Land and Freedom by Vergara-Camus Leandro

Author:Vergara-Camus, Leandro
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2014-08-20T04:00:00+00:00

Strengthening peasant family farming

MST settlers and Zapatista peasants practise an agriculture that resembles what Friedmann calls ‘independent household production’. Such production resists commodification, presupposes land availability, allows for subsistence production with village organization, and demonstrates relative absence of competition (Friedmann 1980: 176). However, MST settlers in southern Brazil, because of their deeper integration into the market, are caught between the peasant condition and that of a small commodity producer. MST settlers in southern Brazil are, however, not capitalist farmers because they organize production as family units and most of the relations of production internal to family units are not commodified. Moreover, many aspects of their production are organized around the production of use-value, and most of them are significantly self-sufficient in food production. Zapatista households, on the other hand, are organized as typical peasant units, as described by Armando Bartra (1982).

In both cases, though, the fact that land is not understood as a commodity but as the result of a struggle may have reinforced the patriarchal nature of peasant production. For instance, the decision about what to do with land is the father’s and the father’s alone. Family farming within MST settlements, if it were not for certain modifications in the gender relations within the household and the community, could be considered as a type of reintroduction of the household estate in regions where it had previously disappeared owing to the modernization of agriculture. In Chiapas, it is possible to think that a similar development has occurred since the ejidatario is more often than not the male head of the household. Decisions regarding the use of land (what to plant, rent or sell) are decisions made by the male head of the household. Moreover, in both Brazil and Mexico women tend not to have land titles or at least their name does not appear on land titles. Importantly, however, the state, supported by the MST, has recently adopted a policy of registering the names of both spouses on the land title.

In southern Brazil and Chiapas, market integration and commodification of social relations do not appear to be occurring through privatization of the land of MST settlers or Zapatista peasants, i.e. through the subjection of their land to capital. However, there are still other ways that the integration of MST settlers and Zapatista peasants into the market can lead to the commodification of agricultural social relations, thus endangering peasant subsistence practices. One of these paths is through the growing importance of commodities in the daily lives of peasants. For Bernstein, once commodities become necessary to fulfil the consumption needs of a peasant household:

… commodity production is internalized in the cycle of simple reproduction of the peasant household [and] simple reproduction cannot take place outside commodity relations. In other words, commodity production becomes an economic necessity. To meet its needs for cash the household produces commodities which become, through the circuit of exchange, material elements of constant capital (raw materials) and ‘variable capital.’ (Bernstein 1977: 63, cited by Goodman and Redclift 1981:

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