Neo-feudalism in Latin America? Globalisation, agribusiness, and land re-concentration in Chile

Abstract

This article traces the effects of globalisation on an export-oriented ‘hotspot’ in Chile's non-traditional agricultural export sector. Drawing on evidence from fieldwork carried out in 1994 and in 2004/5, the analysis examines the impact of neoliberal policy over the past two decades. Although the fruit export sector is seen as a key success story of the Chilean economy, and is an area to which small producers are often encouraged to ‘reconvert’, it is argued here that the outcome has been land re-concentration, marginalisation and proletarianisation. Small farmers become increasingly locked into dependent relationships with larger landowners and agribusiness, whilst others form a rural proletariat that serves these concerns. Whilst some commentators have labelled this process ‘semi’ or ‘neo’ feudalism, this article maintains that we are witnessing a deepening fragmentation of the peasantry driven by the continued development of capitalism. The gains of the earlier land reform period are being eroded as rural Chile differentiates and depeasantisation unfolds.

Notes

1 For the debate about globalisation, see the useful collection edited by Panitch, Leys, Zuege and Konings 2004.

2 See Siavelis 2005 for the background to the Concertacíon coalition.

3 Petty commodity producers survive as such, and continue to reproduce themselves economically. As argued by, among others, Wolf 1971, their survival in the face of capitalism underlines the durability of what he termed the ‘middle’ peasant, or independent proprietors who neither sold nor purchased the commodity labour-power.

4 According to this view, capitalist penetration of the agrarian sector necessarily erodes the internal structure of peasant economy, and turns it into a de facto labour reserve. Although cultivation by petty commodity producers may continue to be in evidence, therefore, decampesinistas maintain that such units are in reality a hollow shell and their independence is similarly a fiction. Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, peasant economy survives only because it provides agribusiness and commercial farmers with workers. It sells not the product of labour but labour-power itself. For the details of this argument, and its application to Latin America generally, see the contributions to the volume edited by Brass 2003.

5 On this point, see especially Altvater 2004.

6 ‘Third Way’ politicians refers to those – such as President Lula in Brazil and Prime Minister Blair in the UK – who attempt (unsuccessfully) to combine laissez faire economics with some form of redistributive social policy.

7 This they generally tend do in one of two ways. Either by overlooking class position, and categorising popular culture as a benign and all-embracing form of ‘from below’ resistance to economic development (a process that generates ‘subaltern’ hegemony). Or by romanticising specific aspects of rural poverty (for example, subsistence agriculture or banditry) as culturally empowering for those concerned (who are also invariably labelled ‘subalterns’).

8 For country case studies in Latin America, see Brass 2003.

9 For an account of non-traditional exports in another Andean country, see Sawers 2005.

10 Although the literature addressing the effects of globalisation on development in the so-called Third World is vast, much of it does not proceed beyond concerned handwringing about the increasing incidence of rural poverty (see, for example, the recent collections edited respectively by Hulme and Toye 2006 and by Nissanke and Thorbecke 2006). Hence the framing of the problem – an example being ‘Globalization, Poverty, and Inequality: What is the Relationship? What Can Be Done?’[Basu, 2006– suggests that some are still asking questions to which the answers have long been known.

11 One should recall that the two initial protagonists [Bauer, 1979a, 1979b; Loveman, 1979 who at the end of the 1970s reignited the debate about the meaning (coercive or voluntary) and significance (free or unfree) of debt peonage in rural Latin America had both originally undertaken research on rural Chile [Bauer, 1975; Loveman, 1976. In an important sense, therefore, the issues raised here are doing no more than updating a longstanding debate about the preferred relational forms of capitalist labour regimes in rural Chile.

12 In the case of Latin America, the best-known exchange on this subject is that between Frank 1967; 1979 and Laclau 1971. It defined the debate in development studies – see, for example, Peet 1980: Section II]– about the systemic character of agrarian transformation, and its determinants.

13 This also happened in the 1960s Peruvian case study examined by Hobsbawm (see below), where estate landowners attempted to interpose themselves between an expanding export market for the profitable coffee crop and peasants on whose tenant holdings this crop was grown. In Poland, the crop marketed this way was grain.

