Journal of Peasant Studies Class relations and ...

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Journal of Peasant Studies

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Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the Colombian coffee industry, 1928-92 Christopher E. Londona a Graduate Student, Field of Development Sociology, Cornell University,

To cite this Article London, Christopher E.(1997) 'Class relations and capitalist development: Subsumption in the

Colombian coffee industry, 1928-92', Journal of Peasant Studies, 24: 4, 269 — 295 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/03066159708438651 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03066159708438651

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Class Relations and Capitalist Development: Subsumption in the Colombian Coffee Industry, 1928-92

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CHRISTOPHER E. LONDON

The concept of subsumption had a short life within Marxist analysis of family farming because analysts using the concept failed to appreciate the centrality of class relations in Marx's analysis of capitalist development. I argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as a theorisation of the subtle cultural and historical processes through which labour is incorporated into capitalist development projects. I reinforce this theoretical discussion with an analysis of capitalist development in the Colombian coffee industry. This case demonstrates that capitalist development is as much project as process, as much the reformation of cultural identity as the restructuring of relations of production. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch [Marx and Engels, 1970: 64]. You say to me: nothing happens as laid down in these 'programmes'; they are no more than dreams, Utopias, a sort of imaginary production that you aren't entitled to substitute for reality... To this I would reply: ... the fact that this real life isn't the same thing as the theoreticians' schemas doesn't entail that these schemas are therefore Utopian, imaginary, etc. One could only think that if one had a very impoverished notion of the real. For one Christopher E. London, Graduate Student, Field of Development Sociology, Cornell University. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1995 meetings of the Rural Sociological Society. The author would like to thank Philip McMichael, Peter Taylor and Luis Llambi for comments on various versions. Centra Regional de Estudios Cafeteros y Empresariales (CRECE), Apartado Aereo 1129, Edificio Seguros Atlas, Piso 20, Manizales, Colombia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.24, No.4, July 1997, pp.269-295 PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON

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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES thing, the elaboration of these schemas corresponds to a whole series of diverse practices and strategies ... For another thing, these programmes induce a whole series of effects in the real (which isn't of course the same as saying that they take the place of the real): they crystallize into institutions, they inform individual behavior, they act as grids for the perception and evaluation of things [Foucauk, 1991: 81].


INTRODUCTION

The image of Colombian coffee production has, since the 1920s, been closely associated with the small family farm [Nieto Arteta, 1981; Palacios, 1983; Bergquist, 1986]. Since the 1950s, this image has been a prominent feature of the international marketing of Colombian coffee in the figure of 'Juan Valdez' and his mule. This image is in fact based on a real historical phenomenon: the existence of a persistent small farm sector with a low level of capitalisation that has depended primarily on family members for its labour power. Family farm coffee production has been a central component in Colombian cultural politics, especially for the institution which has governed the coffee industry for most of this century: The National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (FEDECAFE). Though it is a private growers association, FEDECAFE has a public mandate - the organisation of the nation's coffee industry - and is funded by a tax on coffee exports. Thus with the founding of FEDECAFE in 1927 a public good was placed into private hands and the nation's economic mainstay was entrusted to a relatively small group of prominent citizen-capitalists. Through financial regulatory mechanisms and an extension service FEDECAFE set out to turn a heterogeneous, geographically extensive commodity export sector into a coherent national industry. The Juan Valdezes of the Colombian coffee industry were the pride and joy of FEDECAFE. They were something it tried to produce, to nurture, and, ultimately, to depend on not only for the product of their labour but also for political and cultural legitimacy within the Colombian nation-state [London, 1994] The Colombian coffee industry is not just an apparatus for commodity production, it is a complex socio-cultural order. The purpose of this essay is to provide an analysis of this socio-cultural order. In doing so though, my intention is not simply to tell a story about Colombian coffee or 'Juan Valdez'. Rather, I believe a close analysis of this particular history can illuminate the cultural order of capitalist development in general and of the family farm in particular. In this analysis Marx's notion of the 'subsumption of labor under capital' will be key. I will present this argument as follows. First, I will give a critical reading of some literature which uses Marx's concept of subsumption in the attempt to analyse the continuing existence of family farm production within capitalism. I will


