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

Owners and Fences 91
son with the traditional peasant mode of production based on perennials,
the capital efficiency of the peasantry would be infinitely better
than that of agribusiness since capital inputs are negligible.
Large-scale farming here is not inherently more efficient than peasant
farming—whether efficiency is defined as output over input, in
currency, or in calories.
So long as a substantial proportion of the agribusiness labor force
is composed of workers who own or share in small plots, the costs to
the agribusiness sector of maintaining and reproducing wage labor
are lower than they would be if that sector had to meet such costs on
its own. For not only does the self-provisioning by the workers cover
part of these costs, but as stated earlier, the workers put their capital
to work on their own farms in a more efficient manner than does agribusiness.
We must take leave, then, of those popular prejudices that naively
exalt the efficiencies of scale and postulate a purely economic motor
of material relationships of "efficiency" displacing one mode of production
by a supposedly more efficient one. Instead, we must call attention
to the role of social relationships and political force in forging
a functional fit between two coexisting modes of production,
agribusiness and peasant, and in so doing be alert to the manifold social
contradictions that such an articulation engenders.
In the evolution of the relationship between agribusiness and
peasant farming in the southern Cauca Valley, agribusiness is less
efficient than peasant production on several crucial criteria. But because
of its monopoly over land, agribusiness can compensate for its
own inefficiencies by taking advantage of those peasant efficiencies.
By reducing peasant farm size below a certain minimum, the capitalist
class is able to accumulate surpluses. Bigness and modern
technology are not in themselves inherently more efficient. Rather,
they provide the muscle necessary to coerce a labor force into being,
as well as the discipline and authority necessary to exact surplus
value from that labor.
Until the capitalist class was able to obtain the political power
necessary to reduce peasant holdings to a certain small size, less
than that required for subsistence, wages in the capitalist sector of
agriculture were high because peasants could subsist from the usevalue
production of their own plots. The high cost of labor here was
due to the low value of labor—value of labor defined as the value of
commodities necessary to maintain and reproduce labor. As capitalist
farmers used the political power channeled their way by the entry
of U.S. capital and by openings on foreign markets beginning
around 1900, they were able to expand over and forcibly appropriate