Reflections on Farmers Standing on Their Own Two Feet in a Market Economy

Introduction

After entering the market, farmers are drawn into a strange society full of uncertainty and risk; in the era of a subsistence-oriented economy in kind, farmers reaped a harvest for every effort they put in, but in the era of the monetary economy, effort does not necessarily bring a harvest.

The rural changes since reform and opening up have all passed through a prominent social mechanism, namely the market-economy-oriented process of rural commodification.

Has the process of marketization and commodification really increased farmers' welfare? Not exactly. When farmers stand on their own two feet amid the great tide of the market economy, although the choices they face are varied, the fate of most of them converges by different routes: those who stay in rural areas are still growing grain, cultivating forest fruits and vegetables, and raising poultry and livestock, but their income compared with their expenses is like a single hair out of nine oxen's hides; those who go to the cities to work see nothing but bright lights and a flood of material desires, yet in another corner of the city they perform arduous manual labor, receive only a basic income sufficient to feed their families, and long for their parents and fellow villagers back home.

Farmers in the stormy waves of the market economy seem to be sailing toward different distant places, yet it is hard for them to escape various conditions of displacement and being endlessly driven by life.

With remarkable economic growth, diverse types of consumption, and farmers' living needs constantly expanding, we have witnessed the penetration of the commodification process into every corner of rural China since reform and opening up, and the various changes that the market economy system has brought to the state and to agricultural policy. However, to examine rural changes against the background of marketization, we need to interpret from the perspective of commodification “how commodity relations are internalized in the small-peasant economy and in broader social relations and social practices.”

1. The Decline of Autonomy: From a Subsistence Economy to a Commodity Economy

A farmer in a village in Hebei once became wealthy through income-generating methods different from those of other people in the same village, such as raising rabbits and frying youtiao. In 2011, he was still frying youtiao, but he no longer raised rabbits. This farmer said:

“We ordinary people all rush in wherever others are crowding, and follow the trend when we see others growing something well. As a result, with insufficient vision and ability of our own, we cannot guess what will sell at a high price, and we cannot endure it when the price is low. In the end it becomes: this year planting this, next year planting that, busy every year, yet every year without a harvest. Alas! Small-peasant mentality!” (words of a Hebei farmer)

According to Bernstein's definition, commodification is a process that refers to “the elements of production and reproduction coming from market exchange and being produced for market exchange, and it is constrained by the principles and coercive force of market exchange.”

Before undergoing the process of commodification, the production and economic activities of human society were not for commodity exchange, but for directly satisfying the needs of individual producers or economic units. We call such an economic form a subsistence economy, and such a social formation a subsistence society.

With the emergence and expansion of the social division of labor and commodity exchange, humanity gradually entered a commodity society. When human production and economy directly take exchange as their purpose and economic relations emphasize exchange, we call this economic form a commodity economy, which is defined in contrast to the subsistence economy.

1. Subsistence Economy

In the subsistence economy, farmers cultivate their own small plots of land. Although farmers live lives not entirely the same as those of city people, this does not hinder them in the least from presenting a scene full of vitality: rising at sunrise and resting at sunset, farming when busy and enjoying leisure when free, family harmony and reunion, with life slow and contented.

The reason they have such leisure and ease is mainly that their survival and livelihood are basically in their own hands; they have a high degree of autonomy and relatively certain guarantees. The hardship they expend can basically be proportional to the agricultural harvest; it can be said that a harvest comes from every effort.

In a subsistence society, many farmer households raise silkworms, chickens, and pigs, or make vermicelli, tofu, and textiles, weave, or produce some handicrafts to buy and sell at market fairs. This is what Scott calls the “exit option,” the “safety valve” for farmers' survival.

Farmers' lives also depended on a large amount of public resources. Forest resources and village wasteland once gave villagers ample freedom of choice in life. For example, in addition to providing timber and income, forests also performed many other functions very important to ordinary people's lives, demonstrating prominent forest multifunctionality.

In a subsistence society, farmers enjoyed many gifts from nature, and these gifts satisfied some of farmers' major needs. For example, farmers could obtain thatch, bamboo, and timber from public wasteland for building thatched huts without spending money, and could also go fishing in nearby ponds and small rivers, and so on. These gifts of nature were within easy reach for farmers.

2. Commodity Economy

In the commodity economy, in rural society that has undergone the process of commodification, farmers first face the insecurity of the market. A fruit farmer in Hebei explained, “An individual cannot grasp market conditions. Whether the fruit grows well or poorly, one can grasp that, but how much it sells for, one cannot grasp. The market price is really impossible to understand.” Mendras found that “erratic market conditions may cause the commodities produced by farmers to lose all value.”