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follow this critique with my own rendition of the concept of subsumption. I will argue that the concept of subsumption is best understood as an analytical description of the establishment and consequences of capitalist class relations. Second, in light of my reading of the concept of subsumption I will analyse the establishment of FEDECAFE's capitalist development project in the 1930s. I will pay particular attention to the role that family farms, agricultural extension, and technical change were intended to play. Technical education and directed change in production practice were held to be key mechanisms for shaping family farms to the contours of a theory of capitalist development.1 This project demonstrates how the prosecution of capitalist development is not coldly rational or simply a structural unfolding. Rather, it is a thoroughly cultural process through which practices, identities, and fundamental beliefs are (re)formed and used to reinforce class relations geared to surplus extraction and capitalist accumulation. Finally, in order to illustrate some of the effects of this project on the lives of family farm coffee growers I will present the opinions of one grower, Santiago Mejfa, who I believe fairly well represents what FEDECAFE was trying to achieve. Mejfa reproduces in his production practices and in his self-analysis the basic contours of FEDECAFE's theories of development. His life history demonstrates how capitalist development can be an intimate and subtle process of cultural reformation. SUBSUMPTION AND THE ANALYSIS OF FAMILY FARMING

The concept of subsumption came into vogue in the analysis of 'smallscale', 'peasant', or 'family farm' agricultural production in the 1980s. It appears to have gone out of vogue by the end of the same decade. It emerged, it seems to me, as a response to the so-called 'modes of production debate' [Foster-Carter, 1978]. That debate had concluded inconclusively with the vague notion of articulation: that distinct economic systems could interact, as it were, with the capitalist system always being the dominant party. The difficulty was that while some people were content with such a formulation when speaking of the interaction of capitalism with 'kinship modes of production' so-called 'peasant' production in Latin America or 'family farming' in the United States did not seem quite so separate and distinct from capitalism.2 With the publication of the 1976 translation of Capital, which included for the first time in English the original Part Seven,5 'The Results of the Immediate Process of Production', Marxist social scientists seemed to have in hand an approach to the analysis of capitalist development, given by the Master himself, which allowed them to argue

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that 'peasant' agricultural production was part of capitalism without really being capitalist. The distinction between formal and real subsumption seemed to allow for the conceptualisation of a continuum of forms of capitalist development; with it you could have a formal capitalism that was not 'really' capitalism but that seemed to approximate it. In this way analysts could keep their basic notions of what constitutes capitalism intact (industrialisation, the existence of property-less labour, and so on) and simply add on a theoretical addendum for family farm or 'peasant' production. This interpretation of the concept of subsumption is, I believe, fundamentally wrong. The (Mis)uses of the Concept of Subsumption The critical failure of the subsumption literature has been to treat family farms as independent units with some kind of inherent structural logic, as if they were products of nature, rather than as social constructs enmeshed in enduring class relations? Consequently, subsumption has been used as a structural rather than a processual concept thus underplaying or ignoring the historical content of the class relations which make capitalist development happen. Goodman and Redclift [1985] are typical in this regard. Their presentation of the structural conditions of family farms, for example, treats them as isolatable units which, though they are supposed to be conditioned by social contexts, would appear to be ultimately products of themselves, that is, sui generis. As in much of this literature [e.g., Chevalier, 1983; Friedmann, 1986; Whatmore et al, 1987; Llambi, 1988; Smith, 1989; Deere, 1990; Pile, 1992] for Goodman and Redclift it would seem the only human agents of history are farmers. While there are other agencies such as 'industrial capitals', 'capital', or the 'long-run tendency of capital' there are no human beings in their account other than farmers. Subsumption in this reading is thus reduced to being a mechanistic reflex of 'capital'. In the hands of Whatmore et al., [1987] (who base their discussion on Goodman and Redclift's [1985] rendition) the reduction goes even further. Formal subsumption is glossed as 'indirect control' of fanners by 'external forces'.6 Though Whatmore et al. construct a 'relational typology' of subsumption, there are no humans in their approach other than farmers so it isn't clear exactly what 'relations' they are typologising. In this typology there is no history, no class, no power other than the actions of nebulous 'forces'. In short, there is nothing left of Marx in this formulation. Concomitant with this tendency to ignore the role of capitalists in the development of family farming, and the reduction of capitalist development to a mechanistic self-realisation of 'capital', is the imputation of a particular psychology to farmers. Chevalier [1983] is the most explicit in this regard, constructing a theory of peasant 'maximization without accumulation'.6



