by David Monod
History Department, Wilfrid Laurier University
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The interest shown by turn-of-the-century bureaucrats and educators in agriculture is certainly curious. No other field of endeavour drew so much investigation, quantification or exhortation; no other area was subjected to so much well-intentioned provocation. Rural Canadians were bombarded with advice on how to raise chickens, hem skirts, make fences, can vegetables, repair engines and choose crops. What government official would have considered offering this kind of information to urban workers, much less to other small proprietors? It seems incredible today that census-takers were calculating the number of farmers having gravel driveways and indoor toilets decades before they considered counting the same amenities in cities. But the truth remains that in pre-WWII Canada more official information was published about cows and wheat then about artisans or doctors or retailers.
A horse drawn cultivator in Saskatchewan, no date.
Source: Saskatchewan Archives Board
The question is why? Doubtless, as David Danbom has observed, the principle purpose of all the enquiry and advice was “to make farmers a productive supplement to the increasingly dominant industrial sector.” [1] But this was equally the urge with merchandising and transportation—sectors which did not attract anything approaching the same volume or variety of interest and intrusion. No, what was singular about agriculture was the way in which people who did not farm felt entitled to supervise and instruct those who did. And at bottom here are a couple of deep-rooted ideas: first, that North American agriculture was a governmentally nurtured and subsidized industry and as such the property of the larger polity, and second that farmers had an obligation to maintain non-farmers, and therefore the community had the right to make sure they provided its sustenance in the most effective and economical way possible. In holding these views, urban people were transforming individual farmers into peripheral agents—temporary occupiers of fecund land with a permanence and productivity unrelated to their work upon it. This is one reason why rural out-migration and the abandonment or appropriation of farmland became so unfathomably worrying to urban people: as a societal resource productive land could never be allowed to disappear.
In the late nineteenth century, these ideas took on a new relevance thanks to the realization of rural depopulation—not on the prairies, of course, where the number of farms continued to increase until the middle-Depression years, but in older settled regions. Because of their pervasiveness in the east, out-migration and economic stagnation came to be considered the fate of all rural communities. And it was paradoxically to stem the anticipated tide in the west that reformers worked to make farm production remunerative and rural life fulfilling. Perversely enough, in promoting technological changes which increased outputs and reduced prices and in narrowing the distance between city and country, governmental and private sector initiatives to ‘modernize’ agriculture undoubtedly advanced the very depopulation they sought to hold in check.
It is good that Jeffery Taylor’s Fashioning Farmers asks us to question afresh some of our assumptions about agriculture. This is because the work provides not so much a history of efforts to reform rural life as a dissection of the structures of modem thinking about farming. This is a book about the way both governmental officials and rural people conceptualized the farmer. Or, more accurately, it deals with the new attitudes to self which farmers—under the influence of governmental efficiency experts—came to accept as their own. In this sense, it is concerned not with specific arguments or particular people, but with forms of self-conception. In its terminology, approach and assumptions it owes its greatest debt to French structuralist marxism. In fact, at the heart of Taylor’s work is the structuralist inversion of both Cartesian and ‘common-sense’ philosophies. Here the individual self is conceived as a social construct and society is presented as a diachronic projection of unconscious, universal and synchronic forms and relationships. This is relatively unknown terrain to Canadian historians, and it is unfortunate that Taylor makes so little effort to render it more accessible. For though his ideas are complex and unfamiliar, he runs through his theoretical assumptions in seven-league-boots. Hopefully, the rather extended commentary that follows will throw some light on the work’s darker intellectual crevices.
Manitoba Agricultural College, Fort Garry, circa 1920.
