Researching Non-Heterosexual SexualitiesResearching Non-Heterosexual Sexualities, edited by PhellasConstantinos N.Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. 239pp. $114.95 cloth. ISBN: 9781409412656 (original) (raw)

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2014

Abstract

are inseparable. Pechlaner masterfully describes the double standards and contradictions in the David-versus-Goliath cases. As described in the opening paragraph of this review, Pechlaner seems to be using the Marxian concept of expropriation to describe the capitalist seizure of agricultural seed supplies. However, rather than acknowledge that connection, she instead uses the one reference to Marx in the book to claim a distinction. ‘‘The term ‘expropriationism’ differs from its conventional legal and Marxist usage of expropriation conducted by a public body ostensibly for public good’’ (p. 26). Pechlaner certainly is defining expropriation as something other than the current legal definition of seizing property for the public good. But Marx did not define it that way. Instead, Pechlaner follows in the Marxian tradition of describing the underlying logic of capitalism and the ways that logic manifests in economic and social arrangements. Pechlaner’s decision to engage the debates from the 1980s on how agriculture is different from manufacturing, because of the reliance on natural processes in agriculture, is helpful only to a point. Those debates documented the myriad ways that capital accumulation can occur, even in a non-wagelabor process. However, assuming the uniqueness of smallholder farming in the United States and Canada reifies wage-labor as the measure of industrialism capitalism. Farmers in the United States and Canada have been petty capitalist enterprises at least since the early 1900s. And the demise of small farming as a primary source of family income is not so different from the story of big-box retail eliminating mom-and-pop retail stores or the demise of local banks in the face of the rise of too-big-to-fail banks. Furthermore, portraying farmers as outside of industrial capitalism is simply not accurate. According to a recent analysis by the United States Census of Agriculture, around 12 percent of large farms (annual sales exceeding $250,000) account for 84 percent of the value of agricultural production (Hoppe and Banker 2010:iv). Farm operators may not be wage laborers, but it is misleading to portray them as something other than capitalist firms that supply raw materials to a thoroughly industrialized and capitalistic agricultural system. None of this takes away from the basic narrative and argument of the book, which is very valuable and timely. News headlines regularly alert us to cases of farmers fighting agribusinesses over seed patents. As recently as May 13, 2013, the United States Supreme Court sided again with Monsanto in a case against a farmer who planted soybeans that he had purchased as grain. Pechlaner gives the reader the tools to make sense of the dynamics behind such headlines. In that sense, the book is useful for the general public. It might even suit a course on intellectual property law. The book is also useful for demonstrating how expropriation is occurring in the twenty-first century, over 100 years after Marx explained that process. Therefore, it would be valuable on an agriculture and food sociology syllabus or a classical theory syllabus. In fact, I just recently added it to my classical theory syllabus.

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