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

86 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
the Pacific coast. Most of them alternate between the coast and the
plantations; they remain at the latter for one to three years and then
return to their households, coming back to the plantations again
after a year or so, usually leaving their spouses and children behind.
The wage laborers on the plantations and large farms are not
"pure" proletarians with nothing to subsist on apart from the sale of
their labor-time. Whether casual or permanent, whether locals or
immigrants, they are generally part-time proletarians whose subsistence
and that of their dependents rests on their complementing
proletarian labor with the fruits of peasant cultivation or of similar
types of income opportunities.
The Ait of Peasant Farming
The cool groves of the peasant farms provide a sharp contrast
to the enormous, hot, and treeless fields of the agribusinesses.
Tiny islands of straggling forest life, the plots lie squeezed by the
sugarcane of the plantation. They are composed of cocoa, coffee, citrus,
and plantains interplanted amid a profusion of shrubs, plants,
and red-flowering shade trees. The difference in aesthetic forms,
peasant and plantation, comes down to this: peasants have some
control over materials, tools, time, and land; wage laborers have
control over none of these. Tomas Zapata put it well: "My sons and
daughters are uninterested. They are only concerned with getting by
daily and grabbing the money in the afternoon; to go to work in the
dawn and return at nightfall. They live day by day. But agriculture is
an art, and they don't understand that. For this art the first thing is
constancy and land." What is more, judged strictly on economic criteria,
the peasant form of farming is in many ways more efficient
than the large capitalist farms. The poverty that so cruelly afflicts
the peasants lies neither in their mode of production nor in their rate
of reproduction. Instead, it lies in the inefficiencies of large-scale
capitalist agribusiness. By virtue of its greater political power and
monopoly over land, agribusiness can compensate its inefficiencies
by taking advantage of the efficiency of peasant farming.
The main tasks in peasant agriculture are the harvesting, which
occurs every two weeks, and the weeding, which is done once or
twice a year. Both tasks are light and require little time. Around two
hectares cultivated in this way provide a subsistence living for the
peasant household and demand no more than one hundred labordays
a year. Only a machete and a light spade are used. Firewood,
house-building materials, cordage, wrapping leaves, packing, gourds,