Source: Archives of Manitoba
According to Taylor, in their effort to ‘modernize’ agricultural production, educators and state officials altered the way in which farm people conceptualized farm production, agrarian self-hood and rural society. Using the Patrons as spokespeople for nineteenth century thinking about agrarian life and work, Taylor argues that farmers conceived themselves as “toilers” who shared with industrial workers “an understanding of capitalist development that made sense of their common experience of exploitation”. He then follows Ramsay Cook in suggesting that the thing uniting “toilers” was a labour theory of value—a doctrine holding that the worth of a good derived from the labour expended in its production. This “producerist” idea led naturally to the classification of all those who lived upon the toil of others (whether industrial employers, merchandisers, lawyers or railway operators) as ‘plutocrats’ and ‘parasites’. Moreover, in conceiving labour as the source of value, nineteenth century farmers had no concept of ‘consumers’ as autonomous agents in the marketplace. Production (plus parasitic profits added later) determined price, supply created its own demand, and consumer cooperation was a mechanism for cutting out the ‘middleman’ rather than a way of making spending into an economic weapon. [2]
Among Manitoba farmers, it was the founding of the Manitoba Agricultural College (MAC) in 1904 that Taylor suggests began the process of transforming these agrarian thought-structures. Through lectures, extension courses and a club network, the MAC is seen to have created a new framework of identification which it revealed in discipline-bound theoretical constructs. Agricultural economics undermined the labour theory of value and replaced it with a price/market driven approach, home economics established a new conception of woman as domestic efficiency expert, and rural sociology created a new image of ‘community’, centred not on producerist identifications, but on localized groups and institutions which were geared to the correction of “social problems”. Together, the new ideology promoted by the MAC superceded the older producerist ethos as farmers were led to reconceive themselves as competitive individualists, “professionals” with “a claim on middle-class identity,” ‘businesspeople’ with a social conscience and a desire to do good works within their localities. [3] This history does not deal with how individuals employed those ideas. Rather it outlines the concepts and takes their assumption somewhat for granted.
The proof Taylor offers for the emergence of a “bourgeois ethos” as the ‘dominant’ rural ideology comes largely from associations. A “new conservative agrarianism”, he argues, became “systematized” between 1916 and 1925 and emerged as the controlling ideology of the United Farmers’ of Manitoba (UFM). Unlike the Patrons, who had seen the tariff as an instrument of “monopolistic oppression”, “Brackenites” perceived it to be a type of “market distortion”; unlike the Patrons who had seen producer cooperation as a form of class struggle, the UFM promoted pooling as a way of making members better farmers and businesspeople; unlike the Patrons, who had struggled to forge a producerist alliance, the new agrarians emphasized “rural community” issues over class identities. While farm men were being “Brackenized” in these ways, farm women were being led to construct their own identities out of an amalgam of “middle class [urban] feminism” and the ‘masculine’ language of community-oriented reformism. [4] Ultimately, this served to destroy what Taylor implies was the farm women’s gender-neutral producerist self-image and to recreate them as individualistic consumers. Older forms of self-conception did survive—manifesting them-selves in periodic reassertions of a labour theory of value, and in Farmers’ Unity League and early CCF support—but the “residual radicalism” would eventually also surrender itself to the dominant ideology.
Except in the case of organized women, who are allowed limited opportunity to speak for themselves and thereby show how the new imagery was adopted and employed, Taylor relies on the views of UFM officials and government leaders to reveal the ascendancy of the dominant ideology. That the dominant ideology might have been adapted rather than memorized, that ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ forms did not necessarily confront each other as block-like opposites (the one “displacing” the other), that people might prove gifted at infusing the categories of a dominant ideology with their own interests, are all propositions implicitly rejected by Taylor. Further, in disconnecting “knowledge” from new and expensive farm technologies and from changes in agricultural income, Fashioning Farmers isolates the theory of business-farming from its practice. Finally, in treating farmers as homogeneous “simple commodity producers” Taylor clearly minimizes the potential existence of alternate ideologies based on such things as ethnicity or wealth.
These omissions are no oversight. The importance assigned here to mutually-exclusive forms of agrarian thought is a clearly declared theoretical postulate and is in keeping with the work’s heavy reliance on the early writings of the Paris-based philosopher Louis Althusser. Taylor’s history, like Althusser’s philosophy, is concerned with challenging the subjectivism of humanistic marxism while at the same time avoiding economic reductionism. For Taylor, as for Althusser, individuals do not make their own history in any conscious or voluntaristic way; they are instead expressions of the criss-crossing structures that underpin their world. Unfortunately, because Althusser is not much read any more (he was always more rebuked than appreciated by English-speaking marxists) and because Taylor’s theoretical explanation is vague (there is no index, but I counted just three references to the French philosopher in the four or five pages devoted to theory), his intellectual debt might not be immediately apparent. To fully appreciate Taylor’s work one must, therefore, undertake the quintessentially Althusserian task of ‘reading the absences’ in the text.
