Question

For millennia, human beings have provided for their material needs by working the land. And probably for nearly as long as they have engaged in agriculture they have been divided into classes, between those who worked the land and those who appropriated the labour of others. That division between appropriators and producers has taken many forms, but one common characteristic is that the direct producers have typically been peasants. These peasant producers have generally had direct access to the means of their own reproduction and to the land itsel£ This has meant that when their surplus labour has been appropriated by exploiters, it has been done by what Marx called 'extraeconomic' means - that is, by means of direct coercion, exercised THE ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM by landlords or states employing their superior force, their privileged access to military, judicial, and political power. In early modern France, for example, as we have seen, where production was dominated by peasant owner/occupiers, appropriation took the classic pre-capitalist form of politically constituted property, eventually giving rise not to capitalism but to the 'tax/office' structure of absolutism. Here, centralized forms of extra-economic exploitation competed with and increasingly supplanted older forms of seigneurial extraction. Office became a major means of extracting surplus labour from direct producers, in the form of tax; and the state, which became a source of great private wealth, co-opted and incorporated growing numbers of appropriators from among the old nobility as well as newer 'bourgeois' officeholders. Here, then, is the basic difference between all pre-capitalist societies and capitalism. It has nothing to do with whether production is urban or rural and everything to do with the particular property relations between producers and appropriators, whether in industry or agriculture. Only in capitalism is the dominant mode of appropriation based on the complete dispossession of direct producers, who (unlike chattel slaves) are legally free and whose surplus labour is appropriated by purely 'economic' means. Because direct producers in a fully developed capitalism are propertyless, and because their only access to the means of production, to the requirements of their own reproduction, even to the means of their own labour, is the sale of their labour-power in exchange for a wage, capitalists can appropriate the workers' surplus labour without direct coercion. This unique relation between producers and appropriators is, of course, mediated by the 'market' Markets of various kinds have existed throughout recorded history and no doubt before, as people have exchanged and sold their surpluses in many different ways and for many different purposes. But the market in capitalism has a distinctive, unprecedented function. Virtually THE AGRARIAN ORIGIN OF CAPITALISM 97 everything in capitalist society is a commodity produced for the market. And even more fundamentally, both capital and labour are utterly dependent on the market for the most basic conditions of their own reproduction. Just as workers depend on the market to sell their labour-power as a commodity, capitalists depend on it to buy labour-power, as well as the means of production, and to realize their profits by selling the goods or services produced by the workers. This market dependence gives the market an unprecedented role in capitalist societies, as not only a simple mechanism of exchange or distribution but the principal determinant and regulat.or of social reproduction. The emergence of the market as a determinant of sodal reproduction presupposed its penetration into the production of life's most basic necessity: food.

Find the argument within the text and summarize it.  

Answer 1

Agricultural industry producers are divided into two categories :

Actual producers or the peasants who work on the land and produce the crop.

Capitalists who have land and agricultural equipments to carry out the production process.

This is an Agency Problem. Capitalists actually have land but do not get involved in the actual farming or production process. They hire the peasants or farmers to work on their land to grow the crops. Capitalists aim for profit maximization by increasing the sales revenue and lowering the cost of production. On the other hand, peasants aim for higher productivity by enhancing the crops produced on the land area. Thus there is always a conflict. The productivity of the land should be enhanced and better crops should be made available for consumption purpose.