Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/188/en

The rural population followed the drive toward freedom — to disentangle itself from its bondage to nature and from the guidance of the folk spirit (which had expressed itself in the folk heritages and in the artistic imprint of the folk souls) — in order, in the labor-divided modern world, to set out — as the proletariat had done before it — on the laborious path of self-discovery. It exchanged the former sense of shelter in the stream of tradition of the folk heritages and folk souls for the challenging and at the same time enticing offers of the labor-divided modern world. Into the spiritual vacuum on the land that had come about in this way, agrarian industrialism broke — with the force of a flash flood — over the remainder of the rural population in the second half of the twentieth century, with the unavoidable consequence of bringing agricultural methods into line with those of industrial production. Through this leveling, facts have been created that can lead every farmer, given some self-reflection, to experiences at the boundary — to an experience of self-created contradictions that give occasion for questions of cognition. One such question of cognition, arising freshly out of the sheer dividedness of the practice of life, runs: Are the conditions of production in agriculture the same as those in industry, or does a fundamental difference exist here? The answer to this question can only be found by characterizing the factors of industrial production in comparison with the agricultural mode.