The ‗domestic industry‘, the production at home or in small workshops of products paid by the piece for a market agent or a manufacturer, was a typical institution of early capitalism. For Marx, the term encapsulated the split between manufacture and
71 In relation to the role of technology, Marx said that it ‗discloses man‘s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.‘
(Marx 1967: 352fn). Therefore, there would be a direct relation between technology and social relations. Harvey (2010: 218-19) also points out, commenting on Marx‘s concept of technology, that machines ‗internalize certain social relations, mental conceptions and ways of producing and living‘, and that ‗technologies not only serve to discipline the laborer within the labor
process but also help to create a labor supply which will depress wages and worker aspirations.‘
agriculture, and the creation of a home market for capital, which took place as peasants were transformed into wage labourers and forced to go to the market to sell their labour power. The creation of a labour market was the most basic condition for capitalism (Marx 1967: chapters 32 and 33). Domestic industries for Marx were part of a transitional structure prior to large-scale industry, in which domestic industry supplemented manufacture (Marx 1967: 700):
[T]he manufacturing period, properly so called, does not succeed in carrying out this transformation radically and completely. It will be remembered that manufacture, properly so called, conquers but partially the domain of national production, and always rests on the handicrafts of the town and the domestic industry of the rural districts as its ultimate basis. If it destroys these in one form, in particular branches, at certain points, it calls them up again elsewhere, because it needs them for the preparation of raw material up to a certain point. It produces, therefore, a new class of small villagers who, while following the cultivation of the soil as an accessary calling, find their chief occupation in industrial labour, the products of which they sell to the manufacturers directly, or through the medium of merchants.
The ‗domestic industry‘ was based on the existence of an underemployed class of peasants. It can be seen then as an intermediate form ‗in which surplus-labour is not extorted by direct compulsion from the producer, nor the producer himself yet formally subjected to capital‘ (1967: 478). Marx makes the point that this form of subjection to capital is reproduced ‗here and there … in the background of Modern Industry‘ (1967:
478). From the point of view of exploitation, Marx also characterised domestic
industries as ‗dens of misery in which capitalistic exploitation obtains free play for the wildest excesses‘ (1967: 460), which is highlighted by the predominant use of child and female labour,
more than in manufacture or the factory system; because of the substitution of muscular power for machines (the opposite of the factory system); because workers are disseminated and therefore can offer less resistance; because of the ‗parasites‘
between the workman and the employer; and because the domestic industry has to compete with the factory system in the same branch of production (1967: 434-5).
It looks clear that for Marx the domestic industry was a system of exploitation based on cheap labour and was more labour intensive. Competition between the factory system and the domestic industry could only be sustained if domestic workers compensated for a lack of machinery, and a more complex organisation of work and division of labour, by extending the working day (in relation to competitors), by working harder, and by getting paid below value. While the factory system was capital intensive, relying more on the extraction of relative surplus value (the cost of goods that define the standard of living is reduced by organisational and technological change), the domestic industry
could only rely on the extraction of absolute surplus value (longer and more intense working hours). Therefore, the domestic industry, which could only prosper in the shadow of manufacture and large-scale industry, was a transitional and unstable structure in permanent crisis.
Lenin (2003: 446) defined domestic industry under capitalism as ‗the processing at home, for payment by the piece, of raw materials obtained from an entrepreneur‘, and considered it to be an industry that can be found at all stages of the development of capitalism in industry, although he associated it mainly with manufacture. There is no contradiction in Marx and Lenin as they both looked first of all at processes, tendencies, and countertendencies. The question is whether the main tendency in capitalism is towards large-scale capital-intensive industry, but neither Marx nor Lenin ruled out its reappearance. As Harvey admits (2010: 225), Marx did not ‗explicitly‘ say that the factory system would eliminate the domestic industry or even that it would prevail.
Harvey (2010: 225-226) prefers to read Marx in a ‗different way‘,
Capitalists, I would argue, like to preserve a choice of labour system. If they can‘t make sufficient profit by the factory system, they want the option to go back to a domestic system. If they can‘t make it that way, they‘ll go off to a kind of quasi-manufacturing system. That is, instead of taking the conditions Marx describes … as temporary and transitional, I prefer to read them as permanent features (options) of a capitalist mode of production in which competition between different labour systems becomes a weapon to be used by capital against labour in the struggle to procure surplus-value.
