A peasant class that self-produces its consumption cannot form collective political action

Evidence

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Marx had written: “Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient; it itself directly produces the major part of its consumption and thus acquires its means of life more through exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A smallholding, a peasant and his family; alongside them another smallholding, another peasant and another family. Afew score of these make up a village, and a few score of villages make up a Department. In this way, the great mass of the French nation is formed by simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 2211

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘sack of potatoes’ imagery of atomized homologous units prefigures Gramsci’s distinction between class-in-itself and class-for-itself, and connects to the reader’s toolkit on how the imagined nation vs actual social formation relate. — connects to: Wilderness ethics cannot transfer to subsistence peasant communities whose land is under assault. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 781
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘sack of potatoes’ as a template for reading contemporary atomized political subjects — gig workers, algorithmically-sorted voters — who lack the organizational infrastructure to become a class-for-itself.
• DEFINE: This is the classic presentation of the peasantry as a class that shares objective position but not internal consciousness — a foundational concept for how group identity becomes political subjectivity.