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How agrarian cooperatives fail: Lessons from 1970s Peru

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 34; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03066150701516690

1743-9361

Tom Brass,

Wine Industry and Tourism

Abstract Given current interest in the agrarian cooperative as an egalitarian institutional form to counter the economic effects of neoliberalism, considered here is how class divisions/distinctions operated inside one such unit in the 1970s. Of particular interest is the way idioms and forms of struggle used by bureaucrats, peasants and agricultural labourers in a Peruvian agrarian cooperative during that decade challenge one of the enduring myths of development theory. The latter invokes a familiar dichotomy to explain the failure of rural cooperatives: a powerful state bureaucracy imposing inappropriate policy on an undifferentiated and uniformly powerless peasantry. The case study presented here suggests that, on a number of crucial issues (privatization of co-owned means of production, the employment of labour-power that was unfree), it was much rather better-off peasants who overruled bureaucrats and imposed their own accumulation project. Notes 1 The positive link between modernization, economic growth and agrarian cooperatives was a common theme in much of the development literature that emerged from the 1960s debate about the so-called Third World, especially that addressing issues of peasant farming and rural poverty: see, for example, Srivastava Citation1962, Weitz Citation1965, Schiller Citation1969, Griffin Citation1970, Worsley Citation1971, Galeski Citation1972, Dorner Citation1972, Baldwin Citation1972, Barraclough and Collarte Citation1973, Walinsky Citation1977, and the contributions to the volume edited by Nash, Dandler and Hopkins Citation1976. This link, and its desirability in terms of agrarian reform programmes in the Third World, had already been strongly recommended by the United Nations Department of Economic Affairs Citation1954: 233ff.] during the previous decade. For an examination of the different political meanings attached to the term 'cooperative', and the implications of this for its form of property relation and control over the forces of production, see Schiller Citation1969 and Warriner Citation1969: 56ff.]. 2 On cooperatives as a form of 'democratic control', see Carr-Saunders, Florence and Peers Citation1940: Part III]. For a similar view expressed subsequently, that cooperatives 'involved attempts to transform capitalistically organized agriculture – the farms of North Africa and the haciendas of Latin America – into a more equitable and socialist institution', see Nash and Hopkins Citation1976: 7]. For useful critiques of this approach, see Petras and LaPorte Citation1971 and Huizer Citation1983a. 3 Accepting that 'so long as powerful interests of privately owned capital exert so strong an influence … it is impossible for the co-operative system to operate freely in its own way', Carr-Saunders, Florence and Peers Citation1940: 249 – 50] nevertheless adhere to the notion of cooperatives as the 'other' of capitalist enterprises, maintaining that 'within their limitations [they] give real experience of industrial democracy in action'. 4 On land reform as a method of eradicating rural poverty and inequality, thereby achieving social justice for the poorest peasants and landless workers, see Barraclough and Collarte Citation1973: 33] and the World Bank Citation1975a; Citation1975b; Citation1978. 5 A comprehensive overview of a wide range of agrarian cooperative arrangements in Europe before the 1914 – 18 war is found in the United States Senate Commission Citation1913 appointed by President Wilson. That the main target of such arrangements was usually smallholding agriculture is evident from the fact that in the Middle East [Keen, Citation1946: 35]'ownership of the holding – or a suitable tenancy agreement – is a necessary prelude to the full development of co-operative societies'. 6 The current uncritical enthusiasm for peasant cooperatives as a solution to rural poverty is itself part of a much wider phenomenon: the forgetting of history generally, and that of Latin American development theory and practice in particular. As has been noted frequently in this journal, the latter form of amnesia is itself a process that is invariably coupled with an uncritical espousal of the 'new' postmodern populism, an aporetic relativism which anyway denies the importance of history. Where the study of rural Latin America is concerned, this combination – forgetting history plus endorsing the 'new' postmodern populism – is epitomized in two recent observations by Taylor Citation2005. First, that the argument that Latin American states co-opt the peasantry is not a 'novel claim'; and second, that the 'new' postmodern populism is 'an essential part of … micro-level politics [without which] no progress can be achieved'. It may well be the case, as Taylor