However, that ‗permanent feature‘ would not invalidate a tendency towards large-scale industry, nor the hegemony of large-scale industry. The permanence or revival of domestic industry must be, therefore, put in its historical context. In late capitalism, as David Harvey shows (1990), domestic industry and the sweatshop have come back to the most developed capitalist economies. The history of the mushroom industry and the change from large tray farms to a contract system based on family farms is related to changes in global capitalism, which Harvey characterises as a change from Fordism to Flexible Accumulation. The previous configuration –which bound big labour, capital, and big government– ended up undermining capital accumulation, leading to high inflation in a context of corporate decline in productivity and profitability after 1966 (Harvey 1990; Moody 2007). ‗Rigidities‘ were overcome by breaking up working class power (1990: 142).72 The new regime of accumulation imported to the ‗old centres‘
practices from ‗new areas‘ such as the sweatshop, rolled back union power, and
introduced where they could sub-contracting and temporary work (1990: 147-152). This
72 See also chapters 5 and 7.
new configuration opened up opportunities for small businesses and the domestic industry. This did not mean that corporation power diminished; it actually increased through mergers and corporate diversification. What happened is that small businesses were agglomerated through the dominance of powerful financial or marketing
organisations (1990: 158). We have seen how in the Irish mushroom industry there was a rapid process of concentration and centralisation in the production of inputs,
marketing and retailing in spite, or thanks to, the initial fragmentation at farming level.
The fundamental question that the crisis of the 1970s put forward to capital was how to deal with the tendency to overproduction (1990: 181). The most interesting way, according to Harvey, in which capital solves, at least temporarily, that tendency is temporal and spatial displacements. They consist (a) in accelerating turnover time or absorbing excess capital and labour supply by investments that are returned in the long term (i.e. Infrastructures), although if turnover time cannot be constantly accelerated it merely consists in a short-term solution;73 (b) Spatial displacement (spatial fix), which is a short-term solution as capitalism is implanted in the whole planet; (c) the
combination of both strategies (1990: 184). Silver (2003: 76) coined the term ‗product fix‘: capital moving to new industries and product lines. In the 1970s, temporal
displacement (investing thinking of future uses such as infrastructures, but also shorter turnover time) led to high debt and inflation, reducing the real value of previous investments. Shorter turnover time led to the destruction of the value of fixed capital assets. Competition between different areas increased leading to an over-accumulation crisis (1990: 185). The new regime of accumulation, which elsewhere Harvey described as neoliberalism (2005), was also based on a combination of the two basic strategies of
‗absolute surplus value‘ and ‗relative surplus value‘. So at both ends, unskilled and skilled (core workers) labour powers developed (1990: 186). It was the combination of both strategies that allowed for the ‗revival of domestic, familial, and paternalistic labour systems‘ such as the sweatshop (1990: 187).74 Other changes brought about were subcontracting, temporary and self-employment. For David Harvey, this is nothing
‗essentially new in the push towards flexibility‘, geographical mobility, relocation, deindustrialisation, etc.; it is related to the tendency in capitalism towards the
‗devaluation of labour power‘ (1990: 192).
The revival of the sweatshop and the domestic industry can be also explained in the context of Marx‘s law of the tendency of profits to fall. It is in fact a countervailing
73 Silver (2003: 66) speaks of the ‗technological fix‘, process innovation, and ‗lean production‘.
74 The combination of both strategies, as well the practices of subcontracting, temporary work, etc., most importantly was applied in core industries (Moody 1997; Mathur 1998).
tendency: capital saving innovations can bring in some cases increases in productivity and profits. The fall in the rate of profits, provoked by the constant increase in the
‗organic composition of capital‘,75 can be temporarily reversed by the opening of new lines of production in which the use of living labour is predominant, rather than dead labour (i.e. Machines, tools, etc.) as Harman explains (1999: 21):
If scientific knowledge is progressing and being applied as new technologies, then some of these technologies may employ less machinery and raw materials per worker than old technologies. To give a relatively recent example, the production of
newspapers using phototypesetting and lithopresses is less capital-intensive than the old method using linotype machines and letterpresses.
