Self-sufficient smallholders establish no social bond, only spatial similarity

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

• QUESTION: If a class becomes a class only through shared relationship, what mechanisms produce that relationship where material conditions keep producers isolated?
• XREF: connects to: Isolated smallholders combine into a nation only by mere addition, not social relation; Agricultural subsistence economics structurally suppress cooperation and trust beyond the family — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 470; Smallholders form a class through mere numerical aggregation, not collective organization

Broader Connections

• Smallholders form a class through mere numerical aggregation, not collective organization #corroborates (0.95)
• Agricultural subsistence economics structurally suppress cooperation and trust beyond the family #corroborates (0.85) — Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, 470