Capitalist Development, Labor, and the Rural Poor: The Politics of Adjustment (Nonresistance)

Abstract

The forces presumed to be operating on rural society in the 1960s and 1970s, and impoverishing them in the process, were by numerous accounts bringing about the transformation of a society of small-scale agricultural producers or peasant farmers into a working class. As noted, this process was conceptualized in various ways. Marxist scholars theoretically constructed the process as ‘primitive accumulation’ (the separation of the direct producer from the land and other means of production) a working class). Non-Marxist scholars, however, operating with a theory of capitalist modernization, analyzed the same dynamics with a different language but even so not alto- gether differently, by reference to a process that would see the disappearance of the peasantry as an economic agent, or as a category of economic or po- litical analysis. In