Self-exploitation in AFNs
Self-exploitation is a key concept of agrarian political economy that is used to explain why simple commodity producers can outcompete capitalist firms in agricultural production (Banaji 1980; Chayanov 1966; Friedmann 1978; Kautsky 1988). In its original sense, self-exploitation meant “excruciating labor by underfed peasant families damaging their physical and mental selves for a return which is below that of the ordinary wages of labor power” (Shanin 1986, 6, paraphrasing Chayanov 1966). The term originated with Karl Kautsky, who sought to explain the persistence of the peasantry in Germany in the late 1800s. Kautsky conceptualized self-exploitation by family farm units (simple commodity producers) as helping to explain why they persisted in the face of capitalist agricultural competition: “the progress of big industry does not necessarily entail the disappearance of small units. It ruins them, renders them superfluous from an economic point of view, but these units have enormous reserves of resistance” (Banaji 1980, 64). These reserves of resistance include the ability to self-exploit, including “underconsumption,” or forgoing the basic needs of individuals in the family. In other words, the family farm can “continue to produce without receiving the average rate of profit” (Mann and Dickinson 1978, 469), often temporarily when commodity prices are low (Reinhardt and Barlett 1989) “to maintain the occupancy of the land itself”