in an excellent post, Yoshie wrote:
>Haciendas & like forms of landlordism -- & plantation owners' class power
>-- were much harder to ruin than free peasantry under market discipline
>(who, to reproduce themselves as peasants, had to succeed in market
>competition -- most of them failed, thus becoming proletarians).
I think it's easy to underestimate the resiliency of a free peasantry. Many
follow a totally risk-averse strategy of self-sufficiency, allowing their
independence to survive for generations. This can actually block capitalist
development, if the Renegade Brenner is right: he argues that the power of
the French peasantry did so for quite awhile.
Of course, a lot of this is political: the reason why hacienda and
plantations were able to block the development of industrial capitalism was
because they usually controlled the government (until after the
liberal/conservative civil wars that plagued Latin America). On the other
hand, peasants were sometimes able to assert power and achieve some
victories, as with the Mexican Revolution after 1911 or the French
Revolution of 1789.
One reason we have to avoid over-emphasizing the problems of peasants under
market discipline is because there are often "internal contradictions" in
peasant agriculture (under some systems of property rights). For example,
peasant holdings often become divided up and thus very small and vulnerable
to market forces because almost every family has more than one son. (Of
course, daughters are excluded...)
The power of "market competition" shouldn't be exaggerated.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
