Mary E. Marcy: Marxian Economics – How the Farmer Is Exploited (April 1917)/title> </head> <body bgcolor="#FFFFF0" text="#000000" link="#0000FF" vlink="#3300FF" alink="#FF0000"> <p class="toplink"><a href="../../../../index.htm" name="top">MIA</a> > <a href="../../../index.htm">Archive</a> > <a href="../../index.htm">Mary Marcy</a></p> <p> </p> <h2>Mary E. Marcy</h2> <h1>Marxian Economics</h1> <h4>How the Farmer Is Exploited</h4> <h3>(April 1917)</h3> <hr class="infotop" size="1" noshade="noshade" /> <p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../history/usa/pubs/isr/v17n10-apr-1917-ISR-riaz-ocr.pdf">Vol. 17 No. 10</a>, April 1917, pp. 621–624.<br /> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p> <hr class="infobot" size="1" noshade="noshade" /> <p class="fst">SSOME of us who have studied only the first part of Volume I of Marx’s <B>Capital</B>, forget that, when this greatest of all economists wrote Volumes II and III he elaborated on his theory of value.</p> <p>Because we have been students of only a portion of the writings of Marx, some of us have claimed that the man who owned a farm and worked it himself and sold his product to some warehouse company, or to some speculator, sold his commodities at their value and was, therefore, not exploited in any way. But we were wrong.</p> <p>As a rule, said Marx, commodities on the average exchange at their value. But by this he did not, by any means, mean that when a farmer sells a thousand bushels of wheat to one man, who in turn sells to a customer, who re-sells to someone else, who finally sells out to a third or fourth buyer—Marx did not mean that all these perfectly useless individuals <I>added any value to that wheat</I>. But they sell at a profit.</p> <p>Now since these speculating purchasers have not added any value to the farmer’s wheat, either the first purchaser bought the wheat from the farmer <I>below</I> its value or the final purchaser paid for it at <I>more</I> than its value.</p> <p>The man who originally bought the wheat from the farmer added no value to the wheat nor did his customer, nor his customer’s customer, etc., add any value to the wheat. But the wheat may have sold finally at fifty cents a bushel more than the original purchaser paid for it, because when it was finally sold there was a greater demand for wheat. On the other hand, wheat occasionally sells below the price paid to the farmer for it, because of the sudden termination of war, etc., or by a decrease in the demand for wheat. Supply and demand, we know, affect price, but not value, so that in war time, for example, the farmer may receive a price that is more than the value of his product.</p> <p>Marx explains in Volumes II and III of <B>Capital</B>, that brokers, middlemen and merchant capitalists, etc., being, on the whole, unnecessary, produce neither commodities nor any value.</p> <p>On the average, he says, commodities exchange at their value—that is, the consumer usually buys commodities at their value. He nearly always receives the value he pays for; he gives gold, or its equivalent, representing so many hours of necessary social labor, in exchange for commodities representing an equal amount of necessary social labor.</p> <p>Commodities usually sell to the consumer at their value. Wheat brokers and wheat and other grain speculators get their profits out of value either produced by the farmer who works his farm, or from value produced by farm tenants or farm laborers, because these products are sold to these speculators <I>below</I> their <I>value</I>.</p> <p>One speculator buys corn from a group of farmers at 40 cents and re-sells it to another speculator at 46 cents, who disposes of it to a third at 50 cents, who finally sells it to the mill men (who use it as raw material from which, say, com flakes are manufactured) at 55 cents.</p> <p>On the average these mill men buy the corn at its value; the various speculators have never seen the corn, never moved the com, added not one particle of value to the torn. The first speculator in this case bought the corn from the producing farmers at something like 15 cents a bushel <I>BELOW</I> its value. This 15 cents of which the producing farmers were exploited, is divided among the three speculators. Nobody is robbed or exploited but the actual producers of the corn.</p> <p>Among the capitalist farmers the same conditions prevail as in other fields of investment. Unless the capitalist is able to make his capital bring him the average rate of profits, he seeks other fields in which to put his money.</p> <p>Capitalist farmers hire farm superintendents, overseers, farm laborers to work their lands or let their farms to farm tenants at a cash rental or for a portion of the tenants’ products. Like the capitalist who, for instance, invests his money in a packing house, a mine or a woolen mill, these capitalist farmers have to divide the value appropriated from the labor of the workers with the <I>middleman</I>. The capitalist farmer pays his workers the value of their labor power, but far less than the value of their products. On the average, these products are sold to the final buyer at their value. The capitalist farmer divides the surplus value, produced by the farm tenants or laborers, with the broker, the speculator, the storage companies,</p> <p>The small farm owner, who works in the fields beside his hired “hands” is an exploiting capitalist as far as he pays his workers wages and appropriates their products. The surplus value or profits he is able to extract are represented by the difference between what he pays for the labor and cost of machinery, maintenance, repairs, taxes, etc., and the price he gets for the products of his laborers.