Southern Italian rentier ownership extracts surplus from a malnourished peasantry

Evidence

The fact that has not yet been properly studied is this: that the ownership of medium-sized and small property in the rural areas is not in the hands of the peasant cultivators but of a small-town bourgeoisie and that the land is given over to primitive share-cropping [mezzadria ], that is, rented in exchange for natural goods and services, or is leased against rent [enfiteusi ]. This means that there exists, in proportion to gross landed income, an enormous bulk of petty and middle bourgeoisie living on “pensions” and “rents”, which has created, in a species of economic literature truly worthy of Candide , the monstrous figure of the so-called “producers of savings”, an economically unproductive stratum which not only extracts its own sustenance from the primitive labour of a specific number of peasants, but also manages to save. This is the most hideous and unhealthy means of capital accumulation, because it is founded on the iniquitous usurial exploitation of a peasantry kept on the verge of malnutrition, and because it is inordinately expensive, since the small saving of capital is offset by the incredible expenditure which is often necessary to maintain a high standard of living for such a great mass of absolute parasites. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1053

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines mezzadria and enfiteusi, the two land-tenure forms behind the parasitic small-town bourgeoisie.
• XREF: Connects to the toolkit’s colonial-property and class-formation concepts later invoked in Islamophobia readings on extractive economies and the comprador bourgeoisie. — connects to: Landlord surplus extraction stripped peasants’ means to manure, exhausting soils — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 267; Peasants in postwar Italy reorganized production around subsistence needs rather than profit — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 381