters and rubber tappers in 2000; and others in countless variations on almost every continent over the last ten thousand years. Some plowed broad-acre fields, but most preferred more intensive practices. “I am not talking here about amber waves of grain,” wrote the anthropologist Robert McC. Netting of smallholding, “but about gardens and orchards, about rice paddies, dairy farms, and chinampas.” Others created forest openings by burning before planting. Some owned land, while others occupied frontiers in advance of private property. Still others squatted on the holdings of absentee owners. Where possible, they supplemented arable farming with foraging, hunting, and fishing. Taken together, agrarians compose the largest class in human history.50
Country people usually identify themselves as members of lineages or families or villages, but the most basic unit is the household. It consists of any family group who work together, share the same living space, and eat from the same pot. A household always includes parents and their children. It might also include grandparents. Older sons disappear and sometimes reappear. They might farm their own plots while they take care of elderly parents, then leave to seize opportunities for trade, and perhaps return for security before launching into marriage and their own households. The household is a collective of individuals in which “family solidarity provides the basic framework for mutual aid, control and socialization.” It spreads the risk of its ventures, reproduces its skills and traditions, transmits its vast ecological knowledge, and catapults its young into adulthood.
No other human institution does these things. Netting captures the collective function and the protective one. “The household is the scene of economic allocation, arranging collectively for the food, clothing, and shelter of its members, and seeking to provide for these needs over the long term with some measure of security against the uncontrollable disruptions of the climate, the market economy, and the state.” But the household is also the scene of domination and control. What happens under the roof is often a struggle for power between fathers and sons and a form of servitude for daughters and wives. In the vacuum of authority that prevailed on the western frontiers of North America, the household served as a state unto itself: sometimes a little commonwealth, sometimes a totalitarian regime. The historian Honor Sachs says more: “The very concept of a household constructs a mythology of human relationships that manifests inequality in ways that seem organic and natural … Only by understanding inequality within the household can we see how the denial of rights for huge swaths of the population did not constitute a dark exception to democratic aspirations but rather a triumph of original design.” The fulfillment of human needs came along with fears and despair.51
Finding a word or phrase to describe the flow of material and money through households is surprisingly difficult. Self-sufficient is altogether wrong. No household is, was, or could be self-sufficient, and none wanted to be. Self-provisioning narrows what is autonomous about agrarians to raising plants and animals for food, but it’s a little awkward. Competency refers to an adequate supply of something or the land necessary to create that supply. When a young couple attained “a competency,” it meant that they had established their household and could raise a family. I prefer subsistence.
We tend to define it as the minimum necessary for existence. Such a definition has no historical significance. Agrarians did not live at the margin of life and death. They met their own needs and attempted to live as well as possible, to thrive. Integral to thriving is partaking in a larger division of labor by exchanging. Yet exchange requires people to produce more than what they would require for bare survival. Economists like to call anything traded a surplus. It sounds like something left over. But agrarians did not make clear distinctions between what a household raised, gathered, and hunted for their own consumption and what they exchanged for other things. They considered it all equally essential. Human needs never adhere to a minimum. This is the problem with the commonplace conception of subsistence. It describes an imaginary condition, and thinking about it this way eliminates an entire realm of human economy. Another word for what I mean is makeshift, meaning to do the best that one can with whatever one has.52
It is strange that no precise word exists in English to describe something that billions of people consider obvious. The paucity of language seems like an artifact of capitalism and its tendency to eliminate all competing economic forms. In this way of thinking, the legitimacy of makeshift economy lies in the past. Conceiving of subsistence economy as vestigial and linking it to poverty limits the horizons of human endeavor. It says that those who still live this way await