claims, that the argument about the co-opting of the peasantry by Latin American states is not new. But it needs repeating precisely because converts from Marxism to postmodern populism – such as Taylor – have forgotten its political importance, and need to be reminded of this by those who have remained Marxists. Among the many things overlooked as a result of forgetting history is that the ethnicity and nationalism informing the 'new' postmodern populism feed directly into the discourse of the political right, a fact difficult to reconcile with any notion of progress. Significantly, perhaps, Taylor was one of those who pronounced the enganche relation – see below – an empowering form of free labour. In this he joined not just other revisionists – for example, Bauer Citation1979– but also neoclassical economists and postmodernists who similarly revised the meaning of debt bondage from a coercive/oppressive relation to an outcome of worker 'choice', a reinterpretation that has been shown to be wrong [Brass, Citation1999: 170, 190 – 92, 200, 202, 203, 206, 208 – 9, 214, 216]. About these different theoretical approaches to rural Latin America, two final points can be made. First, given that Taylor has proved to be mistaken so often and on so many issues, the politically complacent remarks he makes in his review are in a sense encouraging. If he disagrees so strongly with Marxist criticisms of postmodernism and subaltern studies, then these criticisms must perforce be right. And second, his amnesia underlines the veracity of the old cliché that those who forget history are condemned to repeat the (analytical and political) mistakes it warns against. 7 For an earlier version of the argument about 'returns to scale', see Balogh Citation1966: 67], who notes that the 'organization of co-operatives would enable the rational use of land and water, and the carrying through of infrastructure and agricultural investment'. Also, Eckstein and Carroll Citation1976: 236ff.] and the view [Griffin, Citation1987: 226] that: 'Producers' cooperatives … manage to generate a small financial surplus and thus by this criterion perform better than the state farms… The peasant farms … do well by this criterion. The peasant producers have almost no capital with which to work, but their output per unit of capital is very high. Strictly in allocative terms there should be a redistribution of capital from state farms to the peasant sector'. 8 See for example the Zapatistas in Chiapas, where Subcomandante Marcos [Duràn de Huerta and Higgins, Citation1999: 271] equates democracy with decentralization: 'We believe that the practice of direct democracy can achieve … recognition for certain aspects of the social life of the communities. When I say communities I'm not referring only to indigenous communities but also to villages, city neighbourhoods and agricultural collectives (ejidos). This is to suggest that people can discuss and take decisions about how to resolve their own problems, and to suggest that these decisions will be infinitely better than the decisions that are normally taken from the centre.' Producer cooperatives composed of small farmers in poor countries are also seen by many well-meaning but politically naïve non-government organizations as efficacious solutions to rural poverty. Such arrangements do not rely on the state for inputs, preferring instead to organize 'autonomously' at the grassroots. In these cases, positive views about this institutional form – the agrarian cooperative – underwrite prevailing wisdom about the desirability and possibility of 'fair trade' within the wider context of neoliberal capitalism, a development approach endorsed by NGOs which regard producer cooperatives as a feasible method of 'trading out of poverty'. 9 This continuing support for the cooperativization of smallholding agriculture on the part of those addressing development issues in the rural Third World is evident from a number of sources. See, for example, Pearse Citation1980, Baviskar Citation1980, Young, Sherman and Rose Citation1981, Lele Citation1981, Leons Citation1982, Apthorpe and Gasper Citation1982, Tendler Citation1988, Attwood and Baviskar Citation1988, Korovkin Citation1990, World Bank Citation1991, Barraclough Citation1991: 156ff.], Rodgers Citation1996, and some of the contributions to the volume edited by McMichael Citation1994. The World Bank has also organized a conference for 2007 entitled 'Cooperative Finance: Global Good Practices'. Current endorsement of agrarian cooperatives as the way forward in rural Latin America is also encountered in an USAID-funded study [Vásquez-León and Finan, Citation2007 that is part of a larger project conducted in collaboration with ACDI/VOCA (Agricultural Cooperative Development International and Volunteers in Overseas Cooperative Assistance): 'Smallholder rural producers in developing countries face multiple challenges and opportunities that arise from an increasingly globalized economy… Smallholder rural societies often represent