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Llambi takes up this argument maintaining that the calculation of relative costs and returns is a major component of commodity production, simple or otherwise [Llambi, 1988]. While, as I will argue below, calculability is indeed central to Marx's concept, these authors fail to provide either a theory or an analysis of how calculability becomes an aspect of production relations. It would seem that the Weberian rationalist is a natural consequence of, again, the self-realisation of 'capital'. Smith also highlights calculation but unlike Chevalier or Llambi, he attempts to show how the use of calculation in production relations progressively commodifies those relations. His discussion centres the multiple relations through which producers engage with each other and in doing so he is able to situate commodity production historically in so far as it is a product of, even as it transforms, these intraclass relations. In this way he is able to show how people's economic psychology changes. Nevertheless, by not analysing the role of capitalists in promoting or providing a context for the application of calculation he has no way of demonstrating the historical formation of interclass relations thus his explanation of why attitudes towards economic relations change is necessarily incomplete [Smith, 1989]. By taking at face value the role calculation plays in capitalist production relations these authors leave a vital facet of capitalist development, class relations, unanalysed [Roseberry, 1983]. The treatment of family farms as isolatable units, or family farmers as a class apart from all others, implies a degree of autonomy that no family in any society ever has. Families are necessarily intertwined within the complex social relations that make up a society, otherwise they simply would not exist at all. This highlights the fact that most uses of the concept of subsumption are guilty of what Stoler identified as an overemphasis on economics to the exclusion of political relations. While I think this is a correct assessment, she herself reduces the distinction between formal and real subsumption to being a question of transitions to capitalism, whereas, as I will show below, Marx argued that they can in fact be coexisting 'modes of production' [Stoler, 1987]. This is a key point: family farm production is not necessarily a strange survival of a past economic order within modern capitalism. In many places the development and expansion of family farm production was intertwined with, if not vital to, the expansion of capitalist States. In the US and Colombia, for example, the geographical expansion of the family farm model through colonisation was a state-sponsored means of opening up new regions to exploitation by capital: it was a social relation of production formed by the intersection of the emerging capitalist world market and nation-state system, frontier geography, and a mobile population.7 In other words, family farm production is a political relation which can be vital to the development of capitalism as such. The family


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farm has never been an independent unit, nor indeed, can it be, even though enormous political and economic energy has been expended trying to make it appear to be so [Tauxe, 1992]. By treating the family farm as independent, analysts have in fact reproduced as truth the ideological constructions of capitalists. In doing so, they have failed to understand a key aspect of Marx's method: critiquing capitalism through a critique of how it is understood. Marx was a cultural sociologist: he analyzed capitalist culture, showing how it operates materially and ideologically through mystification. That people have failed to see this is a result of that same mystification: they violently abstract his ideas thinking he is describing universal laws when what he is doing is illustrating a particular cultural form called capitalism [Oilman, 1993; Meister, 1990; Sayer, 1987, 1991; Wood, 1995]. As a consequence, the concept of subsumption has been too quickly and silently buried along with the rest of orthodox Marxism when, as I will now argue, it is a flexible and indeed subtle concept that can be usefully employed to analyse the dynamics of social change in family fanning. Marx on Subsumption and the Mystifications of Capitalist Development As is well known, Marx argued that there are two forms of subsumption: formal and real. Formal subsumption on the one hand, is the assumption of control over, and the intensification of, an extant labour process by a capitalist. This leads to an increase in output which is appropriated by the capitalist as absolute surplus value. Thus the actual material form of production does not change, what changes is its management. If changes occur in these traditional established labour processes after their takeover by capital, these are nothing but the gradual consequences of that subsumption. The work may become more intensive, its duration may be extended, it may become more continuous or orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist, but in themselves these changes do not affect the character of the actual... mode of working ...[rather] the capitalist intervenes in the [labor] process as its director, manager ... [Marx, 1976: 1019, 1021].8 What changes is not the form of production but the character of the social relations through which the labour process is orchestrated. Though the structure of production remains constant the meaning of the work does not. The intensification of labour implies that the hours worked or the level of physical effort applied in labor is increased, which necessarily affects the social life of the labourers. Furthermore, the management of production so that it is 'orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist' entails the creation of a host of relations in which the capitalist develops and extends surveillance and control mechanisms, placing labor under the constraint of


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objectification [Foucault, 1979]. A formal subsumption process is the effective creation of capitalist class relations in spite of the relative continuity of the empirical labor process.9 Real subsumption on the other hand, is when the labour process as a whole is reconfigured in terms of the designs of the capitalist allowing the extraction of relative surplus value:


The social productive forces of labour...come into being through cooperation, division of labour within the workshop, the use of machinery, and in general the transformation of production by the conscious use of the sciences, of mechanics, chemistry, etc. for specific ends, technology, etc. and similarly, through the enormous increase of scale corresponding to such developments [Marx, 1976: 1024]. In contrast with formal subsumption where the labour process is not so much changed as it is intensified, through real subsumption the labour process is fundamentally transformed. It is this fully transformed situation that Marx calls a 'specifically capitalist form of production'. The main difference between formal and real subsumption then, lies in how material and managerial knowledge is applied in the labour process. It is the way in which the labour process is designed and controlled which is crucial. Marx argued that formal and real subsumption are intimately connected. Formal subsumption is the foundation [on which] there ... arises a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production - capitalist production - which transforms the nature of the labour process and its actual conditions. Only when that happens do we witness the real subsumption of labour under capital ... [Furthermore, formal subsumption] is the general form of every capitalist process of production; at the same time, however, it can be found as a particular form alongside the specifically capitalist mode of production in its developed form, because although the latter entails the former, the converse does not necessarily obtain ... [ibid.: 1019, 1034-35]. There are two important points to be drawn from these passages. The first is that Marx does not make a ideological connection between formal and real subsumption processes. In fact, they can exist side by side as two features of the same capitalism, even though they are distinct 'modes of production'. Capitalism then is a heterogeneous social order composed of a variety of coexisting modes of production which are themselves defined by the social relations of production through which they are instantiated. Thus capitalism is not defined merely by the formal properties of industrial


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capitalism such as wage labour performed by nominally free workers [Sayer, 1991: 40; McMichael, 1996b]. Rather, (and this is the second point), given that formal subsumption is characterised here as the general form of capitalism, the managerial control of the labour process by capitalists is not simply a component of capitalism but is what constitutes capitalism as such. In short, capitalism is a class relation through which production is managed by capitalists for the purpose of surplus extraction and accumulation. The distinction between formal and real is simply a way of marking the historical differences which can exist between different expressions of capitalist class relations.10 Capitalist development is historical and thus necessarily heterogeneous. It is also a social process and thus necessarily involves the human intellect. In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels [1970: 47ff] argue that the ruling ideas of an epoch are the ideas of the rulers. Capitalist development is achieved by making the particular interests of the ruling class appear to be the general interests of A social body. By reshaping the social relations of production in the labour process the ruling ideas can become embedded within worker consciousness thus embedding the workers/thinkers within capitalism. Capitalist development is thus the combined process of creating capitalist subjects through the formation of capitalist labour processes [Corrigan et al, 1980; Corrigan 1981; Miller and Rose, 1990; Miller, 1992]. For capitalist development to occur then, somehow the capitalist has to be able to intervene in both the mental and physical processes of production. Two mechanisms which Marx identified for doing this are, respectively, money and science and technology. Marx's arguments concerning the roles, realities, and effects of money are quite detailed and complex so it is not my intention here to rehearse them. Rather my goal is more specific — to explore how money can be used to both exercise and conceal class domination. Similarly, my goal in discussing science and technology will be to show how they play a role in propagating capitalist relations as a standard for social (and self-) organisation. Science and technology further the mystifications of money but they also provide the means for restructuring physical labour processes from the body up. Part One of Capital is dedicated to illustrating how from a process of simple barter something so abstract and apparently universal as money could emerge. Once it does emerge though, it is more than simply a measure of value as it can be perceived as value itself. This cognition of value as money is part and parcel of the commodification process and is a key factor in commodity fetishism [Woolf, 1988]. As Marx [1973: 191] succinctly put it in the Grundrisse: 'After money is posited as a commodity in reality the commodity is posited as money in the mind.' That is, through the use of the money-form people can become increasingly enmeshed in a symbolic


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system where everything is reducible to apparently self-generating value.


[I]n line with the dominant mode of production, even those kinds of labour which have not been subjugated by capitalism in reality are so in thought. For example, the self-employing worker is his own wagelabourer; his own means of production appear to him in his own mind as capital, as his own capitalist he puts himself to work as a wagelabourer [Marx, 1976: 1042]. For capital to exist there has to be wage labour [ibid.: 272-3]. That is, the interested capitalist who wishes to assume control of a labour process to extract surplus-value has to be able to calculate the potential profitability of that process and the going rate of wage labour provides a standard for doing so. But as the above quote suggests, for capitalism to operate it is sufficient that wage labour exist somewhere to provide a standard by which value can be calculated. Capitalist domination, is predicated not so much on real wage labour but on the wage relation [McMichael, 1996b]. For any subsumption process to occur then 'Money is needed ... only as a category, as a mental relation [Marx, 1973: 191].'" Like Midas it would seem, what money touches it turns into a calculable unit, it abstracts into a system of universal equivalence: 'Just as in money every qualitative difference between commodities is extinguished, so too for its part, as a radical leveller, it extinguishes all distinctions' [Marx, 1976: 229]. Under the rational, abstract rule of money the benign social order of Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham is realised. But this of course is a mystification [ibid.: 280].12 Money does not rule in capitalism, capitalists do. Although money is a powerful lever to make production 'orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist', it does not necessarily transform the basic character of the labour process. As I argued above, capitalist development, especially the emergence of a specifically capitalist mode of production, is characterised by the application, by capitalists, of science and technology within the labour process. For Marx the material application of science in the form of technology clearly plays a fundamental role in the development of the forces of production [ibid.: 754]. 'Science and technology' though, are not self-evident phenomena. Science in fact is as much a fetishised mental construct as the commodity form: The same transformation may be observed in the forces of nature and science, the products of the general development of history in its abstract quintessence. They too confront the workers as the powers of capital. They become separated effectively from the skill and the knowledge of the individual worker; and even though ultimately they are themselves the products of labour, they appear as an integral part