Laboratory at the Lethbridge Experimental Station, Lethbridge, Alberta, 1912.
Source: Glenbow-Alberta Institute
In the 1960s Althusser claimed he was offering a “left-wing critique of Stalinism”, by which he meant both an attack on vulgar economic determinism and a denunciation of what he considered to be “right wing” western marxism. Rejecting a correspondence theory of perception whereby what is known is a reflection of what is, Althusser separated the “real condition of existence” from the “understanding” of that reality and suggested that while the true “invests” the imagined, perceptions “express a will” and therefore do not actually mirror what is. Indeed, the very relationship between the “real” and our understanding of it was, for Althusser, culturally dependent. Because “the material essence” (the real) was not reproduced so much as approximated in the human perception of it, it was clear that reality could not “determine” the image of itself, just as it followed that “consciousness” could not flow from simple experience. Something had to intercede between the material and the perception of it; something which preceded it and had the autonomy to “distort it”. To use Althusser’s much maligned phrase, material realities determined under-standing only “in the last instance”, by which he meant something like the view from a fixed position: realities (such as ‘objective’ class positions) located people on the landscape, but what they saw and how they made sense of what lay about them were matters of “ideology”. [5]
“Ideology” had a very special meaning for Althusser. Unlike “sciences”, which he felt questioned their own “theoretical presuppositions”, ideologies were made up of the unconscious assimilated images and myths through which people organized their world. Using Freudian categories, Althusser suggested that the human ‘ego’ (the consciousness that mediated between the “individual in his unique essence” and “society”) was constituted by “ideology”. Then using structuralist ideas, he argued that the images comprising that ideology were part of an unconscious system of rules and conventions lying beyond history. By “ideology”, then, Althusser was referring to the eternal system of differentiation upon which structuralists suggested all cultures were based. This system, rather than “experience” or “perception”, guided human understanding. Ideology stood between people and reality and its role was to transform nature’s “concrete materiality” into the “idea of the thing” which was felt, seen, tasted, understood or remembered. [6]
Ideologies did, however, take different forms and they did possess a history. In fact, each society was organized through its own distinctive myths, rules and codes. To use one of Roland Barthes’ not dissimilar, but infinitely more appetizing, examples, steak-and-chips was for the French more than a thing, it was a taste, an image, a “stand-in” for a type of lifestyle. The dish carried patriotic associations which had nothing to do with the food itself, or individual taste, but which derived from the “culture” of the community as a whole. Althusser also believed ideology “loaded” all perception with meanings. In the first place, human understanding was organized through eternal binary oppositions (bleu versus a point, in the case of steak), moreover, the “ideologies” which guided our perceptions and experiences of things served quite specific purposes. A dominant class, like the bourgeoisie, did not “rule” because it possessed certain material instruments, rather “in its own constitution of itself as the ruling class” it accepted and was acknowledged by the population in its rule. Power only existed through the acceptance of its legitimacy, which Althusser insisted was achieved through the valuation of realities like steak-and-chips in the interest of elite power. [7]
Dominant classes could use “State Apparatuses” to foster the ideological images which legitimized their authority (creating thereby a “Structure in Dominance”). Those with power employed the apparatuses of the State—which Althusser defined as not only the police, military, judiciary and government, but also the family, trade unions and, most importantly, the education system—to reconstruct and subordinate the individual’s sense of self and place. Eating steak-and-chips, for example, led people to feel one with the nation and its valuation as a ‘French’ food thereby helped to undermine social protest by legitimizing the authority of the state. Similarly, workers in a capitalist society were “mystified” by the idea that they were “free” wage-earning labour. Ideas like democracy and individuality were “imaginary relations” by which people conceived of their selfhood and accepted a society that in reality imprisoned and exploited them. Althusser used the term “interpellation” to describe the process whereby individuals reconstitute themselves as conscious subjects while nonetheless accepting the subordination involved in socialization. Interpellation was, for Althusser, a method whereby “dominant” ideology became everyday or “practical”. [8]