values that center on place and community where the goal is not so much to maximize profit but to achieve a viable and stable livelihood in the community and on the land … producer cooperatives may play a fundamental role in allowing rural populations to achieve these goals.' That such views are not confined either to the academy or to global financial institutions, but circulate also in the domain of popular culture, is evident from a recent film, Black Gold (2006), directed by Marc and Nick Francis. Highlighting the difference between what consumers pay for a cup of coffee, and what producers in farmer cooperatives of Ethiopia get for this commodity, the film underlines the need for those in western capitalist counties to increase the price received by peasant cultivators for this crop. 10 It is striking just how far the element of class has vanished (or, more accurately, been banished) from current histories of and narratives about rural transformation, and the contrast with the equivalent kind of analyses being written in the 1960s and into the 1970s. At the latter conjuncture, even non-Marxists recognized the impossibility of examining agrarian reform units in Latin America (and elsewhere) without a reference to the impact on them of an only slightly modified pre-reform class structure. Hence a review of writings about rural transformation at that conjuncture by an agronomist working for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization [Domike, Citation1973: 64] drew attention to this very issue, noting of the Chilean agrarian reform programme the importance of 'internal conflict among the campesinos', and adding that: 'No politician, and only the naïvest social observer, believes that settling the overall campesino-landowner conflicts in favour of the former resolves the matter henceforth.' Much the same note of caution informed the conclusion written during the early 1960s by Thorner Citation1980: 185], another non-Marxist, in his perceptive analysis of cooperativization in rural India: 'Experience in many countries has shown that cooperatives can serve as a means by which peasant cultivators can help each other to improve their position. But the success of rural cooperatives presupposes a modicum of social equality, political democracy, and economic viability among the villagers. These preconditions have not been present in village India and are still not present today. If the cooperative movement in India is to get anywhere, two things must happen … (1) the power of the village oligarchs … must be curtailed; and (2) the Government must become an instrument of the ordinary people, and must be considered as such by ordinary people.' 11 The text in question is Goodman and Redclift Citation1981: 123], where the following argument projecting the strong-state/weak-peasant dichotomy is also encountered: 'Political control of the new agricultural technologies … lies with the technical staff who decide which cooperatives should receive most help from the state, and whose close supervision of their accounts ensures that the surplus is appropriated on terms favourable to the state.' This echoes a similar conclusion arrived at earlier by Long Citation1977: 173], who observed of Peru that 'co-operatives often result in increased centralization and state control. They do not always entail greater peasant and worker participation at local or national level.' 12 This strong-state/weak-but-resisting-peasant is an ever-present theme in monographs by Scott Citation1976; Citation1990; Citation1998. 13 See, for example, McClintock Citation1981: 84], who maintains that in the case of Peru 'with the transformation of the hacienda into a self-managed cooperative in the early 1970s, the clientilistic orientations of peasants gave way to a new set of orientations most simply described as "peasant egoism". Collaborative and participatory attitudes emerged among peasants towards their fellows in the cooperatives; but … a sense of solidarity did not extend to peasants beyond the cooperative, or to the Peruvian nation and its government.' Because it ignores class divisions within the peasantry who are cooperative members, this idealized view is wrong: it cannot capture the fact that antagonism is directed as much internally – against 'their fellows in the cooperatives'– as externally, against those outside production cooperatives. 14 This view about the undesirability of state intervention in Third World agrarian cooperatives was also one advocated in the 1960s by neoliberal economists. Opposing state resource provision and regulation as 'market distorting', one right-wing development theorist [Bauer, Citation1971: 365] argued at that conjuncture that '[t]here is no general case for subsidising cooperative societies [in Africa] rather than other forms of enterprise. If cooperatives are to be supported, this is appropriately carried out by the provision of advisory and supervisory services for a limited period [since otherwise] such organizations are subject neither to the commercial or competitive test of the market'. A decade later, in a political climate more favourable to his laissez faire views, the same neoliberal economist [Bauer, Citation1981: 176] felt able to categorize agrarian cooperatives receiving inputs from the state as 'quasi-totalitarian regimes'. 