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of capital wherever they intervene in the labour process ... [ibid.: 1055]. The development of capitalism is predicated on the intellectual subordination of the labourer through the abstraction of knowledge [Braverman, 1974]. This abstraction creates the condition in which the labourer experiences the material manifestations of knowledge, that is, the technologies used and the products produced, and especially those manifestations of specifically scientific knowledge, as being natural forces which are harnessed by the capitalist rather than seeing them for what they are: social constructions created through, and simultaneously marshalled against the worker in, the labour process [ibid.: 754]. Though Marx stresses that the mystification of the sociar relations of production through science is more fully realised under 'real' than 'formal' subsumption [ibid.: 1024], nevertheless the conditions for the former are prepared by the development of the latter. That is, the marshalling of the labour process such that it is 'orderly under the eye of the interested capitalist' is itself both a precursor to and a component of the development of science as a powerful fetish and tool in the hands of capitalists [ibid.: 616-17, 1024].l3 To recap the argument, subsumption is not a category, a state that can be achieved. Rather, the concept of subsumption is a way of characterising the relative control of labour processes, both mentally and materially, by capitalists. The exercise of control is always worked out through these processes, it is always in formation, rather than ever being wholly formed. Thus an analysis of subsumption does not have to be merely concerned with, for example, weighing the relative weight of money or science and technology in the structure of production (though it could include such issues). Instead, the focus should be upon how capitalists attempt to control the labour process and the specific consequences of those attempts. By focusing on these projects and the processes they propel and within which they are enmeshed, the capitalist social relations of production, in their mental and material manifestations, are put at the center of the analysis. These relations are ultimately what capitalism is all about, both as a project of the ruling class and as an historical process. FEDECAFE'S CAPITALIST DEVELOPMENT PROJECT When FEDECAFE was founded in 1927 coffee was a spatially extensive, extremely heterogeneous export sector that had grown mostly in the previous 15-20 years. Problems with quality control, market volatility, labour unrest, and so on underscored a long felt need on the part of the Colombian bourgeoisie, and Antioqueno merchant-industrialists in


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particular, that the coffee sector had to be efficiently organised if it was to be a dependable component of the national economy [Bergquist, 1981; Fajardo, 1986; Machado, 1982; Palacios, 1983]. So FEDECAFE was formed and charged with the task of reining in this dispersed, complicated commodity production sector and making of it a predictable, malleable, and profitable industry. The means to do this were to establish financial and technical control over the industry.


Financial Control In 1928 there were signs that the dispersed character of coffee production was threatening Colombia's position in the world coffee market as a purveyor of quality beans. Colombia had captured ten per cent of the world market primarily because of its quality relative to Brazil, having made its fame for quality in the first decade of the century. But as the century progressed a perception emerged that quality declined as more coffee came from the 'provinces', that is, as a larger proportion of the total harvest came from small family farms [Keable, 1910: 40, 92; Revista Cafetera (RC), 1929, (13): 464].14 FEDECAFE, though, placed a great deal of blame for this situation on local merchants who failed to use their leverage over farmers as a means for improving quality. Due to lack of resources (whether of materials or knowledge) farmers could not guarantee quality. But because local merchants were apparently uninterested in doing anything to guarantee quality themselves, there was no possibility that farmers could get what they needed to do their job better. Thus to guarantee quality and stabilise Colombia's status in the world coffee market, it was argued, local speculation had to be overcome The Almacenes Generates de Deposito (general warehouses, hereafter AGD) were one way of working toward this goal. The AGDs were first established as a response to the 1929 financial crisis. When the crisis hit, the departments of Antioquia and Caldas were in the middle of the harvest season and many merchants refused to buy the crop or would only offer risible prices. Consequently, the first AGDs were set up to buy the harvest and curtail speculation on a captive supply. This regulatory function was intended to be permanent. It was hoped that the AGDs could control the negative impacts of speculative middlemen by standardising grading, regulating weights and measures, and providing farmers with access to inputs and supplies. Above all it was hoped that the regulatory power of the AGDs would enable access to credit through the issue of receipts which farmers could use as collateral in banks [RC, 1929 (13): 436; RC, 364, 772, 1177, 1631; RC, 1934 (58-62): 1807; FEDECAFE, 1934: 4]. By enabling credit, it was claimed the AGDs would 'provide the coffee grower with the opportune means to attend his fields and bring in his harvest, obtaining his