Only “science” escaped the pervasive power of the dominant ideology. Althusser postulated that in developing true “knowledge” based on the questioning of its own precepts, science was able to break the closure of a particular cultural system. Science began with a theory, followed with a method and then used the theory and the method to “diagnose” and “treat” the object of its theory (“self-criticism”, he dubbed it). In so doing, only science went beyond the unquestioning acceptance of a given reality to actually “transform its own object” through enquiry. Science alone achieved “knowledge’, because “knowledge’ flowed from an understanding of the “problematic” which ideology obscured. Hence Althusser’s paradoxical assertion that real science must be “purified” of the “contamination” of perceived or accepted “reality”. [9]
This all might have sounded like ultima Thule to Manitoba farmers, but Taylor’s work serves as a meeting place for such ostensibly unconnected things. The novelty of Taylor’s vision lies not in his exploration of the ideas of rural sociologists and efficiency experts, but in his recentring of the dynamic of change and in his determination to justify that re-ordering through theory. He therefore dispenses with his discussion of economic issues at the beginning (placing his subjects on the “last-instance” class terrain), before he even addresses the problem of ideology. Once the topic of ideology is introduced, he never looks back, maintaining the impression that new forms of capitalism and new methods of production affected farmers not directly, but interpreted through, and as a new perception of, self and society. In this way, the efficiency experts of the MAC did not simply teach techniques, they changed the farmers’ understanding of themselves and their world. Modernity brought not so much new tools as new eyes.
Consider, for example, Taylor’s presentation of the transformation of the female farm worker into the modem housewife in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The change did not originate, as Ruth Schwartz Cowan or Veronica Strong Boag have suggested, in new methods of working or buying—household appliances, consumer credit, mass distribution, or psychological advertising—as, before WWI, “the domestic labour of [Prairie] farm women was changed in [only] limited ways.” Rather, Taylor presents the transformation as entirely “ideological” and he traces its origin to the dissemination of “home economics” information through Women’s Institutes (which he implies were instruments of the State) and through the extension courses of the MAC. Home economics led women to treat their homes as business enterprises to be “scientifically man-aged”. More important, by teaching marginal economics, they shattered women’s sense of themselves as “producers” and reconstituted them as “consumers”. Ultimately, in promoting bourgeois ‘feminist’ values through Women’s Institutes, the educators also undermined the farm women’s identification with the “toiling” masses. In this way, “by participating in Home Economics Societies and Women’s Institutes, women not only learned household skills, but they also acquired a social identity.” [10]
Like Althusser, Taylor feels that real change can only be affected by the revolutionary actions of groups capable of supplanting one ideational construction with another. A new “ideology” had to be interpellated for nineteenth century producerism to be supplanted. Consequently, the ‘modernist’ ideology disseminated by the Agricultural College is presented as a “science” (in the Althusserian sense) which was capable of generating a new “agricultural knowledge”. Rural education, for example, is described as proceeding from a thesis (that there was a farm problem) to a method (the identification of “significant facts”), to a resolution. [11] And, like Althusser, who was far more concerned with ideas than with their employment, Taylor simply assumes the interpellation of the MAC’s modernist ideology. As Althusser explained it, ideologies were inevitably assimilated (“interpellated”) “by the Law of Culture on every involuntary, conscripted candidate to humanity.” [12]
In the case of farm women, this approach clearly runs against much of the new work in the field. Katherine Jellison, for example, has recently rather persuasively argued that farm women “adapted” and “interpreted” home economics in light of their own experiences and needs. Further, a good case has been made for the emergence of a homegrown “producerist” feminism within nineteenth century organizations like the Patrons. In addition, farm women’s lives were being affected by new consumer goods, by mass advertising and by broadening shopping opportunities. And finally, though marginal utility made great strides among academic economists before WWI, it is difficult to believe a theoretical approach that was only just establishing its dominance within the profession, should have so effectively “displaced” the farmers’ labour theory of value by as early as 1925. [13] But in rejecting these arguments, Taylor is holding fast to his Althusserian position. As “the real” only exists for people as an experience of ideology, it follows that while ideas could change realities, experiences could never alter ideology.
