英文摘要 |
Agrarian development in colonial Taiwan provides a basis for a critical reexamination of Marxist, neo-populist, and other debates on the family farm. The Taiwan evidence forces us to reject both classical Marxist and neo-populist approaches. The classical Marxist viewpoint predicts either the dissolution of family farms, and their replacement by capitalist farms, or the transformation of family farms into mere suppliers of cheap labor to capitalist farms or industry. The neo-populist viewpoint, while correctly underlining the persistence of family farms, fails to spell out the integral linkage between family farms and agro-industrial capital;it also tends to slight the extensive domination of the former by the latter by mechanisms other than market, control. On the basis of a careful study of rural class differentiation and family farms in the colonial economy, I propose an alternative framemork to comprehend the role of family farms in a capitalist economy. In colonial Taiwan, the vertical concentration, which relied upon a highly productive family farming agriculture and was made possible by the control of family farms by sugar capital, better fit sugar capitalists' profit-making objectives, than did a system of horizontal concentration in capitalist plantations. The capacity to extract a substantial surplus from highly productive family farms allowed the agro-industry to secure necessary profits to accumulate capital. The result is a preponderance of vertical, over horizontal concentration in sugar production in colonial Taiwan. |