something better. It dismisses their knowledge as irrelevant and their tenacity as naive. “Smallholders may not always live well,” Netting tells us, “but they are seasoned survivors. They may moonlight as craftsmen, petty traders, field hands, or factory workers, but they do not keep one foot on the farm out of sentiment or stupidity.” None of this should be taken as an excuse for the poverty so many agrarians suffer, for disease, malnutrition, and lack of educational opportunity. But to what extent do we misunderstand the problem? Is it that a smallholder existence is identical to poverty? Has no one ever lived well in a village? Or is it that events have degraded their capacity to thrive? Smallholders depend on specific conditions, without which they become desperately poor. The question is whether development should strive to maintain those conditions. The alternative is to say that agrarians are not made for the world as it is, that the resources they use for subsistence and barter are too valuable. The forest will be turned into lumber; the river will be diverted for irrigating sugarcane. In that case, the demise of agrarian existence is self-fulfilling. I will take up some of these questions in the last chapter.53
The single most important thing to know about settlers, peasants, campesinos, and smallholders is that they do not conform to the particular rationality described by capitalist political economy. What they maximize and waste, how they regard money, and how they organize work come from different assumptions and circumstances. “The distinctive economic behavior of the subsistence-oriented peasant family,” as James Scott puts it, “results from the fact that, unlike a capitalist enterprise, it is a unit of consumption as well as a unit of production.” All such families use their production to enhance their consumption in a circuit, one different from the one that creates capital. This one begins and ends with commodities, not money. Agrarians create useful things, consume some of what they raise, and swap the rest for money or other useful things. They exchange in order to gain the tools and luxuries that they cannot make. Marx expressed the circuit this way, C→M→C, where the two Cs are commodities of various kinds and the M is money. Depicted in its most simple form (though it’s never simple), the commodity circuit does not result in accumulation. Its purpose is to sustain and reproduce the household without end.54
The circuit begins with production. All agrarian households must manage the tension between available acres, working hands, and wanting bellies. Among the first economists to model peasant economy was a Russian named Alexander Vasilevich Chayanov. Writing during the 1920s, Chayanov found that the peasants he studied did not attempt to maximize profit or minimize labor. Peasants, said Chayanov, will “purchase the increase of the total year’s labor product at the price of a fall in income per labor unit.” They showed no concern for diminishing returns but kept working for as long as they needed in order to create a necessary stock of food and commodities no matter how long it took them. Exactly what it means to have “enough” is always debatable. But unlike capitalist firms, peasants have an acute sense of “enough” and only exert themselves to attain it. As the anthropologist Enrique Mayer explains it, “Because householding is self-provisioning, the cycle is complete when all that is needed is produced.” The true product of the agrarian household is the survival and reproduction of the household itself.55
And yet, there is another sense in which peasants can attain great efficiency. They produce more energy (in calories) than the energy they expend. In Mexico, with no draft animals, corn yields nearly 11 units of energy for every 1 unit expended. In the Philippines, with animal labor, it yields 5 to 1. Compare this to the United States, where combines and nitrogen fertilizer recently produced yields of 3 to 1. Cassava production in Nigeria attains an output-to-input ratio of 7 to 1. Wheat in Kenya, using only human power, reaches 3 to 1. Draft animals reduce the ratio because they require food and human attention. Still, Filipino wet-rice planters who use animal traction realize a ratio of around 3 to 1, while mechanized rice production in the United States does no better than 1.5 to 1. Then there is swidden, a term for the way people have used fire to burn off vegetation before planting in the rich ashes. It can deliver rice at an amazing 25 to 1, allowing families to provision themselves by working just two hours a day.56
There is much more to consider here, like the nuanced relationship between the number of people and the intensity of cultivation. How do wanting bellies change the way working hands cultivate available acres? Historically, how agrarians have lived has varied from extensive hunting and gathering, with little or no farming, to remarkably intensive gardens and rice paddies and little use of the wider landscape. In the first case, households externalize much of their subsistence needs. The forest or savannah gives them lumber and cattle fodder. In the second, most ecological functions must be replicated within domesticated spaces. The open range becomes the hayfield. The difference is very often population. When common lands become crowded, cultivators feel pressured to redouble their labor on the land they have. This amounts to a kind of law that is the perfect inverse of the one first popularized by Thomas Robert Malthus at the end of the eighteenth century. Under the right circumstances, more people do not starve for too little food; they create the additional food they need. And yet, there are exceptions to the pattern. The people of the southern mountains had trouble making this transition. (I will return to this subject in chapter 4.)57