But that is not the end of the argument. It shows only that at any one time there will be some new technologies that are capital-saving. The important point, however, is:
what will be the average result of new technologies? Will they save capital or increase it?
What Chris Harman means is that once that innovation has been applied, further
investment will be capital intensive generally. The end result is that the average result in the long term will still be the increase of the value composition of capital. So the
branches should not impede us from seeing the forest. We will see how that is the case in the mushroom industry. In relation to the tray farms, the satellite growing system applied capital-saving technologies. We also have seen that phase II bulk composting in tunnels was also a capital-saving technology. Afterwards, however, capital-intensive investments reassumed in both farming and composting operations.
Miriam Wells (1996) in her work about the strawberry industry in California deals with the resurgence of sharecropping, which she does not consider ‗a reversion to a less
‗advanced‘ form of production‘ (1996: 278). Rather, it was a response to a shift in class power in the labour market after the mid 1960s, and a way to cope with production risks and uncertainties (1996: 284). We have seen that the labour question was also the main reason behind the shift to a satellite growing system in the mushroom industry in Ireland. Wells also questions the idea that the development of capitalist systems is uniform and unilinear, common in scholarship on work according to her, and in that I agree with her. But she goes further. She brings a quote from Capital, volume III, in which Marx says about ‗sharecropping‘, according to Wells (1999: 4):
It is a mere tradition carried over from an obsolete mode of production and managing to prolong its existence as a survival. Its contradiction to the capitalist mode of production is shown by its disappearance of itself from private contracts, and its
75 ‗The ratio of the value of the materials and fixed costs (constant capital) embodied in production of a commodity to the value of the labour-power (variable capital) used in making it.‘ (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/o/r.htm)
being forcibly shaken off as an anachronism, wherever legislation was able to intervene as in the case of church tithes in England.76
The problem is that Marx never said that about ‗sharecropping‘, as Wells argues. He was talking about rent in kind, and contrasting it with rent in work and rent in money.77 There is, however, much that is valuable in Wells‘s study on the strawberry industry.
Certainly the mushroom satellite system was more efficient than the previous one, in spite of being based on domestic industry at farm level. However, if we stop there we would get a wrong picture. Domestic industry was contingent and episodic; small farms on the bag system have already disappeared, but more important was the process of centralization and concentration in the production of inputs, in marketing and retailing, which increased its speed under the satellite system. Marx, on the other hand, provides us with ideas to understand how a domestic industry might have come back.
It constitutes a common argument in rural sociology that agriculture is labour intensive because mechanisation is either not possible or too costly. The reason is that we are dealing with a ‗natural production process‘. Goodman et al. (1987) attribute the resistance of farming to industrial production to that fact, disregarding social relations of production since ‗no industrial alternative to the biological transformation of solar energy into food has been found‘ (1987:13). That is why, in their opinion, large-scale industry tends to appropriate the production of farm inputs but not farming. Their argument is very appealing in relation to off-farm processes of appropriation and substitution in agriculture. They, for example, recognize the value of Kautsky‘s account (at the end of the 1800s) of why the family dairy farmer was able to remain in business thanks to the ability of capital to determine conditions of supply without going into production (1987: 147-8). The problem for them is that Kautsky did not explain why it was not better and cheaper to produce milk in an industrial way. Yet, corporations also
76 http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm
77 The quote actually starts like this: ‗As regards rent in kind, it should be noted now that, in the first place…‘, and the quote above follows. There is also a tendency in ‗scholarship of work‘, just to follow Wells, to uncritically and stereotypically to prove Marx wrong by taking quotes out of context. But in this case, Marx is even actually misquoted. Perhaps Marx did not anticipate the political circumstances that could make subcontracting and personalized work relations of renewed advantage to capitalist producers in the late 1990s, although Harvey‘s reading of Marx allows accounting for that phenomenon. Marx, Wells goes on, does not provide guidelines for making sense of contemporary changes (1999: chapter 9). She also argues that according to Marx ‗sharecropping‘ would be incompatible with efficient capitalist production
‗because it hampers the mobility of labor, fosters technological stagnation, and requires a repressive political system to hold it in place.‘ (1999: 300). David Harvey (2006; 2010) has produced extensive work on changes in contemporary capitalism based on Marx‘s writings, and also criticized some weaknesses in Marx‘ analyses, but never in such a simplistic (and wrong) way.
