Cooperation or cooptation: A southwest French wine cooperative

Abstract

Cooperatives, with respect to the history of wine production in the southwest of France, require that they be graced as the outcome of the transformation from the era of captitalist markets to the era where the capitalist mode of production became dominant—a transformation marked by the creation of a market in labor as predominant among winegrowers. As Marx showed through his many works on the development of capitalism, the translation of market exchanges into a quantifiable economic entity only serves to mask the social relations on which it is based. It was therefore my intent in the first part of this essay to highlight, if only suggestively, the process that led to expanded commercialization of wine in the Aquitaine and the deployment of a specific system of labor. Although wine proprietors and growers were divided by social class early on, the market in labor matured slowly, especially in the sector of the production of table wines. The market in labor among winegrowers followed from the appearance of the grand crus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and from the social consequences that ensued from the phylloxera in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The grand crus ushered in new specialized labor while the phylloxera intensified this process by turning wealthy merchants and large proprietors towards the volume production of table wines, thus usurping the last vestige of the small independent producer.