Sharecropping and Class: A Preliminary Analysis

Class Struggle on the Homefront

“…21. The emergence of independent producers in the transition from feudal to capitalist agriculture in Europe constitutes a noteworthy analogy to the transformation of feudal to ancient households (Marx 1981;Kayatekin 1990). The relation between landowner and peasant appears unchanged in so far as the landowner continues to receive rent from the peasant (either in money or product form).…”

Postbellum race relations in commodity exchange

“…Crop lien laws favored landlords, who were able to purchase the labor of former slaves for an indefinite period, making sharecroppers, one of the physical inheritors of slave politics, less the owner of their labor power and more of an outright commodity--a slave--possessed by the landlord (Kayatekin 1996). Having no reserves, the sharecropper as consumer was forced to buy on credit from the landlord.…”

The Difference that Class Makes: Neoliberalization and Non‐Capitalism in the Fishing Industry of New England

“…While the domestic and small‐scale businesses that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s clearly made money for boat owners and were, in this respect, similar to other small businesses where fixed capital presumes a right to surplus, they were distinct insofar as the right to surplus was (culturally and legally) shared by crewmembers and, indeed, surplus was distributed to crewmembers and, by extension, fishing communities via a share rather than a wage system of compensation. In addition to this unique class process of surplus production, appropriation, and distribution, a variety of cultural understandings and social practices served to differentiate fishing from standard models of capitalist enterprise (cf Kayatekin 1997, 2001). While fisheries did continue to expand, modernize, and increase capacity tremendously (which would eventually create new problems for the alternative economy), there remained a common property system where labor was compensated via shares rather than wages and capital was locally embedded within fishing communities.…”