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

92 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
peasant land. They were motivated by the desire for more acreage for
their crops and by the need to reduce peasant holdings so that peasants
would be obliged to become wage laborers—semiproletarians—
who provided part of their subsistence from their peasant farming
and, in some cases, used their wages as remittances to sustain the
peasant farm.
This type of articulation between the two modes of production is
part of a larger determining context, that of neocolonial underdevelopment:
specifically, the smallness of the domestic market and the
underdeveloped division of labor. This structural feature of peripheral
economies, whose market lies at the centers of the world capitalist
system, means that concern with increasing workers' purchasing
power is secondary to the drive for unlimited expansion of production.
Hence, reducing the value of labor and purchasing power or
maintaining it at a low level makes for fewer problems than it would
in developed capitalist economies. Semiproletarianization of the
peasantry, as opposed to complete proletarianization, is in keeping
with such a structure. Moreover, this same structural feature precludes
the conditions necessary to sustain a "pure" proletariat (especially
in the countryside)—that is, a class of people who have
nothing to fall back on but their labor power, which they are forced
to exchange on the market for wages. The peasant adjunct to wage
labor is therefore necessary both to capitalists and to wage workers,
for whom a capitalist wage is rarely sufficient for survival.
This moment of social history and this fact of social structure
have to be firmly grasped if we are to appreciate the moral nature
and social significance of the sentiments that underlie peasantworker
existence: the history is one of enclosures, barbed wire, sugarcane,
and hunger; the important component of the social structure
is the laborer who stands between two epochs and in two worlds,
proletarian and peasant. It is all too easy to idealize the margin of
precarious independence that blunts the full play of market forces
on the peasant. Yet, as Raymond Williams reminds us, we must be
alert to the implications of just such a breathing space in providing
a critical distance from the ever-dominating wage economy (1973:
107). The experience handed down from generations of struggle
against land appropriation is tied to the daily experience in fields
and woods of two utterly distinct forms of life. This pattern of history
and the contrast that is lived out within two antithetical modes
of production prevent the development of a capitalist working class,
"which by education, tradition, habit, looks upon the conditions of
that mode of production as self-evident laws of Nature" (Marx,
1967,