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money under extremely beneficial conditions, and salvational for his industry, as well as redeeming him from the claws of the rural usurer' [RC, 1933 (48-50): 1631]15 This in turn would 'facilitate the adequate processing and preparation of the bean by small producers, as well as [provide] the best conditions for its sale' [RC, 1931 (32-33): 1197]. Through the AGDs FEDECAFE hoped to stabilize the internal market and to incline small growers to entrust it with their futures. By eliminating middlemen and contracting family farm debt FEDECAFE can be seen to be taking over the disciplinary potential inherent in monetary exchange [Reddy, 1987] for use as a lever to enforce improvement of processing by family farmers. That is, the disciplinary potential of credit was envisioned as a means of regulating quality control for the world market. By stabilising internal commercialisation, tying farmers to the institution through debt and other services, and assuming the role of quality overseer, FEDECAFE can be seen to be working toward consolidating capitalist managerial control over the coffee sector. AGDs were also intended to be a mechanism for regulating international coffee markets. As part of its contract with the government FEDECAFE was given sole right to put a 'Colombian Coffee' or 'Product of Colombia' imprimatur on sacks; to be stamped each sack had to be reweighed in AGDs at the principal ports before exportation. Thus FEDECAFE became a guarantor of quality coffee for the international market, making it the institution with which foreign purchasers preferred to do business. AGDs were also intended to be a vehicle for intervention in the world market by controlling the flow of coffee stocks as a way of manipulating prices and exercising quality control. Modeled somewhat on Brazil's Institute do Cafe and its valorisation schemes, the management of stocks was seen to be the critical lever with which FEDECAFE could hope to manage the international market. By underwriting the export infrastructure through credit schemes based on these stocks the hope was that FEDECAFE, and Colombia, would be able to wrest some control of Colombia's participation in world coffee markets away from foreign export houses. To a certain degree, FEDECAFE succeeded in its goal of 'nationalising' the industry: between 1933 and 1942 the AGDs moved from being the eighteenth largest exporter to being the third, controlling 10.7 per cent of Colombia's total coffee exports. At the same time other Colombian firms among the top ten exporters moved from controlling 23.1 per cent of exports to 46.6 per cent [RC, 1929 (3-4): 104; RC, 1929 (11-12): 356, 436; Chalarca, 1987: 107; Machado, 1982: 179-88; Machado, 1988: 168-9]. The control which FEDECAFE established over trade in Colombian coffee was consolidated in the 1960s when the first Internationa] Coffee Agreement (ICA) was established and when the system of FEDECAFE



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controlled coffee co-operatives was formed. By regulating international prices, the ICA provided FEDECAFE with a mechanism for further rationalising internal trade through the establishment of price floors and a standardised price structure based on quality. The co-operatives became the mechanism enforcing these standards. As the principal buyer in coffee towns the co-operatives forced private buyers to either accept the price and quality standards or lose all of their clientele. By only buying coffee which met certain quality standards, the cooperatives also functioned as a disciplinary mechanism to reinforce the demands placed on growers by FEDECAFE's technical division. They also, in association with the Banco Cafetero (another FEDECAFE division, founded in 1953) and the technical division, were a key component in FEDECAFE's credit apparatus. This regulatory structure has remained in place up to the present, though since the final abrogation of the ICA in 1989, it has been seriously weakened and is undergoing restructuring. Technical Control The technical companion to monetary regulation through AGDs or co-ops is agricultural extension. FEDECAFE mounted the first extension service in Colombia (and the second in Latin America, the only predecessor being one mounted by Brazil's Institute) do Cafe) [Bejarano, 1987]. The Manual Cafetero, published in 1932, was the basic technical manual for the extension service and it provided a standard against which farms and farmers were to be judged by the institution. Though it was very small to begin with (only ten agents in 1928, and 46 by 1938) the extension service was touted as being one of the most important of FEDECAFE's interventions because it was responsible for making the coffee fields orderly under the eyes of capitalists.16 But in order to understand how the leaders of FEDECAFE conceptualised the role and methods of extension, it is important to know just what they thought about the people they hoped to change. On the whole the image of family farming that emerges from the pages of the Revista Cafetera in the 1920s and 1930s is that it was in sorry shape and that farmers were generally ignorant, stubborn, and in need of salvation.17 One repeated criticism was that the preparation of new trees for planting was haphazard. Typically, farmers would simply transplant spontaneously generated seedlings to open spaces. An extension agent from Antioquia wrote that with regard to reseeding or renovating their fields, small growers were 'quite indolent' and were 'too confident and attached' to those seedlings. After describing the basic principals of genetic crop improvement, the head of the Technical Section of FEDECAFE wrote that, instead of employing science, the 'famous [traditional] selection process has