</p> <p>Occasionally buyers’ associations grow so powerful that they demand so great a share of the surplus value produced by the farm workers that the farm owner, or fruit grower, or truck gardener is unable to appropriate any of this surplus value produced by his laborers, and he ceases to use his land in raising that particular product. This has been true in the case of many small capitalist fruit raisers. Apples rot upon the ground in Michigan and in many other states because the commission houses are so organized that the fruit farmers have no other market, and the price commission organizations offer for apples or peaches is so low that after the farm owner has paid the laborers to pick and pack the fruit there is no surplus value left for himself.<br /> </p> <h4>Farmers in Different Classes</h4> <p class="fst">Farmers cannot be lumped into one industrial class as politicians are so fond of doing in this country. To speak of the “farmer” means nothing definite today. We read about the brother of ex-President Taft being a “farmer.” But we are informed that this wealthy gentleman does not even superintend the work on his great capitalistic farm. Mr. Taft is an exploiting capitalist who appropriates the surplus value produced by his laborers and tenants.</p> <p>As the industrial capitalist who employs workers to produce furniture, cloth, machinery, etc., is compelled to <I>divide</I> this surplus value with the wholesale merchant, the jobber and the retailer, so even the millionaire capitalist farmer, Mr. Taft, sells many of the farm products expropriated from his farm laborers <I>below</I> their value. Both classes of industrial capitalists have to <I>divide</I> the surplus value with other groups of capitalists.</p> <p>Socialists are not in the least concerned with helping the industrial capitalists, neither the mighty Tafts nor the town farmer who hires two or three men who run his farm by the aid of additional men in harvest time. This small town farmer also sells the product of the farm workers <I>below</I> its value. We do not grieve to see the expropriator expropriated—the robber robbed. We are concerned only with seeing to it that the working class receives the value .of its products.</p> <p>Now commodities tend to exchange at their value, but this does not mean that the small farmer can exchange a hundred bushels of wheat or corn, representing the hours of labor <I>he has put in them,</I> for machinery or other commodities representing an <I>equal</I> amount of labor.</p> <p>The capitalist farmer, who uses the most modem farm tractors and other modern farm machinery, sells wheat and corn representing, perhaps, only one-half as much labor as the wheat and corn produced by the small farmer using small or old-fashioned machinery. And both receive the same price for their wheat or com because commodities exchange at their <I>social</I> value, at the average <I>social</I> labor required to produce them at a given time.</p> <p>So the capitalist farmer, who has capital to buy modern machines and who rents enormous farms, gets almost twice as much for the same amount of labor as the small farmer. It is the same old story of modern productive methods and small antiquated methods which has occurred so often in the past; the hand weavers yielding to the machine product; the small factory being frozen out by the big factory; small machine production being driven out by modern automatic machinery.</p> <p>The small farmer not only pays interest every year on farm loans or rent on farm lands, but, because he has no capital wherewith to buy modern machinery, gets less and less for his labor, because every year a bushel of wheat, a bushel of corn represent <I>less necessary human labor</I> than they did before. In other words, wheat and corn and other farm products are steadily decreasing in value because of growing modern machine methods in farm production.</p> <p>There are several other ways by which the small farmers are forced to <I>give</I> more than they <I>receive</I> in exchange. But we cannot take them up here. Those who are particularly interested irf this subject will be interested in reading <B>How the Farmer Can Get His</B>, published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, at 10 cents a copy.</p> <p>The farmer who owns or is paying on a small farm, who works his farm himself, ought to be interested in the revolutionary movement. He exploits no one and sells his products below their value.</p> <p>On the other hand, we hear a great deal from the farm owner who works a little and hires two or three men. His complaints fill the country newspapers from Maine to California. It is true that he sells the products of his farm below their value. But his only concern is to secure higher prices for these products, not the payment to his laborers of the value of the things they produce, the wheat they grow, or the fruit they raise. He desires to make more money from the labor of others.