15 Ironically, this view finds echoes in the approach of some Soviet writers to Third World development in the 1970s: one such [Ivanov, Citation1979: 205] declared that production cooperatives in rural Africa constituted 'an alternative to capitalist development'. In a similar vein, another [Ulyanovsky, Citation1974: 449] maintained: 'It is planned that these agricultural supply and marketing co-operatives should in future be adapted as producer co-operatives … successful development of agricultural co-operation in the political conditions now obtaining in Burma could provide a basis for the gradual transition of rural Burma to a non-capitalist path of development.' For the centrality of cooperatives to agrarian populism generally, see Mitrany Citation1951 and Wiles Citation1969: 168]; for their importance to Russian and North American populism, see respectively Maynard Citation1942: 61ff.] and Danilov Citation1988 and Buck Citation1920: 65ff.] and Canovan Citation1981: 26ff.]. 16 Writing about the farmers' movement – the Grange – which took place in the United States during the late nineteenth century, Buck Citation1920: 65, 66, 67] observes: 'It was but natural, then, that the Granges should be drawn into all sorts of schemes to divert into the pockets of their members the streams of wealth which had previously flowed to the greedy middlemen… The most common type of coöperative store was that in which the capital was provided by a stock company of Grange members and which sold goods to Patrons at very low prices. The profits, when there were any, were divided among the stockholders in proportion to the amount of stock they held, just as in any stock company… Farmers' agencies for the disposal of produce met with greater success. Coöperative creameries and elevators in several States are said to have saved Grange members thousands of dollars.' 17 Asked what was the attitude of Fascism towards cooperatives, the leader of the British Union of Fascists [Mosley, Citation1936: Question number 68] answered: 'The Co-operative Societies will play a greater not a lesser part in the Fascist State. They support the Fascist principle, which requires the widest possible diffusion and ownership of capital. They oppose both the Socialist principle of State ownership, and the capitalist principle of the concentration of capital in the hands of a few exploiters. Under Fascism … [t]hey will be genuine trading concerns serving the people.' For the role of rural cooperatives in Fascist Italy during the mid-1920s, see Schneider Citation1928: 163 – 64]. This is not to say that agrarian cooperatives were or are in some sense 'fascistic' institutions; it is to say, however, that such units should not be regarded as innately (or, indeed, prefiguratively) socialist. 18 The view that rural cooperativization worked economically and socially, and could have continued to do so had the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution not intervened and dashed what was a viable democratic solution to the difficulties faced by peasant economy, is a position commonly taken by commentators on Russian political and/or rural development – such as Walkin Citation1963: 147ff.], Lewin Citation1968 and Volin Citation1970: 112ff.]– who were either critical of or hostile to Soviet agricultural policies and the post-1917 agrarian programme. 19 In his endorsing introduction to Chayanov's book on peasant cooperatives, Danilov [Chayanov, Citation1991: xii] accepts that the object of agrarian cooperatives was 'to rescue the peasant population of Russia from ruin and proletarianization', the object being to '"keep capitalism out" of the Russian countryside'. According to Chayanov Citation1991: 17 – 18] himself, 'peasant cooperatives in our opinion represent, in a highly perfected form, a variation of peasant economy which enables the small-scale commodity producer to detach from his plan of organization those elements of the plan which a large-scale form has undoubted advantages over production on a small scale – and to do so without sacrificing his individuality.' 20 See Chayanov Citation1991: 17]. In his opinion [Chayanov, Citation1966: lviii], therefore, 'horizontal concentration of production offered only limited advantages in agriculture….; on the other hand, vertical concentration allowed agriculture to achieve a revolution comparable to that of the steam engine in industry. The whole point of this vertical integration was to reconcile the maintenance of peasant farms in the biological processes of intensive cultivation and livestock breeding … [t]he agricultural cooperative was to be the instrument of that integration.' He concludes [Chayanov, Citation1966: 263]: 'Sometimes this vertical concentration, in accord with the general economic situation, assumes not capitalist, but cooperative or mixed forms. In this case, control of the system of trade, elevator, irrigation, credit, and processing undertakings that concentrate and guide agricultural production in part or in whole belongs, not to the holders of capital, but to the organized small commodity producers who have contributed their own capital to these undertakings or have been able to create social capital.' 