And yet, at other moments in Fashioning Farmers, Taylor seems less certain. Though his whole approach seems predicated on the separation of and precedence for ideas over realities, he is clearly uncomfortable with the totality of Althusser’s idealism and elitism. Unwilling to fully embrace structural marxism’s blatant intellectualism (only philosopher/scientists can generate the knowledge needed to free humanity from ideological bondage), Taylor attempts to dilute Althusser with a spritz of Gramsci. The long and bitter debate between humanist and structuralist marxists, he optimistically declares, was merely “putative.” The differences never really existed and can be easily reconciled. Unfortunately, real problems result from Taylor’s blithe attempt to plaster over the divisions in modern marxism.
The trouble arises when Taylor steps on that noted land-mine in Althusserian theory, the question of the relationship of class feeling to the dominant ideology. Althusser never entirely explained how one was to rationalize a “last instance” perception with “interpellated” ideas, but the logic of his argument leads one to the conclusion that while “objective” class positions might lead to variations in the way the dominant ideology was expressed, they did not obstruct its actual “absorption.” This was why Althusser disdained ordinary people and never thought their efforts at reform could amount to anything: whatever they did they could never shatter the closure of the dominant ideology (hence his contempt for the students in 1968).
John Bracken, President, Manitoba Agricultural College, 1920.
Source: Archives of Manitoba
Although it may be to his credit, this is too much for Taylor. “Critical” perspectives like patronism (the rural voice of nineteenth century “producerism”), must, he feels, occupy a different plane from the “agricultural knowledge” of the “Brackenites.” Unfortunately, demonstrating this is no mean task as it requires him to defend the rather anti-Althusserian idea that in the late nineteenth century a “popular” agrarianism could lie beyond the reach of ideology. Ultimately, Taylor tries to do in two ways: first by suggesting that “the production process is the material base for the creation of critical ideologies” and second, by assimilating the marxist-humanist confidence in individual agency. “Theoretical ideologies” he maintains, “connected with actual human subjects to form social identities.” Or again, the “receiver” of ideology “is participating in an ongoing process of formation and reformation.” In other words, for Taylor an “actual” human subject did exist in the late nineteenth century and lived in “real” relationships unbeclouded by ideological interpellation. [14]
Of course, Althusser would never have approved such a patently “bourgeois” assertion. Althusser believed the crucial moment of interpellation occured the first time an infant recognized him/herself in the mirror (thereby objectifying his /her subjectivity). Taylor, however, suggests that dominant ideologies are “ordered” by the adult receiving subjects in ways that are “meaningful” and consistent with their “experiences.” Of course, Taylor must maintain this argument if he is to separate ideologies perpetuating the class structure from the common truth which would naturally seek to destroy it. There must be an “experience” of reality separate from and independent of its ideological perception. It should, however, be clear that this argument is at odds with his overall approach to ideologies. Because Taylor elsewhere follows Althusser in rejecting the direct correspondence of reality and perception (as in “knowledge is the region ... where meaning is produced”); in placing thought before action (“knowledge ... gives human labour its uniqueness”); and in accepting ideologies as “structures” that transcend individuals (through interpellation people are “subjected to a system or systems of representation”), his view that the relations of production might generate the tools of “true” understanding seems untenable. The experience of work and the perception of social relations would, after all, be pre-determined even in the nineteenth century by ideas; ideas which Taylor (in his more Althusserian moments) does acknowledge to be “at the centre of [that] production.” [15]
But it is not just the internal consistency of his argument that is damaged by his struggle to harmonize Althusserian and humanistic marxism. The difficulty is that Taylor wants to pit heroic ordinary farmers against an ideologically dominant State mechanism. This means that he must give farmers some basis for resisting ideology. Which is why he presents “producerism” as real (derived from the actual experience of production), and “knowledge” (generated by the capitalist/state apparatus via the MAC) as false. He cannot accept, as Althusser doubtless would, that nineteenth century “producerism” was simply an earlier variant of a dominant ideology (classical liberalism) which served the interests of an emergent capitalist order. [16] After all, an Althusserian might say, in struggling for shop-floor control or improved