Subsistence, Survival and Capitalist Agriculture: Aspects of the Mode of Production Among a Colombian Proletariat

Abstract

This paper is an effort to come to terms with a number of theoretical difficulties associated with research on rural Colombia and with some of the literature on rural Latin America in general.2 On a theoretical and methodological level, the mainstream literature which portrays rural Latin America as feudalistic, backward, traditional, conservative, and/or homogeneous constitutes a misapprehension of both the historical and contemporary condition of Latin America's penetration by the capitalist social system in its various forms. The dual economy model, advocated by both non-Marxist and some Marxist scholars, has been greatly supported by, if not actually derived from, most anthropological studies of so-called 'peasant societies' in Latin America. The major objective of this paper will be to suggest that the penetration of a capitalist mode of agricultural production utilizes and even necessitates a multiplicity of labor strategies. Various modalities of labor such as wage-labor, sharecropping, subsistence agriculture, and slavery must be understood not as separate and distinct economic or social systems, but as crucial factors of production within the dominant world system of capitalism. We should also understand that in many cases, such as subsistence gardening, economic relations have adaptive survival qualities necessitated and generated by the social relations of production in the capitalist system itself. These conditions can best be understood and explained by the application of a Marxian methodology and especially by the use of Marx's concept of the mode of production. The consequence of this type of analysis indicates that what has been described in much of the orthodox (and some of the non-orthodox) literature as 'peasant economy' or 'peasant society' is an illusion or obfuscation and should more correctly be perceived as alternating strategies of sur