</p> <p>If the workers received the value of their social products, no one would care to <I>own</I> land, because ownership would not then mean opportunity for exploitation. The landless farmer would not care to own land so long as he possessed access to it and the opportunity to produce and to exchange his products at their value.</p> <p>In an industrial democracy it need not be a matter of serious moment that one group of workers finds it necessary to labor upon inferior land. We cannot all sow and reap of the best. Men and women should be recompensed according to the necessary number of hours they work, and not upon the amount of wheat they raise upon a certain piece of land. For the same labor will produce twice the crop of wheat on rich land as upon poor land.</p> <p>Every group should, of course, be advised by national experts as to the best crops to plant, the fertilizer needed, and on the thousand and one questions that are constantly increasing as farming is being reduced to a scientific basis.</p> <p>If a group spends a certain amount of necessary labor on a piece of land according to advice of expert agronomists and the crop is entirely lost because of frost, floods or drought, this farming group should not be forced to beg for a living the remainder of the year. The local loss should be borne by the whole nation and every bushel of wheat would represent a little more <I>social</I> labor than it would have meant without the failure of local crops.</p> <p>The whole wheat product will represent <I>all</I> the necessary social labor expended in producing it. Every year there will be failures of farm crops for one unavoidable cause or another, but the hours spent in farm work by the group of workers whose labors have proved fruitless will, without doubt, be included in the total number of hours spent in farm production by all the workers. Because the labor of <I>all</I> will represent the socially necessary labor embodied in the wheat crop, potato crop, or corn crop.</p> <p>In this way the farmer who works poor land will receive the same payment, per hour of labor, as the man who works the most fertile land. The total product will represent the total number of hours necessarily expended in the production of a commodity, and men will be paid according to their labors.</p> <p>In this way groups of farmers will be practically insured against crop failures. Modern machinery will abolish all farm drudgery. The income of farm workers will be assured, as will be the income of all other necessary workers. Equal necessary effort, equal labor will mean a like recompense in every branch of industry. Exchange will be based upon labor for labor; service for service.</p> <h4>* * *</h4> <h3>Questions</h3> <p class="fst">1. When one farmer raises wheat by modern high-power machine methods and another by old small machine methods, which gets the most for his labor power when they take their products to market?</p> <p class="fst">2. Can the hand-producer ever receive as much for his labor power as the man raising the machine product under this system?</p> <p class="fst">3. Do the grain speculators who buy and sell wheat on the Boards of Trade add any value to it?</p> <p class="fst">4. Where do the profits of these, speculators come from? Do they come out of the pockets of the people who buy flour and bread or do they come out of the value produced by the grain growers?</p> <p class="fst">5. Can grain speculators sell grain to the “people” at its value and still make a profit?</p> <p class="fst">6. Did you ever hear of a farmer who, after paying the interest on his mortgage, and paying the interest on his machinery, and paying for some machinery and tools, buying seed and fertilizer and hiring “hands” to help during harvest, sold his product and the product of these “hands” at so low a price that there was scarcely anything left for the farmer?</p> <p class="fst">7. If commodities sell to the consumer at their value (or the social labor necessary to produce them), who gets the best of it, the capitalist farmer or the farmer who works his own farm?</p> <p class="fst">8. What has always happened when hand-production tried to compete with machine-production?</p> <p class="fst">9. Who produces the value that pays the banker his interest on the mortgage he holds on the “farmer’s” land?</p> <p class="fst">10. Does the farmer who owns his own elevator and storehouse and who is rich enough to hold his crops two or three years, waiting for a rise in the price of farm products, possess more capital than the farmer who has to sell his orops as soon as they are raised in order to get money to pay his debts? Well, if the rich farmer does use more capital (in elevators, storehouses, in holding his crops), does he expect a return on the additional money invested in his farm? Marx would call this additional investment merchant capital, and declares that the man possessing merchant capital expects an income on his investment equal to the average rate of profit.</p> <br /> <hr size="1" noshade="noshade" /> <h5><a href="#top">Top of the page</a></h5> <p class="updat">Last updated on 27 January 2023</p> </body> </html>