incomes, workers and farmers were conceiving themselves as “independent” proprietors with the right to profit from their own labour. They, and their equally “independent” employers, were not talking different languages; they were each struggling for control of a common notion of independence and ownership. As Patrick Joyce has suggested with respect to the English working class in the nineteenth century, artisans traced their radicalism to liberalism, and not to some experiential socialism (similarly, the Patrons praised Gladstone as “among the nineteenth century’s greatest men” and always found it difficult distinguishing themselves from the Laurier Liberals). In our case, the Manitoba Patrons’ emphasis on “their bond of union,” not with all “toilers,” but with artisans and shopkeepers, should be noted. The ideology of these groups was a variant of a common entrepreneurial ethos, though admittedly one whose connotations—freedom, control over one’s labour, work-pride, industriousness, self-sacrifice—had become a battleground between emerging big businesspeople using traditional proprietary values to justify the creation of a docile wage-labour force and workers defending their equally proprietary right to control their own labour. [17] Such a bleak presentation would, admittedly, undermine the romance of the late nineteenth century class struggle, and Taylor is in good company when he rejects it. But in so doing Fashioning Farmers winds up defending the rather unlikely scenario of a “free” and “critical” people suddenly losing not only their “practical” ideology but also their freedom to experience “truth” and becoming deluded pawns of the Manitoba Agricultural College.
Taylor’s romanticism has other implications. In suggesting that critical ideologies are “real” and dominant ones “interpellated,” Taylor makes the radicalism of the Farmers’ Unity League and the CCF into an artifact of “truth” in a beclouded world. But, one is tempted to ask, if at least some farmers were able to “exercise” the experience-based producerist option right through the 1930s, they must have been free to resist the dominant ideology’s remaking of their sense of reality (Taylor implies as much on p. 17). Moreover, and this is admittedly to return us to an earlier point, if experience could serve as a forge of critical ideology in the nineteenth century, and survive as an ideational possibility well into the twentieth, why could it not work to “dilute” or “adapt” the dominant ideology rather than simply to resist it on the one hand or capitulate to it on the other? In other words, what would prevent farmers from making the MAC’s “knowledge” their own and turning it into a “critical ideology”?
Appealing though it is, Taylor’s portrait of late nineteenth century “critical” ideology—especially on the evidence of the Patrons—is exceedingly sentimental. The Patrons were not the class conscious dirt farmers he wants them to be; they were, by and large, members of the most affluent sectors of the farm population and they wanted hard cash to grow in their machine-and-migrant-tended fields. They were not out to dismantle the class structure or smash capitalism, though they did object to the increasing power of the big corporations (many of them were, however, outspokenly supportive of such ‘good’ trusts as the T. Eaton Company, which worked to lower retail prices). Nor were they so antediluvian in their thinking as to be unable to play the system when it profited them. Certainly they were market-oriented enough to know that the price of their wheat was determined by grain buyers and not by labour-inputs. They were, it is true, “supply-side” in their economic thinking to the extent that they felt it was the size of the crop and the date of delivery that determined the price, but they also appreciated the logic of demand. Indeed, one of the Patron’s major activities was to organize members to hold their wheat until the price hit a pre-determined level and they published their marketing advice in coded messages in the Patron’s Advocate. “Let us act,” observed the paper’s editor, “as business men do who have something to sell, and who, by judiciously limiting the quantity offered attempt to regulate and support the price.” [18]
Still, Taylor is right in suggesting that the Patrons were not the chromo-crazed progressives Paul Voisey located in early twentieth century Vulcan. But in emphasizing their sense of “value” he forgets that it was price that most concerned them. To describe these people as “simple commodity producers” or “toilers” is to accept the stereotype while undervaluing the evidence. Late nineteenth century commercial wheat farmers were Victorian proprietors who shared their cultural blinkers with other “independent men.” Of course, business meant something different for these people then it would come to mean in the twentieth century; it meant the family enterprise, a form of property that was more than simply owned or worked by families (a widow with no children and hired workers could still run a “family farm”), but that was managed and conceptualized in singular ways. At