The Decline of the Pre-capitalist Structure of the Hacienda and the Emergence of Transitional Forms of Production: the Case of the Province of Chimborazo

Abstract

Since the recent enactment of agrarian reform laws, the state or the capitalist fraction of the landlord class has been identified too frequently as the architect of the transformation in the social relations of production on highland haciendas. This interpretation has led to either simplistic or unilateral characterizations of the changes which have taken place in the agrarian sector during the last few decades. It has also resulted in similarly inadequate characterizations of the evolution of the landlord and peasant classes. Meanwhile, the analysis of the internal dynamic of the pre-capitalist form of hacienda production has been neglected. Accordingly, a still embryonic debate concerning the characteristics of the transition experienced by the rural highland has restricted the complexity of the problematique to the progressive expansion of the capitalist mode of production to which the hacienda, as a form of production, finds itself subordinated. Thus, the decline of the hacienda has been reduced to the pressures emanating from capital the broadening of the internal market, the demand for a «free» labour force, market stimuli, etc. Meanwhile, the hacienda's capacity to survive has been attributed to its functionality in the reproduction of capital. It is worth asking to what extent the methodological approaches utilized up to date have erred in interpretation by not starting from the analysis of the interaction of key elements within the phenomenon to be explained; that is, from the social relations specific to the pre-capitalist form of hacienda production; from this key point of departure, other causal factors of an economic (the process of accumulation), political (the system of national and regional domination) and ideological order can then be legitimately integrated into the analysis.