The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Owners and Fences 71
lem of labor discipline afflicting the manager of Japio in 1882,—"We
cannot find workers even though one trips over idlers every day." In
the words of the old mayordomo of the largest estate in the southern
Cauca Valley, that of the Holguins', describing the return of the
owners in 1913, "They came to dominate the negroes and expand
their hacienda." Rural proletarianization began in earnest. National
censuses indicate that wage laborers constituted a mere fifth of the
number of smallholders in 1912. But by 1938 the proportions had reversed.
The wage laborers were a third larger than the number of
smallholders and had increased fivefold.
Why wasn't a capitalist economy developed on the basis of commercial
peasant farmers? Why did it develop by means of large estates
and wage labor? The social organization of the peasants posed
an obstacle to capitalist institutions. The working of land was
shrouded in a maze of intensely personalistic relations based on different
rights and obligations woven into a kinship system of multiple
marital unions. To some extent the peasants produced for the national
market, but consumed few market commodities. They were
neither easily able nor zealous in expanding a surplus. Without the
clearly drawn lines of private property in the modern bourgeois
sense, they were refractory to the financial institutions and inducements
that met and attracted the ruling classes. The peasants' bonds
of kin and kind meant that capital accumulation was a virtual impossibility.
Wealth, not capital, might be amassed, but only to be divided
among the succeeding generations. Of course, merchant capital
could coexist with this form of social organization, but since
national capital accumulation demanded an ever-increasing domestic
market, peasants who continued to practice self-subsistence
were an obstacle to progress. Whatever the intricate calculus of the
emerging system, its initial push was to destroy a form of social organization
embedded in a nonmarket mode of using and sharing
land.
Describing the beginning of enclosures, an old peasant tells how
Jaime Gomez came. "He began to usurp, to rob, to damage, and to
disquiet the residents of Barragan, Quintero, Obando, and so on.
Then you had to flee or sell. In Barragan he broke the houses and
erased the communism, the comuneros, because there were comuneios
there." Systems of teamwork, festive labor parties and reciprocal
labor exchange, were in force. "The minga [festive labor]. In
that week you skin a pig, a chicken, a calf, or whatever, and invite
your neighbors to work. They are working and others are preparing
the meal from those animals. One or two days, whatever it is. One
month or a week later I do the same. This we called the minga. It's