the core of their self-image was the notion that independent proprietorship generated social harmony, moral courage and national progress. The hired-hands (itself a delightfully ‘familial’ expression) were not to be imagined as wage-earners but as neighbours helping-out (hence the crucial symbolism of the gargantuan meals farm-wives prepared for the migrant harvest-workers). Similarly, machinery—while an obsession for Victorian farmers—was conceived in moral terms as a symbol of human achievement and intelligence. For Victorian proprietors it was not just economics that was involved in modernization, it was social betterment and national uplift. This was why the distinction between price and value remained so crucial to the family farmers’ conception of their independence and status. Though in business to make money, they saw their earnings as reflections of the intrinsic worth of their activities as “producers of natural wealth.” Prices were arbitrary to the extent that they could be too low (incommensurate with the value of the work) or too high (thereby generating obscene profits). And they objected to both with equal vigour. Victorian farmers had the independent businessperson’s dislike for inherited fortune and wealth: as a manifestation of the value of labour, money was best enjoyed in moderation. And so, when the Advocate defined its support for socialism, it did so by commenting that what it really meant was making it “beyond the power of any man to become a millionaire.” [19]
Ideas such as these were no more a “real” reflection of the nineteenth century farmers’ actual work practices than was the mass production ethos of the mid-twentieth century. Both were cultural constructs with historical, practical and ideological foundations. [20] Nor should one be misled by the conventions of the Patrons’ protest rhetoric into portraying them as simple “producers.” The language of nineteenth century populist protest was undoubtedly over-the-top—a kind of agrarian verismo—but it was also highly stylized and conventional. They often referred to themselves as a “class” but then so too did manufacturers and retailers and independent artisans, and none of these people saw themselves as victims of systemic exploitation or believed their mission was to revolutionize the economy. Though they did not like the way the growth of big businesses had led to a marginalization of their own property, though they were appalled by the widening disparities of wealth and power, and though they worried over the fact that they had somehow lost touch with their government, theirs was an economic system controlled by visible hands. Harmony and order could be restored by driving the monopolists and boodlers and cheats from the temple of property. Patrons knew that they shared these ideas with other self-employed, independent, and work-proud tradespeople; and while they insisted they were little better than the “chattel slaves” (wage labourers) of the implement companies, grain buyers and railway magnates, they would have been deeply offended if anyone had taken them at their word.
Consequently, even though Taylor is right in pointing out the gradual loss of this rural speech and the increasing use of an imagery developed for mass production industries, he exaggerates the depth and nature of the transformation. It seems to me more an adaptation of proprietary business speech than a transformation from “producer” (real) to “capitalist” (artificial). What Taylor is documenting is not so much an “epistemological break” and a loss of truth, as a gradual and incomplete accommodation of Victorian capitalist thinking to the new corporate terminology. Farmers continued to imagine their land in proprietary, capitalistic and commercial ways, but the meanings given to trade, profit and ownership changed over the course of the new century. The Victorian confidence in the value of honest toil was appended to and amended by a modern faith in scientific management and technological innovation.
And yet, despite its romanticization of the nineteenth century’s toiling masses, and for all the occassional thinness of evidence and questionable twists of theory, Fashioning Farmers is a book that demands contemplation, appreciation and discussion. It is original, imaginative and daring—things rare enough in Canadian history—and it would be warmly welcomed even if it had done no more than broaden the theoretical debate through the introduction of French structuralist categories. It does, however, provide more than just a new way of interpreting tired evidence; it initiates a critical reassessment of farm organizations, rural education and agrarian self-perception and it blasts away at the Aubrey-Woods-style-hagiography that has mounded up over farm protest since the 1920s. It is a thin book thick with ideas and even as one questions the workability of an Althusserian model half-destroyed by contradictory humanistic appurtenances, there is no doubting its importance or appeal. While not always convincing, this is an exceptionally interesting work and I sincerely hope it finds a wide and engaged audience.
