Family cohesion vs. capitalist hegemony: Cultural accommodation on the north Dakota farm

Abstract

The economic domination of household agricultural production by agribusiness on a national scale has been so complete that for many years analysts have concluded that the independent family farm has more existence in myth than in reality. For example, Walter Goldschmidt, (Montclair, New Jersey: Allenheld, Osmun, 1978); Robert Rohwer, \ldFamily Farming as a Value,\rd 16, no. 4 (1951); Voegeler, . Given that most farmers are excluded from realizing the ideal of family owned operations sustaining generation after generation, and even the fortunate few are subject to structural economic domination by big capital, one may ask why it is that rural families have persisted in valuing this way of life. In the face of these contradictions between the family farm myth and the experience of family farmers, the persistence of agricultural individualism and its Jeffersonian ideals of rural free-enterprise is remarkable. What to make, then, of these values, of this tradition? Has the independent family farm in Mercer County (and in the rest of North America) become a mere fiction and its values merely ideology? Traditional rural society is in danger of passing from anachronism to illusion with the increasing contradictions between its values and the realities arising out of its relationship to industrial capital. These values have become more rhetorical and imaginary; they lose their substance when compromised by families and communities responding to economic crisis by binding themselves ever more tightly to the very market forces that undermine them, and they lose their traditional meaning when used in advertising to promote further industrialization. The transformation of the American heartland myth comes full circle when it is appropriated by mass media in sympathetic reports on the farm crisis. Such coverage typically highlights an individual farm couple's stoic grief as the old family place is put up on the auction block, with lamentation over the loss of this traditional institution and breaking of a farm family's continuity. Focus on these emotionally wrenching and symbolically loaded images romanticizes and obscures the historical realities of farm family life, by suggesting that family farmers as a class have ever been otherwise than economically threatened and broken-up. Media analysis mourns the passing of family farms without criticizing the structures which grind them to pieces, and so is simply another reflection of the nostalgic and individualistic ideology that supports the very fragmentation it laments. After more than a century of struggle for survival, family farmers continue to be, in the words of one exasperated activist, “victims of their own suicidal assumption that individual effort, a free market and elimination of governmental intervention will solve their economic problems”. Shirley Greene, \ldStruggle for Survival,\rd (e/sa forum-45, United Methodist Church, no date), p. 11. Farmers in the United States are political conservatives, and are notoriously difficult to organize in cooperative associations. As petty capitalists, they have been subject to the laws of motion of capitalist society, that have made their's a competitive way of life that is destructive of their families. Nonetheless, the dialectic between the ideals and the practical experiences of farming has produced ideological acquiescence to the system that has caused them so much suffering.