English-speaking travelers who visited peasant societies often admired them. Henry Colman, once the commissioner of the Agricultural Survey of Massachusetts, spent the 1840s going village to village throughout Europe. “A more civil, cleanly, industrious, frugal, sober, or better dressed people than the French peasantry … I have never known,” wrote Colman. He saw two and a half acres in Flanders “give ample support for a man and wife and three children … add to it three acres more, which this amount of labour is more than sufficient to cultivate, and you add a considerable surplus for other purposes.” John Candler, a British Quaker, toured the West Indies between 1839 and 1841. In Haiti he found a nation of proud smallholders cultivating land that once belonged to the very slaveholders who owned their parents and grandparents. He noted their “few wants … common faire, coarse clothing, and enjoyments of a mere animal nature: it is true, they work to live, as without some labour they cannot subsist; but they do not, and they will not[,] work hard to please anybody.” Their dwellings were well kept, continued Candler, “their coffee is clean and vigorous, their gardens are flourishing, their fences neat—every thing indicating order, industry, and content[ment].” Agrarians suffered under adverse climate and political turmoil beyond their control, but they did not suffer because they were agrarians. Into the twentieth century, those who knew them best noted their resilience, industriousness, and productivity. But I have only suggested what is required for an agrarian household to produce. The next turn in the commodity circuit is exchange.58
Raising stuff leads to selling stuff. This might seem obvious. Only in capitalism do people live on money and nothing that they produce themselves, and even most wageworkers the world over grow at least a portion of their food. (This is the subject of chapter 6.) No one has ever willingly lived without exchange. “Market-less households do not exist,” writes Mayer. “We therefore commonly say that the household’s integration to the market is partial.” How much to produce for exchange is a more vexing question. Chayanov concluded that although the Russian peasants he studied sold things for money, they didn’t see money as essential. After a certain point, moneymaking became “an excessive burden on the undertaking.” The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins elaborates: “If ‘surplus’ is defined as output above the producers’ requirements, the household system is not organized for it. Nothing within the structure of production for use pushes it to transcend itself.” An organization drawn together for survival cannot also operate as a profit-making business. Money supplements the household but does not sustain it. Agrarians go to market to acquire tools and clothing that they cannot make, but the limits of family labor translate into lim
its on what households have to sell and therefore what they can purchase.
And yet, it would be a mistake to emphasize the commercial limits of an agrarian economy. That thinking leads to one of the worst misconceptions, that such people are too isolated to exchange very much and have little interest in it. Yet political economists often failed to see the rich market engagement of smallholders. James Steuart asserted that those who practiced “a direct method of subsistence” sold nothing because they had nothing to sell. “The articles of food and necessaries are hardly found in commerce … because the principal occupation of every body is to procure them for himself.” It’s a perplexing statement because it contradicts human behavior for centuries in every environment and on every continent. Steuart might have been thinking of the Scottish Highlands, which he considered primitive compared to regions with more money and more complex divisions of labor. Regardless, peasants and smallholders always participate in the wider commercial world. Chayanov said the same, that peasants everywhere had “been drawn into the system of the capitalist commodity market,” including “exceedingly complex social interactions with … the present-day economy.”59
Mayer proposes an elegant structure that embraces the core of Chayanov’s conception but moves beyond it. The Andean peasants he studies maintain two kinds of cultivated spaces, one for subsistence and the other for cash. They keep these “accounts” strictly separate. What they grow in order to eat never enters the market, and the money they earn by selling commodities enhances their standards of living but does not sustain their households. In other words, they can endure a complete loss on the cash crop with a shrug—nothing gained and just a little labor lost. Such a failure might prevent them from buying certain things but without posing an existential threat. Andean peasants recognize two “transactional realms,” one in the village and the other beyond the mountains, one grounded in social relationships within the community and the other purely for profit and therefore impersonal. The village represents certainty and familiarity, where everyone is taken care of. The distant market offers the possibility of gain and the excitement of risk. Trading over the mountains or down the river carries none of the social strictures of kin and household.60