Harvesting near Stuartburn, Manitoba, 1918.
Source: Archives of Manitoba
1. D. B. Danbom, The Resisted Revolution; Urban Life and the Industrializationof Agriculture, 1900-1930 (Ames, 1979), viii.
2. J. Taylor, Fashioning Farmers: Ideology, Agricultural Knowledge and the Manitoba Farm Movement, 1890-1925 (Regina, 1994), 22, 90-8; G. R. Cook, ‘Tillers and Toilers: The Rise and Fall of Populism in Canada in the 1890s’, Canadian Historical Association, Historical Papers (1984), 13-14.
4. Fashioning Farmers, 98-101; 108-16.
5. T. Benton, The Rise and Fall of Structural Marxism: Althusser and his Influence (New York, 1984), xi; L. Althusser, Reading Capital (London, 1970), 87; Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London, 1971), 37-8; Reading Capital, 25.
6. Althusser, For Marx (New York, 1969), 231-2; Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy (London, 1971), 218-9 and 170-71.
7. Essays on Ideology, 33-4; R. Barthes, Mythologies (London, 1976), 62-4; For Marx, 233-4.
8. Essays on Ideology, 20-31; For Marx, 234-5; Essays on Ideology, 83-84; Lenin and Philosophy, 160-71.
9. For Marx, 70, 166-68, 174, 181-89 and 252; Reading Capital, 58-9,156-7, 105 and 117.
10. Fashioning Farmers, 13, 42-3 and 80.
11. Fashioning Farmers, 17 and ch. 4. From an Althusserian perspective it is, however, hard to justify Taylor’s belief that the MAC disseminated “knowledge” at all. Rather, in failing to question its own proposition that there was a “rural problem,” bourgeois agrarianism constructed its solution on the basis of a thesis serving “real” as opposed to “theoretical” goals. Which would make agricultural education a variant on existing bourgeois ideology rather than an epistemological break.
13. K. Jellison, Entitled to Power: Farm Women and Technology, 1913-1963 (Chapel Hill, 1993), ch.2; D. Marti, Women of the Grange: Mutuality and Sisterhood in Rural America, 1866-1920 (New York, 1991) and M. Neth, ‘Building the Base: Farm Women, the Rural Community and Farm Organization in the Mid-West, 1900-1940’, in W. G. Haney and J. B. Knowles, eds., Women and Farming: Changing Roles, Changing Structures (Boulder, 1988), 26-42; Taylor relies on Goodwin’s whiggish argument about the triumph of marginal utility, but ignores less certain articles in the same volume, such as Stigler’s ‘The Adoption of Marginal Utility Theory’, in R. D. Collison Black, A. W. Coats and C. D. W. Goodwin, eds., The Marginal Revolution in Economics (Durham, 1973), 305-20.
14. Fashioning Farmers, 67 and 17.
15. Fashioning Farmers, 15-17.
16. Though he does, at one point, unfathomably contradict his own argument by suggesting that the ‘farmer as capitalist’ was a ‘dominant ideology’ as early as 1894, Fashioning Farmers, 91.
17. The traces of this Althusserian perspective can be found in Jacques Ranciere’s argument that working class radicalism was a “borrowing” from middle-class notions of freedom and work-pride, The Nights of Labor (Philadelphia, 1989). P. Joyce, Visions of the People (Cambridge, 1991) and on the struggle over language, R. Gray, ‘The Languages of Factory Reform in Britain, 1830-1860’ in P. Joyce, ed., The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987), 143-79. As Michael Bliss has shown, most Canadian manufacturers clung tight to a labour theory of value of their own right up to the First World War. A Living Profit (Toronto, 1974), 27-8, 103-4. Gladstone is praised in Patron’s Western Sentinel, 23 September 1896. On the meaning of “toilers”, Patron’s Advocate, 3 October 1894.
18. Patron’s Advocate, 21 October 1894; 17 April 1895.
19. Patron’s Advocate, 24 July 1895.
20. The similarity of nineteenth century agrarian views to those of businessmen documented in M. Bliss’ A Living Profit or F. Roy’s Progr is striking.
Page revised: 26 September 2012
