Rethinking class, capitalism and exploitation from the perspective of family farming in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Abstract

Using empirical evidence and an exploration of literature on simple commodity and capitalist farm production, a theoretical argument is developed to show that, despite not employing labour, self‐employed family farmers (at least in New Zealand) are capitalist, not simple commodity, producers. This has major implications for not only class theorists from a Marxist perspective, with whom we are primarily concerned, but also poses questions for Weberian inspired stratification adherents preoccupied with occupation and lifestyle. Land ownership, together with the different way capital can be generated in broad‐acre livestock farming compared to other industrial settings, enables family farmers to generate profits and accumulate capital. This means that rather than being subsumed by capital, self‐employed owners of farm enterprises appropriate surplus value not by directly hiring labour to generate income from their large landholdings but indirectly by utilising the labour of other enterprises and by hiring bourgeois or petit‐bourgeois operators (purchasing equipment, technology and knowledge, and using the distribution, processing, marketing and other services supplied by other businesses). Buying and selling land also supports these capitalist enterprises. Although not expropriating surplus value directly to operate their enterprises, capitalised family producers have, as was pointed out in 1985 by David Goodman and Michael Redclift, achieved political legitimacy by distancing themselves at the ideological level from capitalism (despite embracing capitalism at the economic level). By disguising their class interests, such producers are adept at legitimating state policy in their interests.