Social Structure in Italy: Crisis of a System by Sabino Acquaviva

Author:Sabino Acquaviva [Acquaviva, Sabino]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780855200459
Google: zU2fDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 4508418
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-21T02:22:32+00:00

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1871 25.7 17.0 56.9 0.4

1881 24.7 13.7 61.2 0.4

1901 33.4 19.8 46.4 0.4

1911 27.6 18.7 53.3 0.4

1921 39.6 15.4 44.7 0.3

1936 51.3 20.0 28.4 0.3

1959 75.7 24.3 -

1970 66.6 33.4 -

Sources: Serpieri, 1947, p. 123; and (for 1959 and 1970) ISTAT, Rilevazione nazionale delleforze di lavoro.

The reshaping of agriculture along capitalist lines has played an important role. Thus, the 45,000 tractors of 1951 had become 700.000 in 1971. There are also other factors that we have not mentioned, but it is certain that the main reason for agricultural incomes’ ceasing to be a source and a form of power is that so many have left agriculture and gone elsewhere. Between the 1961 and 1971 censuses the South lost some 2,300,000 inhabitants.6 In some regions the losses were colossal. Sicily, with 4,667,316 inhabitants in 1971, had lost 440,000 of its former number; Calabria with 1.962.000 had lost 390,000; etc. If we recall that most of those emigrating were previously actively engaged in agriculture, the implications are clear – in certain small towns in the South it is now hard to find any males between the ages of 18 and 45.

Various authors have discussed these figures for one reason or another, but we shall not enter here into a technical discussion that would be alien to our main theme. Suffice it to note that one author has concluded that during the twenty years of the economic miracle (1952–72), Southern Italy lost 6 million inhabitants – an exodus of truly biblical proportions.

The number engaged in agriculture was on the decrease nationwide. It dropped by 43 per cent between 1961 and 1971, and had dropped by 31.1 per cent in the preceding decade. The proportion of the population actively engaged in agriculture dropped from 42.2 per cent in 1951 to 29.1 per cent in 1961 and 17.3 per cent in 1971, and the last few years have witnessed a further decrease. This steady overall decrease conceals some quite varied movements of the overall labour force.7

The fact remains that between 1961 and 1971 agriculture once more took on a capitalist structure, though those administering it and the conditions under which they did so had vastly changed. While the emphasis used to be on large estates and huge-scale farms, today the stress is on the industrialization of agricultural production, and industrial capital is being invested in agriculture. Farms are now run along quite different lines. Both in its actual running and in its relationship with the power structure, agriculture now tends to be absorbed into the industrial sector of the economy, and the old traditions of the country estates have almost vanished. Yet not quite, Despite all the modernization, there is still an old-fashioned side to agriculture. As well as the up-to-date farms with full-time employment for all and a hardly perceptible increase in the workers’ average age, one still finds the economically inferior small farms that barely manage to survive with part-time hands and elderly workers.

There are about 50–60,000 large or intensively cultivated

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