21 See, for example, the framework informing the analysis of food commodity chains by Bernstein Citation1996, whose continued adherence to a Chayanovian epistemology has been traced elsewhere [Brass, Citation2007. 22 In the case of Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the reason for this is brought out succinctly by a contributor to a volume edited by Shanin Citation1988: 182 – 83], the founder of this journal: 'Whereas the majority of Marxist economists believed in the advantages of concentration because such is the tendency of the capitalist mode of production, Chayanov maintained that horizontal concentration of production offered only limited advantages in agriculture. In an area of extensive cultivation where 2,000 – 8,000 hectares of grain land can be farmed with appropriate machinery, the optimal dimensions of productive units will not be the same as they are in a region of sugar-beet cultivation where the more intensive use of machines makes transport costs grow disproportionately beyond an optimum of 200 – 250 hectares. In other words, natural conditions themselves impose certain limits on the possibilities of a horizontal concentration. These difficulties disappear, however, for vertical integration: small farms can benefit from all the advantages of scale by using the formula of cooperatives. That is why the competitive power of peasant farms versus capitalist farms or collective farms was much greater.' 23 For the capitalist role of cooperatives in German agriculture, see Lenin Citation1961: 205ff.]. Comparing the populist agrarian programme of the Socialist Revolutionaries to the revisionist views of Eduard David in Germany, Lenin Citation1964b: 422, 433] observed: 'All sorts of societies (co-operatives) and the communal purchase of land will always benefit the rich peasants most… Two basic ideas, and, correspondingly, two main points in the programme, run through the pattern of David's "work". He glorifies agricultural co-operatives, expecting all possible blessings from them, demanding that the [German] Social democrats help develop them, and (just like our Socialist Revolutionaries) failing to see the bourgeois nature of these alliances between petty proprietors and agrarian capitalists, big and small. David demands the conversion of large farms into small ones, and waxes enthusiastic over the profitableness and efficiency [of the latter].' For the endorsement of peasant cooperatives by David (and others) in their debate with Kautsky during the 1890s, see Hussain and Tribe Citation1984. 24 'It is deception,' Lenin Citation1964a: 205, 207] said of the Socialist-Revolutionaries' programme, 'to assert that "co-operatives of every kind" play a revolutionary role in present-day society and prepare the way for collectivism rather than strengthen the rural bourgeoisie … [t]heir conception of the path leading to socialism is peerlessly characterised by their substitution of the development of co-operatives for the class struggle. In their estimation of the present stage in the agrarian evolution of Russia, they have forgotten a trifle: the remnants of serf-ownership, which weigh so heavily on our countryside.' 25 Of producer cooperatives under capitalism, and the struggle in these contexts between rich and poor peasants, Preobrazhensky Citation1965: 219, 222] wrote: 'Under capitalism … cooperatives can exist only if they adapt themselves to the law of value… Since cooperatives can exist in capitalist society without in any way threatening its existence, this shows quite plainly that cooperation in itself contains no active principle of transformation in the direction of socialized production relations. The Utopians of cooperation affirmed the contrary, but were beaten by the entire practical experience of capitalism and of cooperation itself. … If we strike a balance of the struggle between these two ways of organizing labour [the collective way and the private capitalist way], exclusively in the field of agricultural production … then we shall have to recognize the following. The state farms have until recently contracted their area to the advantage of petty production [while] the area of kulak and semi-kulak holdings has increased more rapidly. The reason is that the kulak holding, which grows organically out of scattered petty commodity production, has hitherto provided more opportunities for the organization of labour in agriculture on capitalist or semi-capitalist lines than the state economy has provided for the organization of labour on its lines. The balance