The Contradiction of the Entrepreneurial Peasant
A short piece exploring some thoughts around Van der Ploeg's elaboration of peasant and entrepreneurial farmers
Critical agrarian scholar, Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg, distinguishes peasant farming in contrast with entrepreneurial farming. In a paper from 2020 he defines each (in the context of farmers’ protests and animal farming in the Netherlands):
Peasant farming: ‘Peasant agriculture builds as much as possible on the self-owned resource base and its internal consistency: animals and land are brought into balance and the fine-tuning of the cycle that links manure, soil biology, grassland production, animal feeding and the production of milk, meat and manure is of strategic importance.’
Entrepreneurial farming: ‘Entrepreneurial farming, by contrast, ‘jumps’ over the limits of locally available resources. It engages in commodity circuits in order to obtain the required amounts of feed and fodder and thus enables growth that is ‘disproportionate’ to the magnitude of the farm (Driel 1982, 1984)’
As someone interested in the idea of ‘repeasantisation’ I find these definitions useful and something I want to push at. Rather than critiquing these ideal types, I’d like to first complicate their distinction, not purely as an academic exercise but because I think it can tell us something about the project of repeasantisation.
Many who want to practice a peasant-like farming come unstuck because they have to pursue the strategies of the entrepreneurial farmer. The reason for this is not complicated: how else do you practice farming within a capitalist economy in countries like the UK? My personal experience of farming was that we had to keep trying to grow because we had to keep trying to make more money as a result of ever-diminishing profits and rising costs of living. It got to the point where it felt like we had more land under our control than we could adequately take care of, and that we were increasingly abandoning the reasons why we went into farming in the first place. Which was influenced by the ideas of permaculture, agroecology, repeasantisation and so on. We are not an unusual story and even those who have been at it for more than a decade are finding the constraints of this moment bite at them.
As I outlined in my talk at ORFC this year, we build our agroecological farms within the context of a capitalist system with all the imperatives that brings. From competing with each other, to the necessity of profit maximisation, to the reliance on regimes of private property, to the exploitation of labour. And in reality it’s not proving possible to build these peasant farms that Van der Ploeg idealises. As he states: ‘Entrepreneurial farms need to continually expand. They are permanently engaged in a ‘race forward’.’ This continual need to expand results from the power of capital, most often experienced by farmers in the UK (as business owners) in the form of ‘mute compulsion’.
A recognition of that is a really important step for the evolution of agroecology. It’s central to any shift from defensive positions of fighting to defend small farms and piecemeal reforms, towards realising the necessity of deeper agrarian reforms. Agroecologisation to an extent can develop from working with already existing farms (something I support), but the bulk of the work is about getting more hands on the land. To get more hands on the land we need transformative agrarian reforms. To achieve those reforms we need to build a more powerful movement. To build a more powerful movement, we need to move from corporatist or economistic demands, to use some Gramscian language, towards larger popular movements. That will mean going beyond the narrower demands of small farmers, towards a movement that encompasses the need to wrest control from landlords (housing or land), to ensure equitable access to nutritious food, to workers’ rights (especially itinerant migrant workers) on farms and more. Only through connecting with other movements and demands can agroecology develop enough power to pursue more transformative reforms.
Without more transformative agrarian reforms we cannot have agroecologisation, or repeasantisation, because the power of capital over farming prevents. Getting from here to there requires, within agroecology a critical appraisal of what is capitalism, and what a post-capitalist food and farming system would look like. Hint, it’s not better run small businesses, even if you have to do that to support your livelihood, let’s not kid ourselves that that is the horizon. The horizon needs to be a decommodified food and farming system and all that entails.
There is, I believe, something to keep in the distinction made by Van der Ploeg, between peasant farming and entrepreneurial farming. The challenge comes in achieving the former. He isn’t blind to this—later in the same paper discussed above he writes:
‘On the other hand, though, these militant [food sovereignty/agroecology] organizations and people too often reduce the persistence of entrepreneurial farming to the assumed unwillingness of those farmers to change while not paying much attention to the structural path-dependency and other mechanisms that lock these farmers into the dominant socio-technical regime. This is clearly limiting their impact and reach.’ [emphasis added]
Often one will hear that what is needed is a “mindset shift”. And sure this is useful but reducing our theory of change to one of “mindset shift” is a limited strategy, to put it mildly. You can have the best will in the world, but putting food on the table, in this world, often requires you to do and support things you’d rather not. And try telling your landlord that you’ve had a mindset shift and you won’t be paying the rent this month.
Therefore what is needed to make sure you don’t actually have to pay your landlord next month, because you no longer have a landlord to pay. Or perhaps you’re fortunate enough not to have a landlord, or paying a peppercorn rent, so maybe what is needed to find ways beyond competition. What can we do that reduces the need to pursue profit? That takes food and farming away commodification?
I would like to do some research with these farms like ours that had to abandon some of their principles because of the constraints of the profit motive because in that I think we might find some answers for the future of agroecology. You can make critiques of Van der Ploeg for XYZ reasons as some do like Henry Bernstein. But that’s easy compared to coming up with what is that path towards a post-capitalist food and farming system. Van der Ploeg is doing some of the important intellectual work of conceptualising that. And for that reason, whilst I may disagree at times, which often relates to his overstating of peasant farming, and understating of entrepreneurial farming, he is always generative to read. You’ll come away with more questions and thoughts and sometimes a few answers. We need much more of that right now.
If the entrepreneurial peasant is an actually existing contradiction, then what would it mean to untangle it? For some, it means embracing this fact and they preach of becoming better business owners. I think that’s an increasingly dead-end project if we’re considering the scaling up of agroecology to become the norm of food production. For some it means ignoring the contradiction, pretending that one can simply wish themselves to become a peasant, reducing it to a cultural identity and ignoring the capitalist aspect. Another dead-end project if we want to be anything other than a small counter-culture.
For me, it means working through and beyond the contradiction. Repeasantisation, if it is to mean anything, means the abolition of capitalism and the building of a new society. With that in mind, we proceed.
I take this up in forthcoming chapter in a book titled “post-capitalist countrysides. I think VdP vs Bernstein is a great way to work through the tension.