engage in large-scale farming as in the case of the lettuce industry in California
(Thomas 1985; Friedland et al. 1981) or the US mushroom industry, where large spawn and compost-making companies own large farms (see chapter 2). Moreover, Goodman et al. do not consider how and why labour is mobilised and devaluated in different contexts, and how those processes determine the mechanisation of farming and capital investments.78
In the case of the mushroom industry solar energy is not a factor in growing
mushrooms but there is a period of time, around two weeks when using compost phase III (longer for phase II), in which the growers must leave mushrooms to follow their biological course. So there is a dependence on nature which proper of agriculture (but not of industry). Mushroom growing, on the other hand, does not depend on weather or soil fertility as in other agricultural crops since mushrooms grow on a soil (compost) that is replaced for each crop. And, the way in which landed property interferes with the accumulation process is in mushroom growing also more similar to industry than to agriculture.79 A more important factor for capital to find it difficult to enter mushroom farming is that harvesting for the fresh market, the most labour intensive activity, cannot yet be mechanised. Further factors are low margins in mushroom growing, which would make capital migrate to other sectors. Nevertheless, Monaghan Mushrooms Ltd.
constitutes an economy of scale that has emerged in the last two decades in the
mushroom industry, integrating compost-making, mushroom growing, and marketing.
Small farms still account for a large part of agricultural output in industrialised countries. Corporate farm output accounted for 6 percent of the total in the US in 1980, up from 4.8 percent in 1960 (Heffernan et al. 1995: 35). On the other hand, farms of over 1,000 acres went from 23.1 percent of total area in 1920 (1 percent of all farms) to 49.2 percent in 1959 (3.7 percent of all farms) (Mandel 1968: 292). Farm size went up from 142 to 434 acres between 1900 and 2000, at the same time that the number of farms went down from 6.7 to 2.2 million. The percentage of population employed in agriculture went down even more dramatically from 42 to 1.6 percent (Douglas 2002).
Small farms, on the other hand, have been ‗integrated into a system of exploitative capitalist relations‘ (Davis 1980: 135). That integration is based on the ability of non-farming capital to control small farmers, which can take the shape of subcontracting. In
78 According to Ben Fine (Fine et al. 1996: 54) Goodman et al. correctly identify the heterogeneity of food systems and the significance of their organic content but incorrectly explain the one by the other.
79 According to Marx, land rent would be an impediment to accumulation in extensive agriculture (see Fine et al. 1996: 45)
that case, the farmer can turn into a piece-worker who sells a product rather than his labour-power (Davis 1980: 140). As we will see, what the farmer sells is actually his labour-power, because exploitative relations are concealed under that particular social relation (i.e. piece work). For Davis, the agricultural equivalent of industrial piece-wages is found in contract farming (1980: 141).
For Marx, industrial domestic work could take different forms including workshops where workers were hired and the workman became an employer of labour-power. What mattered for him was the particular ways in which labour was subjected to capital and the stage of development of capitalism at a particular moment. A study in Mexico City (Littlefield, Alice and Larry Reynolds 1990) found that subcontracting and industrial homework in Mexico City, apart from being related, were structured in a variety of hierarchical organisational forms. Multinational firms subcontracted to local firms, which in turned subcontracted to small sweatshops, which then put out part of the work to women working at home. Contract farming also presents different levels, from a relation with capitalist firms just based on the sale of agricultural products to the
For Marx, industrial domestic work could take different forms including workshops where workers were hired and the workman became an employer of labour-power. What mattered for him was the particular ways in which labour was subjected to capital and the stage of development of capitalism at a particular moment. A study in Mexico City (Littlefield, Alice and Larry Reynolds 1990) found that subcontracting and industrial homework in Mexico City, apart from being related, were structured in a variety of hierarchical organisational forms. Multinational firms subcontracted to local firms, which in turned subcontracted to small sweatshops, which then put out part of the work to women working at home. Contract farming also presents different levels, from a relation with capitalist firms just based on the sale of agricultural products to the