SYMPOSIUM: RURAL WAGE LABOR AND THE CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT OF THE LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRYSIDE
Two interpretive lines regarding the capitalist modernization of the rural world argue, respectively, that the main movement of the modernizing process was the expulsion of the peasantry and its transformation into a “subject for capital” and for the urban world, as a proletariat, or, in another direction, that its outcome was the formation of a modern, family-based agriculture, made up of small and medium-sized rural holdings linked to a consumer market. In both cases, the conclusion is that either proletarianization or family farming generated the conditions for the development of capitalism in the countryside. In Latin America, where large landholdings (latifundio) were associated with the capitalist transition, this would confirm the existence of another, authoritarian, path of modernization. Within these analyses, important critical studies have been produced on rural and agricultural development policies and their impacts on rural living conditions and the environment. However, such debates, with the exception of work carried out by a small number of Latin American researchers in recent decades, have paid little attention to the living conditions, labor organization, and identity of Latin American rural wage laborers. Subordinated to capitalist processes of commodification, rural wage laborers appear to be marginal within the context of the formation and consolidation of family farming, rarely emerging in debates concerning rural development, public policy, and relations with other rural subjects—including family farmers, many of whom also work as temporary wage laborers. This Working Group therefore proposes to bring together researchers who contribute to reflection on the historical, social, economic and political place of wage laborers in the rural world and in processes of rural development, on the assumption that their existence depends on a multiplicity of material and symbolic processes derived from the commodification of social relations characteristic of rural development, and that without their direct involvement it is impossible to build social projects alternative to capitalism and its destructiveness. Accordingly, contributions are expected that, from interdisciplinary perspectives and/or from sociology, anthropology, history, economics and political science, discuss wage labor and wage laborers as subjects of development from a Latin American or comparative perspective, both theoretically and empirically.
