The rural poor split into day-labourers and property-owning smallholders with opposed interests

Evidence

The morti di fame are not a homogeneous stratum, and serious mistakes can be made if they are identified abstractly. In the village, and in the small urban centres of certain agricultural regions, there exist two distinct strata of morti di fame : the day-labourers, and the petty intellectuals. The essential characteristic of the day-labourers is not their economic situation but their intellectual and moral condition. The typical peasant of these regions is the smallholder or the more primitive share-cropper (whose rent takes the form of a third, half, or even two-thirds of his crop, depending on the fertility and location of his holding), who owns a few tools, a pair of oxen, and a cottage which he has often built himself on days when he is not working, and who has obtained the necessary capital either by emigrating for a few years, or by spending a few years “down the pits” or serving in the carabinieri , 341 etc., or as a servant for a big landowner—i.e. by “contriving” and saving. The day-labourer on the other hand, unable or unwilling to “contrive”, possesses nothing, is a morto di fame , because day labour is scarce and irregular. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1013

Categorization

• QUESTION: The claim that the day-labourer’s defining trait is ‘intellectual and moral condition’ rather than economics needs unpacking — worth chasing what Gramsci means concretely.
• XREF: connects to: Landowners’ tenure choices deliberately fragmented the peasantry into class allies — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 468; Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1077; Landless agricultural labourers are peasants without land rather than industrialized farm workers — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 465 (+6 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Landowners’ tenure choices deliberately fragmented the peasantry into class allies — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 468; Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 1077; Landless agricultural labourers are peasants without land rather than industrialized farm workers — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 465 (+6 more)

Broader Connections

• Serfdom’s abolition split the peasant’s fused roles into pure owners and pure laborers #expands (0.92) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 601
• Entrenched property-ownership ideals defeated the effort to treat land as a social resource #complicates (0.74) — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 1077
• Impoverished rural strata use left-wing subversivism as blackmail while siding with the right #complicates (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1015
• Abuse of land stems from regarding it as owned commodity rather than community #complicates (0.71) — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 10