The disastrous impact of machinery on the peasantry

In the book The Whale and the Reactor: in search of limits in the age of high technology (1987), political science professor Langdon Winner notes the complexity of technological development in industrial society. It results from an amalgam of political choices aimed at specific social consequences (increasing segregation between rich and poor through urban planning methods, neutralizing a union by introducing a new machine into a factory even when this decision is economically irrational, etc.), and from the practical necessity imposed by the obsessive quest for efficiency (introducing a new machine to produce more with fewer people). The first case is illustrated by the example of highway bridges on Long Island that Robert Moses wanted specifically to be low to prevent poor and black buses from getting there. To illustrate the second case, Langdon Winner takes the example of the mechanical tomato harvester developed since the 1940s and introduced in California.

The introduction of this new technology then produces a cascade of deleterious consequences for society: modification of tomato varieties to force their adaptation to the machine (dynamic of adaptation of living matter to the machine also described by the economist Hélène Tordjman or by the history-sociologist Jacques Ellul), massive destruction of jobs, disappearance of thousands of farms, concentration of production in the hands of a handful of large producers, etc. Even when the intention of Departure may seem commendable at first In place (eliminating the arduous handling work during harvesting), scientific and technical progress very often ends up causing unexpected human and ecological disasters. If there were social norms that severely limited technical progress in pre-industrial civilizations or cultures, it was for good reason.

To go further on the subject of peasantry and its systematic eradication through the development of machinery, we recommend the book Taking the land back from the machines: manifesto for peasant and food autonomy of the Atelier paysan.

Illustrative image: mechanized tomato harvesting in 1959, University of California, Agriculture and Natural Resources.

The story of the mechanical tomato harvester (by Langdon Winner)

“The story of the mechanical tomato harvester, a remarkable device that researchers at the University of California have been improving continuously since the 1940s, is worth telling. This machine is capable of collecting tomatoes in a single pass per row. It cuts the plant at ground level, detaches the fruit by shaking and (on the latest models) electronically sorts the tomatoes in large plastic gondolas that contain up to twenty-five tons of product intended for canning plants. Faced with the sudden movements of these machines, agricultural researchers developed new varieties of tomatoes that were harder, more resistant and less flavorful than those that had been grown before. Mechanical harvesters replaced the manual harvesting system, in which teams of farm workers went through the fields three or four times, collecting ripe tomatoes in crates and leaving the green tomatoes for the next harvest. Studies show that using machines reduces costs by $5 to $7 per ton compared to manual harvesting. But the benefits are not evenly distributed in the agricultural economy. In reality, this agricultural machine caused a total transformation of the social relationships associated with tomato production in rural California.

By virtue of their simple size and cost (over $50,000 each), these machines are only compatible with a highly centralized form of tomato cultivation. With the introduction of this new harvesting method, the number of tomato farmers increased from around 4,000 in the early 1960s to around six hundred in 1973, and yet the tonnage of tomatoes produced increased substantially. At the end of the 1970s, an estimated 32,000 jobs had been eliminated in the tomato industry as a direct result of mechanization. Thus, a significant increase in productivity was obtained for the benefit of very large farms, and at the expense of other agricultural communities.

The research and development activities of the University of California in the field of agricultural machinery, from which this tomato harvesting machine originated, were finally the subject of a lawsuit filed by lawyers from California Rural Legal Assistance, an organization representing a group of farmers and other actors in the sector. University officials were accused of spending taxpayer money on projects that only benefited a handful of private interests at the expense of farm workers, smallholders, consumers, and rural California in general. They required an injunction from the Court to stop these practices. The university contested these accusations, arguing that upholding them “would require the suppression of any research that has any potential practical application.”

No one, to my knowledge, claimed that the development of the tomato harvesting machine was a conspiracy. A study by William Friedland and Amy Barton on this controversy completely innocent the researchers behind the machine and the resistant tomato: they had no intention of facilitating economic concentration in this sector. What we see at work here, on the contrary, is a continuous social process in which scientific knowledge, technological invention, and profit reinforce each other, for deep-rooted structural reasons, in which the hallmark of political and economic power is easily recognized. For decades, research and development activities in agricultural education have tended to favor the interests of large agribusiness companies. It is because of these subtly entrenched patterns that opponents of innovations such as the tomato-picking machine are branded as opponents of technology or progress. Because this machine is not only the symbol of a social order that rewards some and afflicts others, it is a real materialization of this social order.”

— Langdon Winner, The Whale and the Reactor — In search of limits in the age of high technology, 1987.