In rural society after commodification, the protective function of the village gradually weakened or was destroyed. Moreover, the “exit options” and public resources in the subsistence economy are constantly disappearing, and the “safety valves” for farmers' survival are constantly decreasing or even vanishing.

For example, many auxiliary occupations that once helped farmer households get through lean years have decreased or disappeared, and the bigger problem is that local forest resources, village wasteland, and public pastures have gradually disappeared. Scott pointed out that most forest land was used for commercial timber harvesting; forests were no longer communal land for farmers, pastoralists, and “tribal” residents, which meant a direct reduction in the resources they could obtain from forest land to maintain their livelihoods, and farmers' household economies became increasingly fragile.

Resources that had always been as free as air and that were still right before their eyes and within reach suddenly became off-limits to them. At the same time, for the purpose of increasing tax revenue, the formerly public right to fish in rivers was auctioned off to private bidders. In short, things that had previously belonged to farmers as natural rights were also stripped away.

2. Coercion + Encouragement: The Mechanism of Rural Commodification

1. Commodification of Means of Subsistence

Bernstein pointed out that “the commodification of the means of subsistence” refers to the process by which the elements that formerly belonged to the “independent” small peasant's means of subsistence (and therefore also the elements of reproduction) gradually come under the control of market exchange and its coercive force (commodification). The commodification of the means of subsistence means that people cannot carry out reproduction outside commodity relations and the principles they impose.

For farmers, the means of subsistence could formerly at least be obtained through non-market channels. After commodification, non-market ties were dissolved, and farmers' means of production and means of consumption increasingly needed to be purchased. Farmers' survival became increasingly dependent on market relations, and without market relations they could not survive. This is the commodification of the means of livelihood.

Farmers who enter the market find that they must spend more and more money and are also increasingly harmed by price fluctuations beyond their control.

In the process of commodifying the means of subsistence, the most noteworthy is the commodification of land. Polanyi believed that economic function is only one of land's many important functions, and to hand the fate of land and people over to the market would be tantamount to their destruction. Land is the most important means of subsistence for farmers; once it is not controlled by farmers, the magnitude of farmers' survival risk can be imagined.

2. Coerced Commodification

For some farmers, commodification is “coerced.” Bernstein believed that “coerced commodification” means that commodification is not a free choice, but a restricted “freedom.” Coerced commodification leads farmers to form a more dependent and servile relationship with exploiters.

Gu Xuebin and others pointed out that in present-day China, such phenomena are not uncommon. Even local officials in poor areas believe that industrialization and agricultural commodification are the miracle cure for escaping poverty. Ignoring the fact that farmers are the subjects of development and violating the life logic in which farmers give priority to subsistence security, they wishfully push farmers into the uncertainty of the market.

Huzhu Town in Fushun County, Sichuan Province, under the banner of returning farmland to forest, forced farmers to stop planting wheat and instead plant certain cash crops to “help” farmers increase income. Farmers were full of resentment about this. One villager said, “The year before last we planted bamboo, last year we planted citrus, and we fear that next year we will still have to plant apples. Every year we plant and then dig up, and the seedlings we planted are pulled out again. In short, nothing at all has been produced.” Is such “tossing about” of farmers really for the farmers' prosperity, or does the local government have other intentions?

In recent years, development ideas such as “adjusting the agricultural industrial structure” have been enthusiastically promoted by governments at all levels. For a time, under the pretext of adjusting the industrial structure, a wave of forcibly promoting large-scale specialized, monoculture planting spread across the country. Who is advocating adjustment of the industrial structure, and from what standpoint? Some clues may be found in the following news report:

In Miqiao Township, Ning County, Gansu Province, farmers did not understand and were unwilling to plant apple trees, but the county government advocated planting apples on the basic farmland along the highway where wheat had originally been planted, calling for “developing the apple industry, promoting structural adjustment, increasing farmers' income, and achieving prosperity for the people and strength for the township,” and proposed establishing among cadres a long-term apple-focused awareness of “judging cadres by apples, appointing cadres by apples, and producing cadres from apple orchards,” along with a responsibility consciousness and a cadre promotion and appointment mechanism. After most villagers switched to planting apple trees, they received no subsidies at all and still had to buy grain to eat. The “benefiting farmers” slogan was in fact an act of harming farmers.