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continued, and instead of being directed in a progressive sense, it has been completely regressive, and if it continues as is who knows where the coffee fields are going to stop' [RC, 1931 (26): 953; RC, 1931 (24): 850].18 The 'defensiveness' of farmers was repeatedly emphasised by FEDECAFE. It was extremely difficult, some argued, to change 'empirical practices strongly rooted in practically the entire mass of our campesinos, because of tradition in some, habit in others, and because of lack of knowledge in the majority'. The farmer was 'conservative of what is his, rabid defender of his practices, of his traditions of cultivating'. Farmers then, were perceived to be not only lacking a progressive, scientific sense of production, but to be bull-headed and unwilling to listen to 'those who are preoccupied with their true well being and betterment' [RC, 1933 (54-57): 1779; RC, 1929 (3-4): 87; RC, 1933 (48-50): 1657]." What this all represented for FEDECAFE's bourgeoisie was that the coffee grower was victim of a fundamental moral failing: an inability to think rationally in terms of costs and profits or to understand the benefits of technical experimentation. Although a large part of production was in the hands of small family farms, it is clear that they were not perceived to be capable of securing the future of Colombia's coffee economy and thus had to be managed by FEDECAFE. Their principal guides were to be the 'expertos ambulantes' (ambulant experts) who would spread the word about the new era FEDECAFE wished to usher in. These agents were given the task of ensuring that small growers became sound root stock upon which to graft the edifice of the industry. Extension agents were given a broad mandate. They had to teach the small grower how he should prune his plantation, how he should shade it, how he should harvest its fruits, how he should process these, how he should use coffee pulp as fertilizer in his plantation ... how he should defend himself and his children from hookworm, malaria and alcoholism, which complementary crops he should have in his business in order to lower the costs of subsistence and even what kind of food he should consume to keep his body healthy and vigorous in order to avoid the degeneration of his race [RC, 1934 (58-62): 1804].20 In order to fulfil this mandate though, agents themselves had to be formed into 'men of irreproachable moral character, good and efficient citizens'. Thus the training of agents was intended to instil in them a 'practical sense' so that they would be able to 'give efficient service to the country in all aspects of the coffee industry'. They would receive 'an especially practical and solid education, dedicating to theory only the time necessary for better comprehension of experiments and demonstrations with the goal that they give the coffee industry a truly economic orientation'. This social model of



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the moral and practical man of the world was the same that Safford calls 'the ideal of the practical' and well describes the self-image of the Antioqueno bourgeoisie. Clearly then, what bourgeois leaders of FEDECAFE were attempting to do was generalise their self-conception by forming model citizens who would go out and cultivate the same behavior in the masses [RC, 1929 (9): 283; Safford, 1976]. The capitalist development of coffee then, was conceived of as a process of bringing farmers into congruence with a social model embodied in the extension agent who was himself a replica of the bourgeois self-image. This model of moral advance through technical change has remained intact throughout the 70 years of FEDECAFE's existence. Among extension workers their labour is spoken of as a calling. To be a good educator one has to have mistica, that is, a sense that the product being extended and the person being extended to are not just commodities and commodity producers but vital components in a cultural order. One extension agent whom I interviewed in 1988 who had worked with FEDECAFE going on 30 years told me that More than a work of technicians, this is an apostolate, because any educational process implies having vocation, a pedagogical temperament. If you do not have mysticism; if you do not care about what you're teaching ... you cannot do a single thing. [T]he word, the lexicon, the example, and everything that induces a group to change has to be born from the heart and soul of the person who is giving it... So this educational process ... has since 1962 [been oriented toward] the formation of the coffee grower first and afterward the coffee fields, that is, first we make the coffee growers and later we make the coffee fields. [Ejvery coffee grower should ... come to understand that [coffee] not only has the advantage of being an economic benefit for the producer, but it is a crop which benefits a large part of the community ... Coffee is a banner, it is a cause, it is an axle, it is the spine of an economy on which lives not just a family but an entire community, an entire country, and each coffee grower should think that he is constructing nationhood (construyendo patria), that he is making a country ... [T]hat is, for us the coffee cause is a spirit of communitarian benefaction. Technical change then is a mechanism for moral regulation, the formation of hearts and minds into producers, not simply of commodities, but of community and nation [Rupert, 1995]. But how was the project that extension agents were charged with


