To Populate and to Discipline

Abstract

In the renewed debate over the form of capitalist development in the Latin American countries, one particular hypothesis is repeatedly tested. It concerns the intertwined relations between the state in the process of unification and the market undergoing construction, defining them now as antagonistic and now as complementary. In this context, we propose to analyze those relations in an area of the Argentinean Pampas at the time of the development of the rural labor market in the second half of the nineteenth century. This choice is quite intentional, as we wish to stress the centrality of the agrarian sector in a society that, unlike classical examples, is not characterized in its initial stages of development by industrial activity. At the same time, the example of Santa Fe is distinct from those of other areas of the Pampas in the proportion of the agro-export sector that is dedicated to the production of cereal grains and in the particular forms of land appropriation by which it is characterized. The construction of this market required profound changes in social relations and in the relations between state and society, changes that together affected the world of commodities in general and real property in particular. The commodification of scarce labor power, causing workers to abandon subsistence activities, to formalize hitherto sporadic and marginal labor