would this be a case of corporate syndicalism?
full article http://thenation.com
FEATURE STORY | November 20, 2000
The Last Farm Crisis
by WILLIAM GREIDER
The contemporary triumph of free-market capitalism has revealed to farmers,
if not to other Americans, the bitter last act in this drama. Farmers can
see themselves being reduced from their mythological status as independent
producers to a subservient and vulnerable role as sharecroppers or
franchisees. The control of food production, both livestock and crops, is
being consolidated not by the government but by a handful of giant
corporations. While farmers and ranchers suffered three years of severely
depressed prices at the close of the 1990s, the corporations enjoyed soaring
profits from the same line of goods. Growers are surrounded now on both
sides--facing concentrated market power not only from the companies that buy
their crops and animals but also from the firms that sell them essential
inputs like seeds and fertilizer. In the final act of unfettered capitalism,
the free market itself is destroyed.
In farm country these developments are often described, with irony, as
America's top-down version of collectivization. "It's interesting," said
James Horne, who leads an Oklahoma center for sustainable agriculture. "Our
system of support payments for the farmers survived about as long as the
Soviet system did, around seventy years. Now, here in the United States
we're doing exactly what the Russians are undoing in their agriculture.
They're decentralizing and we're centralizing."
Farmers tend to express the point more pungently. "We're in a death struggle
out here, and we're getting our butts kicked," said Fred Stokes, a former
career Army officer who retired to raise cattle in his home state of
Mississippi. Stokes calls himself a Reagan Republican, but frequently begins
a statement by saying, "Now, I'm not a socialist but..."
"The thing that bothers me most is the Big Brother aspect of this deal," he
said. "It's clear the government is more concerned with mining big profits
for these corporations than it is with food security or family farmers. It's
all about more money for a handful of guys who will be the elites. The rest
of us wind up swinging machetes. You talk about feudalism. This thing makes
farmers indentured on their own land; they're going to be the new serfs."
The media's usual take on this new farm crisis is a tearjerk feature story
that begins with a worried farm couple poring over bills at the kitchen
table, children crying in the background; and it closes with a romantic
elegy for Jefferson's doomed yeomanry. Too bad, but that's the price of
progress, end of story. I intend to skip over the pathos of farm families,
widespread though it is, and focus instead on the intricate economics of
monopoly power and why collectivized agriculture promises ruinous social
consequences for the rest of us. Farming, as an industry, is inescapably
different from other sectors--since weather is always a big wild card in
production--but the patterns of concentration and control in food production
provide a visible primer for what's also been under way in the larger
economy. The same great shifts in structure and market domination are fast
forming in finance and banking, telecommunications, media and other sectors.
The much-celebrated entrepreneurial spirit is steadily
neutered--"rationalized," the players would say--by the same rush of
mergers, acquisitions and "strategic alliances" among supposed rivals. (See
Adam Smith on how businessmen always yearn to escape from price competition
through collusion.)
