Elizabeth Dore is Reader in Latin American History at the University of Southampton. She is the author of The Peruvian Mining Industry: Growth, Stagnation, and Crisis; the editor of Gender Politics in Latin America: Debates in Theory and Practice; and a coeditor of Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, also published by Duke University Press.

Myths of Modernity

Peonage and Patriarchy in NicaraguaBy ELIZABETH DORE

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3686-0

Contents

List of Tables and Illustrations……………………………………………………………xiAcknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………..1INTRODUCTION Who Controls the Past Controls the Future……………………………………….17ONE Theories of Capitalism, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity……………………………………..33TWO Indians under Colonialism and Postcolonialism……………………………………………53THREE Patriarchal Power in the Pueblos……………………………………………………..69FOUR The Private Property Revolution……………………………………………………….97FIVE Gendered Contradictions of Liberalism: Ethnicity, Property, and Households…………………110six Debt Peonage in Diriomo: Forced Labor Revisited…………………………………………..149seven Patriarchy and Peonage……………………………………………………………….164conclusion……………………………………………………………………………….172epilogue History Matters-The Sandinistas’ Myth of Modernity……………………………………181Notes……………………………………………………………………………………213Glossary…………………………………………………………………………………217Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………..239

Chapter One

Theories of Capitalism, Class, Gender, and Ethnicity

At the turn of the twentieth century class, gender, and ethnic upheavals radically altered Diriomeos’ everyday lives. In the years between 1870 and 1930 the state abolished common property to promote private property, Indian comuneros became ladino peasant proprietors, Diriomeos and Diriomeas were drawn into debt peonage, and the rise of private landed property had contradictory gendered effects. A patriarchal duality underpinned the social order. Patriarchy from above, coffee planters’ patriarchal power, regulated class and gender relations in the plantation economy. Patriarchy from below, the senior male’s familial authority, governed household relations in the peasantry. In addition, privatization ended males’ common land rights on the one hand, but extended property rights to Indian women on the other. The new social order that emerged in Diriomo was the product of political intention, social struggle, and forces beyond anyone’s control.

My interpretation of social change in Diriomo in the era frequently described as Nicaragua’s capitalist transition rests on a set of theoretical understandings about the nature of capitalism, class, gender, and ethnicity. This chapter sets out the theories that underpin the study, some drawn from explicitly theoretical literature, others from complementary historical studies. Theory is not only useful, it is necessary to explain the manifold social forces at work at a particular place and time. Historical research throws up masses of information about events, people, places, perceptions, and ideologies. Without a theoretical framework, a thesis or argument about dynamics of social change, it is impossible to make sense of the messiness of everyday life. Theory is developed by distilling patterns from the wealth of historical particulars, and the patterns facilitate analysis of historical transformation. This process allows researchers to compare empirical findings to theoretical hypotheses and thereby assess whether research conclusions support or contradict the theoretical argument. My research for this book began with a set of theoretical hypotheses about the dynamics of capitalism, class, gender, and ethnicity. In the process of research I held up empirical findings to the light of theory and evaluated the degree to which the former fit the latter. In the conclusion I draw out connections between the theoretical frameworks and my interpretation of historical change in Diriomo.

The first section of this chapter reviews controversies about capitalist development in the colonial and neocolonial world and presents a definition of class. Drawing largely on Karl Polanyi’s conceptual distinction between the role of markets in capitalist and noncapitalist societies, I argue that the question of capitalist transition turns on the nature of markets, in particular on the presence or absence of markets in labor. The next section rehearses theories of patriarchy and gender that influenced my interpretation of historical change, particularly Steve Stern’s thesis that gendered understandings of patriarchal relations sustain political authority over the long term. Building on Joan Scott’s classic definition of gender, I emphasize the materiality of gender relations and explain why gender analysis is fundamental to understanding society. The third section analyzes theories of ethnicity and mestizaje, understood as social (as opposed to biological) processes of Indian assimilation into a society’s dominant Hispanic cultural patterns. Recent historical literature has tended to emphasize cohesive forces within Indian communities that fortify resistance to mestizaje. However, finding mounting evidence that Diriomeos and Diriomeas largely accepted ethnic integration, I considered theories that explore divisive forces in ethnic politics and the undoing of community.

