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ABSTRACT
This article examines the relevance of ground-rent and landed property for the economic and political forms of capital accumulation in Argentina. This specific focus on capitalist development in Argentina is more broadly framed as a theoretical intervention within recent debates on Agrarian Marxism, which addresses the major issues under controversy through the lenses of an original methodologically-minded approach to the Marxian critique of political economy. Empirical quantitative evidence for the theoretical discussion is offered through the presentation of an estimate of ground-rent and its appropriation by landowners between 1993 and 2019.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For a similar conclusion from a different theoretical perspective, see Carlson (Citation2018) and Manning (Citation2020).
2 For this reason, we shall leave them out of the main theme under discussion in this article. See Villar (Citation2022), for an in-depth examination of the stark contrast between these two qualitatively different kinds of ‘hybrid’ personification (‘genuine’ small capitals vis-à-vis the rural surplus population) in the case of Paraguay.
3 For the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ in South America, see Grinberg and Starosta (Citation2015) for Argentina and Brazil, and Purcell (Citation2016) and Dachevsky and Kornblihtt (Citation2016), for Ecuador and Venezuela.
4 Our discussion will focus on the portion of ground rent appropriated by landowners. We are currently finalising an update of the measurement of the ground rent appropriated by capital in general.
5 For an in-depth analysis of the latest National Agrarian Census, see Ameghino and Fernández (Ameghino and Fernández Citation2019).
6 In our view, these two phenomena (the leap in the normal degree of concentration of capital in agrarian production and the appearance of sowing pools) underlie the so-called fading away of the ‘chacareros world’ described in the specialised literature (e. g. Balsa Citation2006; Gras and Hernández Citation2019).
7 For a more extended discussion of the changing material conditions of reproduction of agrarian wage-workers during this period, see Villulla (Citation2021).
8 In other words, on the grounds spelled out earlier on, the following discussion does not apply to the rural surplus population that constitutes the social determination of most ‘peasants’ in the rest of Latin America. As already mentioned, for those social subjects the appropriation of ground-rent is entirely immaterial for their conditions of reproduction and, therefore, for the constitution of their political subjectivity.
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Gastón Caligaris
Gastón Caligaris is Lecturer in the History of Economic Thought at the National University of Quilmes (UNQ) and a member of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), in Argentina. He also teaches at the Faculties of Social Science and of Arts and Humanities of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).
Alejandro Fitzsimons
Alejandro Fitzsimons is Lecturer in the Argentine Economic History at the National University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a member of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), in Argentina.
Sebastián Guevara
Sebastián Guevara is Professor in the Argentine Economic History at the National University of Buenos Aires (UBA) and a member of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), in Argentina.
Guido Starosta
Guido Starosta is Professor in the History of Economic Thought at the National University of Quilmes (UNQ) and a member of the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET), in Argentina.