14 According to Hobsbawm 1969: 46], therefore, ‘the era of neo-feudalism [ended] with the peasants' rebellion’ which resulted in the expropriation of the landlord class. Symptomatic of the difficulties is the fact that what Hobsbawm refers to as ‘neo-feudalism’ is for others – for example, Furtado 1970: 13–16]– evidence of classical ‘feudalism’ itself. Thus feudalism is defined by Kula 1976: 9] as ‘a socio-economic system which is predominantly agrarian and characterised by a low level of productive forces and commercialisation; at the same time it refers to a corporate system in which the basic unit of production is a large landed estate surrounded by the small plots of peasants who are dependent on the former both economically and juridically, and who have to furnish various services to the lord and submit to his authority.’

15 Hobsbawm 1969: 39, 41] infers that ‘serfdom in the province is not so much the child of a feudal tradition as the response by powerful landlords to an economic situation … the immediate roots of the peasant revolt of 1958–62 lie in the systematic attempt of the provincial lords to reimpose the system of serf-labour [and] to take over the land brought into effective cultivation by the pioneer peasant settlers. Historians of the European middle ages may be left to think of parallels.’ This point is repeated by Hobsbawm 1969: 48–9] in his conclusion.

16 Hence the view [Hobsbawm, 1969: 43] that the ‘only limits to the hacendado's prosperity were those of the traditional feudal lord: managerial and financial incompetence and a tendency to throw money out of the window for purposes of luxury or status competition.’

17 It should be noted, however, that Sombart 1967 linked the expansion of capitalism to the consumption of luxury goods. For him, therefore, conspicuous consumption was not an obstacle to accumulation but much rather a stimulus to this.

18 The ‘semi-feudal’ thesis has been deployed principally by those analysing the agrarian sector of India, and its main exponent is Byres 1996.

19 On this point see Brass 1999; 2002.

20 The proposition that the peasant family farm successfully resists the attempt by all other modes of production to shape it economically underwrites the theory advanced by populists (and neo-populists) such as Chayanov 1966, James Scott 1976 and – more generally – those writing about rural Latin America who subscribe to the campesinista framework [Glover and Kusterer, 1990.

21 According to Kautsky 1984: 14–15] peasant economy is established in those European countries (France, Belgium, Switzerland, South and West Germany) where ‘compulsory feudal labour services’ were abolished. By contrast, the large-scale agrarian enterprise, the one that relies on cheap labour-power that is unfree, is encountered only in backward Eastern Europe (Russia, Rumania, Poland) where, following the abolition of forced labour, the ‘vitality’ of such units ‘has rested … first and foremost on a new kind of slavery, the slavery of indebtedness’ (original emphasis). The reproduction of ‘feudal’ relations by agrarian capitalism is a point made by him elsewhere [Kautsky, 1988: 25–6]: ‘In those areas where a market had developed for wood, the obvious and in fact rather easy thing to do was to turn forests into private property and then run them along capitalist lines – though under feudal forms.’

22 A considerable literature has evolved on this over the last decade and a half. Murray and Silva 2004 provide an entrance point into some of the arguments. One area that has proven particularly contested is that of the impact on gender relations of production. Some writers see the transition as essentially positive, providing employment and empowerment for women [Tinsman, 2006. Others are more critical of the type of the nature of that employment, being temporary and relatively low paid and thus reflecting the inferior structural position of women in Chile more generally [Barrientos, 1997.

23 These large plots were farms of formerly much larger landowners who had been allowed to keep relatively large plots during Frei's reform and who had gained some further land back during the counter-reform.

24 From 1966 President Frei enacted a range of policy measures that would foster foreign technology transfer and consultancy in order to facilitate the export potential of Chile's fruit sector which enjoys a natural comparative advantage with respect to the timing of harvest vis-à-vis the northern hemisphere. This plan involved research and development in conjunction with US academics and agronomists, investment in irrigation infrastructure including dams, and the construction of cooling and storage facilities in strategic locations such as Curicó in the Central Valley.

25 On this, see Morrison, Murray and Ngidang 2006.

26 See Murray 2002b for fuller discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Warwick E. Murray

The author would like to express gratitude to Tony Chandler, for his energetic assistance and company in the field. He would also like to acknowledge the guidance of Robertson Lafayette in El Palqui, together with the kind help of all of the growers and others interviewed for this work. Victoria University of Wellington provided funds for Tony Chandler and the author in the field. Finally, Tom Brass, editor of JPS, offered highly valuable comment and suggestions on an earlier version of this article