Capitalism and Class

TRANSITION DEBATES

Classic debates about imperialism and colonialism long centered on the nature and timing of capitalist development. Broadly speaking, in the first half of the twentieth century leading socialist scholars argued that the countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia were underdeveloped because they were not capitalist. Their arguments rested on the premise that capitalism unleashes social forces and technological changes that accelerate industrialization and growth. In the second half of the century, many radical scholars turned that analysis upside down and argued that underdeveloped countries have long been capitalist. They concluded, therefore, that capitalism, not its absence, blocked development. The second paradigm dominated Latin American studies from the 1960s to the 1980s. My purpose here is not to resurrect those debates, but to situate this book within the major currents in Marxist historiography.

The Comintern, a world federation of communist parties founded in the 1920s by the Bolshevik Party of the USSR, held that the countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia were predominantly feudal. Feudal, in this sense, meant societies ruled by landlord and merchant classes whose power and wealth derived from exploiting subordinate classes by coercive, nonmarket means. Leading scholars inside and outside the communist tradition argued that forced labor was the antithesis of capitalism; therefore, elimination of overt coercion was a precondition for capitalist development. In line with this interpretation, the Comintern propounded a formula for two-stage revolution-first capitalist, then socialist-for the liberation of colonial and neocolonial countries. Notwithstanding its stagism and rigidity, the Comintern’s official interpretation of Marxism influenced development theory well beyond the communist movement. In the 1960s a revolution in scholarship overturned the classic Marxist view of imperialism and colonialism. A new generation of socialist scholars argued that with the expansion of empire, markets, and trade, capitalism had developed throughout the world. Their revision rested on a major reconceptualization of the nature of capitalism. In classic Marxism, the distinctive feature of capitalism is the particular form of class exploitation: the appropriation of surplus value from free wage laborers in production. In the revised version, the distinguishing feature of capitalism is the spread of exchange relations through global trade.

The paradigm shift gave rise to two major intellectual currents: dependency theory and world systems theory. I suggest, however, that the two can best be understood as a theme with variations. The theme is that international trade and the expansion of capitalism are the self-same process. The variations are that (1) capitalism is a relationship among countries in which surplus is appropriated from one country by another, and (2) European trade spread capitalism throughout the world. In this paradigm, surplus appropriation through trade caused underdevelopment in the colonies and neo-colonies and development in the imperialist countries.

A third way in the capitalism controversy attracted scholars who rejected the dichotomy between precapitalist and capitalist societies. They emphasized the articulation of modes of production. In its classic definition, a mode of production is a social system stamped by the prevailing class relations of exploitation or, paraphrasing Marx, by the way surplus labor is pumped out of the direct producers, coupled with the political and cultural institutions that facilitate exploitation. However, instead of viewing the sweep of history as the replacement of one social system by another, articulation theorists stressed the continuous interaction between different modes of production in one country. They argued that instead of free wage labor necessarily replacing unfree labor and capitalism replacing noncapitalist systems, the two often coexisted over the long term. In this paradigm, sometimes peasants struggled to preserve noncapitalist social systems to stave off the ravages of capitalist exploitation; sometimes the precapitalist order survived because it bore most of the costs of survival of the labor force, allowing employers in the capitalist sector to pay wages well below the level of subsistence; and sometimes capitalists endeavored to preserve precapitalist class relations because it was more profitable to exploit peasants via sharecropping or peonage than by means of free wage labor.

Drawn by the politics of anti-imperialism but weary of theories insufficiently grounded in the study of history, scholars of Latin America, Africa, and Asia reinvigorated the Marxist canon by emphasizing the contradictory nature of agrarian development. Borrowing elements from the three post-1960s paradigms, they criticized the notion of a contemporary feudalism and the idea that history unfolds in linear fashion from feudalism to capitalism. Influenced by theories of articulation, they emphasized the contradictory and zigzag character of capitalist transitions in postcolonial countries. Evidence from Diriomo lends weight to the thesis that social upheavals in the modern era were not necessarily steps on the road to capitalist development. One of the principal conclusions of this study is that the revolutions in land and labor, in gender and ethnicity, in Diriomo in the era from 1870 to 1930 did not give birth to a capitalist social order. Diriomo’s new society rested on the direct exercise of patriarchal coercion and consent, not the indirect compulsion of market forces.

THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MARKETS

My interpretation of late capitalist development in Diriomo turns on an understanding of the class relations of peonage and the social character of markets. My premise is that societies are distinguished by their class character, which is constituted, in the first instance, by social relations in production. I define class as the shared relationship of a group of people to ownership and control of the means of production (production inputs, i.e., land, water, natural resources, machinery, tools), to their own laboring activities, and to other classes. Class is also the shared relationship of a group of people to political institutions and cultural norms. In this framework, class relations are constituted through the appropriation of surplus products or labor, which under capitalism takes the form of socially mediated labor time (surplus value), and class hierarchies are sustained by the exercise of political power. For most people, class is a relationship of exploitation: the classes that control the means of production systematically extract surplus labor or products from the producing classes, with surplus meaning labor in excess of what people perform in order to live. Whereas noncapitalist elites appropriate labor directly, often using personalized forms of coercion and consent, capitalists appropriate labor indirectly through market mechanisms. In all societies, class relations develop within historical constraints, contain within them gender, race, and ethnic contradictions, and are altered by collective activities.

The premise of Marxist approaches to understanding markets is that a society’s class character conditions the nature of markets; ergo, the forms and meanings of exchange are embedded in class relations. Notwithstanding apparent similarities in forms of exchange in capitalist and noncapitalist societies, these mask differences in the substance and significance of market relations. A unique feature of capitalism is that most people have to sell their labor (or more precisely, their ability to labor, their labor power) to survive, and the buying and selling of labor is regulated by market forces. This aspect of market regulation is represented as freedom: workers’ freedom to sell, or not to sell, their labor. However, notwithstanding people’s formal freedom in the marketplace, in everyday life freedom is constrained by the need to work for wages. Under capitalism, market forces gradually transform social interactions into commercial exchanges, and in the process markets come to regulate the dynamics of the social order.

In noncapitalist societies, by contrast, because subordinate classes generally have access to land, natural resources, and tools, they are able to produce their own food and necessities. Consequently, rather than regularly bringing their own ability to labor to the marketplace, they irregularly buy and sell things in the market. Therefore, unlike in capitalism, where markets dominate people’s way of life, in noncapitalist societies markets and exchange relations are subordinated to the workings of society. The dynamics of price formation is illustrative of this difference. Whereas in capitalist societies prices are largely regulated by market competition among companies, in noncapitalist societies prices are largely regulated not by market forces, but by custom, social hierarchy, kinship, power, and chance.

This analysis of the critical difference in the role of markets between capitalist and noncapitalist societies is drawn from Karl Polanyi’s classic The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, first published in 1944. As Joseph E. Stiglitz writes in the foreword to the 2001 edition, “Because the transformation of European civilization [that Polanyi describes] is analogous to the transformation confronting developing countries around the world today, it often seems as if Polanyi is speaking directly to present-day issues.”

Polanyi’s understanding of capitalism and its transformative character is rooted in an analysis of the historical and social nature of markets, which he captures in the distinction between market societies and societies with markets. He argues that although markets are not unique to capitalism, the role they play in capitalism is unique. Although markets, money, and wage labor predate the development of capitalism, this trinity regulates economic and social life only in capitalist societies. In societies with markets (Polanyi’s term for noncapitalist societies), although people may intermittently work for wages or sell products, most households have direct access to land and produce most of what they consume. Under these conditions markets play a marginal role in social reproduction and govern neither class relations nor the wider society. However, market societies (capitalist societies) are decisively different. Under capitalism, most households are landless or land poor and cannot subsist on their own production. Consequently, necessity drives a majority to regularly sell their capacity to work, their labor power, in order to survive.

In contrast to Polanyi’s analysis of the historical and social nature of markets, and his differentiation between market societies and societies with markets, writers who equate capitalism with markets understand markets to be ahistorical, asocial institutions. In their view, markets operate in much the same way regardless of class relations between buyers and sellers and regardless of the wider social and historical context in which they are embedded.

Polanyi’s insight into market dynamics rests on a Marxist interpretation of free wage labor under capitalism, understanding free in a contradictory sense. When landowners and the state expropriate the peasantry, people are freed from their land. This same process might also free peasants from traditional social bonds, for instance, from landlords’ coercive control. Following expropriation, people find themselves free to sell-or not to sell-their labor. However, and here’s the rub, they may well find themselves free in yet another sense: free to starve.

As capitalism engenders landlessness and as markets permeate rural life, a corresponding process unfolds. Subsistence peasants turn into what Sidney Mintz calls store-buyers. Households that once bought and sold foodstuffs and other necessities intermittently now find it necessary to buy and sell continually because they lack the means of producing their own livelihood. This explains a paradox of capitalism: although it appears that individuals enter into exchange relations by their own choosing, freedom is largely negated by necessity.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from Myths of Modernityby ELIZABETH DORE Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.