The survival of agricultural petty production and the evaluation of its theoretical significance have posed a problem to sociological research on agriculture. The three most important contemporary approaches - modernization theory, structural Marxism and neo-Weberian subjectivism - have been driven into an acute crisis resulting from their failure to resolve this problem. It is argued that this crisis is rooted in an ontological and epistemological dualism shared by all of these approaches. The crisis can be overcome by means of a genuinely dialectical interpretation of Marx. This epistemologically realistic investigation strategy is based on the dialectical unity of the empirical investigation (by means of induction) of the phenomenal surface, that is, of the phenomenal relations and ideologies of the research object, on the one hand, and the conceptualization (by means of deduction) of the general assumptions postulated as the internal characteristics of these phenomenal forms, that
is, their essential relations, on the other. It is not an essentialistic method, because no attempt is made to deduce the empirical surface directly from the essence. To establish the unity between the essence and the phenomenal form, one only needs to explain the dynamic and the scope of the latter by the internal characteristics of its essential relations. A number of social-philosophical distinctions (the material in general versus the ideal in general, subjective versus objective) facilitate the analysis and comparison of the conceptual structures of the different petty production theories. By means of these distinctions, one can outline a materialistic conception of society which makes possible the analysis of subjectivity and the problem of hegemony. Using this conceptual apparatus, it is further demonstrated that agricultural petty production cannot be conceptualized in terms of family farms, although this is a strategy common to all of the most important approaches within the petty production discourse. It is argued that the concept of family farm is an ideological fiction characteristic of the hegemonistic discursive formations of western capitalist societies. It cannot be used to conceptualize agricultural petty production; instead, the varying forms of petty production must be analyzed as the phenomenal relations of the essential relations of capitalism.
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