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

114 Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America
The Antinomies of Production
The plantation and peasant farming society of the southern
Cauca Valley is composed of two antithetical exchange systems
operating simultaneously: on the one hand, the system of reciprocity
and self-renewal; on the other, that of unequal exchange and selfextinction.
Although it has been commercialized in many ways, the perennial-based
peasant agriculture still replicates the natural ecology of
the tropical forest, provides food for the cultivating household, and
yields produce throughout the year. The agricultural labor is done
without any strict division of labor by either sex or age, and is, in the
truest sense of the phrase, a "householding economy." Compared to
labor on the agribusiness plantations, work on the peasant plots is
felt to be far less intense and far more pleasant, for physical as well
as for social reasons. What is more, this perception applies even for
the wage laborers—referred to as peons—who work for peasants. For
instance, when employed in weeding, a peon covers around onetenth
of an acre per day, and in 1970 received around 20 pesos a day.
Working for an agribusiness, on the other hand, the same person
covers about one-third of an acre and receives around 30 pesos. In
other words, as more elaborately calculated in chapter 4, the agribusiness
laborer can earn a higher daily wage, but has to work a great
deal harder for each peso of income. The decision confronting an
economically pressed worker who must choose between work for a
peasant or work for an agribusiness is an excruciating one. Sooner or
later, the worker finds out that there is little choice: either agribusiness
labor has to be abandoned because the piecework system extends
one's capacities beyond their limit, or such labor has to be
suffered as a type of slow death brought on by chronic fatigue and illness.
The agribusiness laborer ages fast. The high spirits of youth
fade quickly into the dejection of a present with no promise for the
future. Adolescents may at first desire to work for the plantations
because of the chance of making more money. But within a few
months to a year they are back working peasant plots for less money
because, as they say, "I would rather be fat without money, than old
and skinny with money." Workers with families to support come to
the same conclusion as they are ground down by tiredness and sickness
and the constant struggle with foremen over piecework rates in
the plantation fields. The state of their bodies, as indicated by their
concern with fatness and thinness and by the sicknesses subsequent