To what extent should they be small farmers?
Much of the current left-wing movement, albeit intuitively, claims small-scale agriculture, without any doubt. However, this claim for smallness has its contradictions: a small farm, by definition, will not be able to produce a lot of food. And is that important? Well, in a sense, yes. The level of complexity a society can have depends on the surpluses it produces. For example, if a single producer can produce as many food as a thousand people, it means that only one in 1,000 people will have to worry about producing food.
The life time of others will be freed to perform other activities that are socially necessary: nurses, musicians, teachers, cleaners, engineers, craftsmen… In this case, the scale for the social division of labor could be provided in 1/1,000. If there are no surpluses in food production, all those involved in society should devote space to food production. It would be a society with a very low level of complexity.
If production were to be organised on the basis of collective interests, how far would we take the size and production capacity of the farms?
The point is that the size of the farm is closely related to the level of surpluses it can generate: the greater it is, the more it can be tecnized and mechanized. This makes it possible to increase the amount of food produced per person. However, this increase in quantitative production does not occur free of charge. As technification increases, the dependence on processes not directly controlled by the producer will increase, losing autonomy and increasing their level of alienation and dependence. Likewise, with the increase of the scale the ecological damage generated by the productive process increases, because the transformation of landscape and ecosystems is also carried out on a larger scale.
Nowadays, in capitalism, the size of exploitation is established by the market: below a level of scale and technification, food production is not profitable and nobody produces it professionally on that scale. But if this is not the case, and if production is organised by collective interests, how far would we take the size and production capacity of the farms? At what point would we solve the existing tension between the factors of scale technification, productivity, environmental, autonomy?
In my opinion, the collectivization of means and the principles of agroecology as guidelines, the expansion of the productive scale should be a field of testing, both in theoretical and practical terms.
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