ABSTRACT

The farm families interviewed have been divided into six groups on the basis of their primary motivations for remaining in agriculture. These are traditional group, reserve group, complementary group, retired group, equity group and residual group. The traditional group is composed of families that remain in agriculture due to an emotional attachment to the land and/or farm life. The reserve group is composed of farm families whose members do not have job alternatives outside of farming and/or lack skills that would allow them to have a sufficiently remunerative job outside the sector. The Kautskyan account of the persistence of small farms and the modern explanations inspired by it are also extremely relevant to an understanding of the Southern Italian case. K. Kautsky stressed that the persistence of small farms is linked to the role of producers of surplus labor that such farms perform within the capitalist mode of production.