Reminder that the vast majority of people in the US who call themselves farmers are capitalists and often landlords, ranging from petty bourgeois try-hards that pat themselves on the back for riding a combine to those who do basically no farm work. And all of them depend on worker exploitation, usually undocumented immigrant labor because they can abuse them the most.
They are at risk of… not being profitable. They want their usual financial bailout and are going to the media for help. Part of this is reduced demand over Trump’s trade war but don’t forget that this is around the end of harvest season, the big time for labor, and they have been failing to find enough labor at dirt wages due to inflation and terrorizing immigrants. According to capitalism, they should be increasing prices and paying their workers more, but that would be less profitable than free money from the government.
The vast majority of farming in America is done by megacorps, the individual farmowners who still exist are a very small fraction of actual farmland and have no real impact on ag production in america. This ICE shit is going to drive them out of business and the megacorps will buy up their shit.
“Half a century ago, when Marx was writing Capital, free competition appeared to the overwhelming majority of economists to be a ‘natural law’. Official science tried, by a conspiracy of silence, to kill the works of Marx, who by a theoretical and historical analysis of capitalism had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly. Today, monopoly has become a fact. Economists are writing mountains of books in which they describe the diverse manifestations of monopoly, and continue to declare in chorus that ‘Marxism is refuted.’ But facts are stubborn things, as the English proverb says, and they have to be reckoned with, whether we like it or not. The facts show that differences between capitalist countries, e.g., in the matter of protection or free trade, only give rise to insignificant variations in the form of monopolies or in the moment of their appearance; and that the rise of monopolies, as the result of the concentration of production, is a general and fundamental law of the present stage of development of capitalism.”
Pretty much this, there are smaller farmers who need to do things so much more boutique that they can remain competitive (think beautiful flawless fruits, flowers, stuff like that where the individual thing is grown and prized) with the bigger industry players.
But nobody is hand harvesting fucking soybeans on their personal acreage.
And even then the boutique places probably rely on migrant workers during a harvest or planting, picking a weekend when the big players aren’t so all the workers can trickle out to the small farms picking up a couple days. It’s a whole ecosystem and these guys think they can tilt it without consequence. Which is exactly the kind of behavior I’ve come to expect from capitalists and landlords.
It isn’t exclusive to the US either. I remember when those farmers’ protests happened in multiple Western countries, and they tried to convince people that they were poor farmers being oppressed by the government for having to lower their emissions, when in reality most of them are wealthy kulaks.
Reminder that the vast majority of people in the US who call themselves farmers are capitalists and often landlords, ranging from petty bourgeois try-hards that pat themselves on the back for riding a combine to those who do basically no farm work. And all of them depend on worker exploitation, usually undocumented immigrant labor because they can abuse them the most.
They are at risk of… not being profitable. They want their usual financial bailout and are going to the media for help. Part of this is reduced demand over Trump’s trade war but don’t forget that this is around the end of harvest season, the big time for labor, and they have been failing to find enough labor at dirt wages due to inflation and terrorizing immigrants. According to capitalism, they should be increasing prices and paying their workers more, but that would be less profitable than free money from the government.
The vast majority of farming in America is done by megacorps, the individual farmowners who still exist are a very small fraction of actual farmland and have no real impact on ag production in america. This ICE shit is going to drive them out of business and the megacorps will buy up their shit.
Pretty much this, there are smaller farmers who need to do things so much more boutique that they can remain competitive (think beautiful flawless fruits, flowers, stuff like that where the individual thing is grown and prized) with the bigger industry players.
But nobody is hand harvesting fucking soybeans on their personal acreage.
And even then the boutique places probably rely on migrant workers during a harvest or planting, picking a weekend when the big players aren’t so all the workers can trickle out to the small farms picking up a couple days. It’s a whole ecosystem and these guys think they can tilt it without consequence. Which is exactly the kind of behavior I’ve come to expect from capitalists and landlords.
Especially with these large monocrops like soy, they are also destroying local ecology and causing long term damage to the land
It isn’t exclusive to the US either. I remember when those farmers’ protests happened in multiple Western countries, and they tried to convince people that they were poor farmers being oppressed by the government for having to lower their emissions, when in reality most of them are wealthy kulaks.
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