What does agrarian wage‐labour signify? Cotton, commoditisation and social form in Gokwe, Zimbabwe

Abstract

In the decade following Zimbabwe's Independence, the idea of a homogeneous, subsistence peasantry was soon dissolved by the ‘discovery’ of agrarian wage relations in the former African reserves. Simultaneously, residual collective labour forms were identified both as signs of a pre‐capitalist past and as institutional templates out of which a socialist future in agriculture might be imagined and constructed. In this article, I examine the complex history of commodity production, domestic relations and labour forms in Gokwe ‐ a particularly intense and recent venue of agrarian commoditisation focused around cotton in the north‐west. In Gokwe, an idealised contrast between collective and wage labour — taken as tokens of a historical sequence —fails to capture either the variety of labour forms, their interrelationship over time, or their relation to shifts in the regional agrarian class structure. Indeed, the increase in intensity of agrarian commodity production has been accompanied by an efflorescence of co‐operative or collective labour forms.