can be changed not by some socialist miracles on the territory of petty peasant production, taken by itself, but only by a more profound influence of large-scale urban industry on peasant farming.' This is confirmed at roughly the same conjuncture by an exchange reported in the United States Senate Commission Citation1913: 843], when Captain L. A. Bryan, committee member of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, answered questions about the political direction of farmer cooperatives in the following manner: 'Q. Does cooperation tend to socialism? A. No. Socialism does not do for society what cooperation does. In 1868 and 1869 the individuals took up cooperation as an antidote for socialism. Some socialists, however, make exceedingly good cooperators, not for that reason, but because they are both. Among our leading agricultural cooperators we have no one who professes to be a socialist. One is a voluntary organization, the other is compulsory.' 26 For the softening of views about peasant cooperatives in 1920s Russia, see Lenin Citation1966: 467 – 71]. This optimism has to be offset by the findings of Kritsman Citation1984: 109, 140], who noted, more generally, that '[u]sury and trading capital are also interlinked, in that trading operations are, to a growing extent in rural life, connected with credit. Frequently usury and manufacturing capital are similarly interlinked. The widely dispersed phenomenon of advances of grain is accompanied by the unpaid "working off" on the farm of the lender. This is in effect a form of interest on the loan, although they would claim they make no profit out of it. There is a lack of recording of trading and especially usury capital.' This description might well be applied to the agrarian cooperative in La Convención examined below, where bonded labour relations linking rich and poor peasants were similarly 'hidden' within the kinship and fictive kinship domain. 27 See Luxemburg Citation1961 and Trotsky Citation1967. The latter [Trotsky, Citation1967: 131] observed that such a threat to the socialization of agriculture should not be interpreted as evidence for the superiority of smallholding cultivation (or peasant economy) over largescale production. It hardly seems necessary to point out that many of those now writing about the agrarian question in Latin America and elsewhere continue to do just this. 28 On this Trotsky Citation1962: 235] observed: 'The programme of the equal distribution of land thus presupposes the expropriation of all land… If we bear in mind that this expropriation would have to be one of the first acts of the new [socialist] regime, while commodity-capitalist relations were still completely dominant, then we shall see that the first "victims" of this expropriation would be (or rather, would feel themselves to be) the peasantry. If we bear in mind that the peasant, during several decades, has paid the redemption money which should have converted the allocated land into his private property; if we bear in mind that some of the more well-to-do of the peasants have acquired – undoubtedly by making considerable sacrifices, borne by a still-existing generation – large tracts of land as private property, then it will be easily imagined what a tremendous resistance would be aroused by the attempt to convert communal and small-scale privately owned lands into state property.' 29 The accuracy of this prognosis – the reinforcement at the rural grassroots of ideas about individual ownership (= proprietor consciousness) would in the end undermine policies based on the co-ownership of land – was borne out by the Latin American agrarian reform programmes of the 1960s. As Jacques Chonchol 1972: 110], the Minister of Agriculture in the Chilean government of Salvador Allende, accepted, '[a] much more serious problem [facing socialists] is that, in general, the [persistence of private property in an agrarian cooperative] tends to perpetuate the image of the traditional farm in the peasant's mind. An agrarian reform process is not just a question of redistributing land, but should involve an entirely new conception of the economic and social organization of agricultural enterprises'. 30 Like many anthropologists, Chayanov – although an economist – focussed on the kinship domain as this affected the economic reproduction of the peasant household. He maintained that the logic driving the latter was demographic, in that the economically active members of peasant family farms worked only as hard (='drudgery of labour') as was necessary to reach the subsistence level for themselves and the unproductive components of the household (the very young, the very old). The resultant equilibrium, called by him the 'labour/consumer balance', was the driving force behind the reproduction of peasant economy. It was this, in the form of cyclical demographic mobility affecting peasant household personnel – not the process of class differentiation into rich, middle and poor strata – that structured the economy of the Russian co