Changing Social Relations of Production and Peruvian Peasant Women's Work

Abstract

Nevertheless it has been demonstrated convincingly that womens contribution toward social production is not a sufficient condition for the development of female status within peasant groupings (Sanday 1974; Michaelson and Goldschmidt 1971). Although the division of labor in the organization of production is an important variable for the analysis of womens socio-economic position it is not totally adequate for the task at hand. Rather it is essential to go beyond the characterization of the forces of production in pre- capitalist and capitalist social formations to an examination of the content of the various relations of production in which women participate. I propose that the analysis of changes in womens socio-economic position should be based on an empirical assessment of the dynamic interaction between the forces and relations of production which simultaneously transform rural society and the lives of rural women. This interaction is captured by the concept of the rate of exploitation. Exploitation exists under pre-capitalist as well as capitalist modes of production if the total labor hours worked is greater than the total labor hours required for the production and reproduction of the workers subsistence (the value of labor power); and if those surplus labor hours are subject to appropriation. The rate of exploitation is then defined as the ratio of surplus labor hours appropriated to the value of labor power. (excerpt)