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executing received and responded to by growers? In order to answer this question it is important to understand first just what has been extended. From its beginnings in the 1870's until the 1970s family farm coffee production technology in Colombia was relatively uncomplicated. Though it was arduous labour family farm coffee production was not a technically complicated endeavor [Arango, 1977; Errazuriz, 1986; Samper, 1990]. The changes dictated by the Manual Cafetero were mostly refinements of the extant system so adoption did not entail significant structural changes in the production process. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing today, Colombian coffee production has undergone 'technification' based on a dwarf variety, Coffea arabica var. caturra and since 1983, Variedad Colombia, a variety developed in FEDECAFE's coffee research center CENICAFE. While the traditional variety, known in Colombia as pajarito, produces greater bean weight per tree, because of its smaller size Caturra can be more densely planted thus resulting in higher productivity per hectare.21 Although adoption of Caturra can take the form of a simple integration into the extant production process, in typical Green Revolution fashion FEDECAFE has introduced the new varieties embedded within a 'technical package' which it has urged farmers to adopt in its entirety. Briefly, the technical package is based on the elimination of shade trees, dense plantation, use of agrochemicals (principally fertilisers), and, in the case of Variedad, the use of selected seed stock which can be obtained only through FEDECAFE. What this model represents is the notion of 'productivity maximization', the idea that intensive production results in higher productivity and, necessarily, a higher standard of living [Valenzuela, 1989]. The technification of coffee production then, as with all 'Green Revolution' technologies, is an attempt to subordinate the physical processes of the coffee plant to the exigencies of a growth-oriented model of economic organisation [Errazuriz, 1986; Goodman et al., 1987; Havens

andFlinn, 1975]. But as Marx argued, physical control over a labor process is not in itself what makes capitalism a powerful social form. It is the power to regulate the social relations of production which makes capitalists into a ruling class. FEDECAFE's technical package for example entails that farmers reconfigure their management practices in three fundamental ways. The first major consequence of the package is that a great deal of preplanning is required. Establishment of a coffee field for example passes through a number of phases and is the most capital intensive feature of coffee production at the level of the farm. Constructing seedbeds and laying out the fields in precise rows, triangulated and plotted with the contour of the slope to retard erosion, requires a considerable amount of work, and triangulation in particular requires skill and forethought. Based on yield estimates the



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farmer has to plan for the harvest, arranging ahead of time the composition of the labour force. Second, FEDECAFE has facilitated technification through offering low-interest (low for Colombia, around 28 per cent per annum), long-term credit. Typically, loans are paid out in three allotments, the second and third of these only being disbursed once an extension agent has confirmed that the fanner has used the previous allotments according to the terms specified in the loan agreement. Thus access to money is tied to carrying out FEDECAFE's production model. As a consequence of the use of official lines of credit, a third management factor, accounting, becomes a prerequisite for planning. Yield estimates, income potential in establishing new fields, managing loans, determining when yields of older fields are tapering off and deciding the critical threshold of decline for renovation, all these and more have to be accounted for in some way or another. Just as the technified fields have to be organised in well-drawn lines so too accounting needs to be organised on the lines of a ledger book. In short, technification is predicated on the quantification of the production process, it forces farmers to manage production in terms of numerical costs and benefits. The direction of technical change in coffee production by FEDECAFE is predicated upon a fundamental transformation, not simply of the techniques employed in production, but of the world-views of the fanners themselves. For the fanner, technification is not simply a process of applying new means to old situations but of entering the market as an almost fully capitalised producer. The formation of coffee growers as market actors is thus a fundamental feature of the technification process. FEDECAFE promotes its knowledge products steeped within a package that is at once material technique and a cultural construction of market rationality: the package is embedded and embedding within the cultural permutations of the world capitalist system. Thus once farmers have technified their fields they have committed themselves to a process in which FEDECAFE, in an increasingly profound fashion, assumes managerial control over the labour process. Technification then, is a concentrated effort at cultural intervention through which FEDECAFE attempts to implant a model of technological and economic development over which it has substantial control. It is intended, furthermore, to be a process through which a moral order is established, one in which the needs and desires of the person are subordinate to the stability and well-being of the social whole. And all of this, it must be said, is oriented toward the establishment of mechanisms for surplus extraction and accumulation by the bourgeoisie. THE PROJECT REALISED It remains to be seen whether this project has had any success. Have at least

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some growers subscribed to the terms of this project? Have their dispositions been shaped into congruence with the moral dictates of technification? If so, how and with what consequences? I believe that some growers have indeed bought into FEDECAFE's project, but that they have not done so as automatons. To claim that they are subject to moral regulation by FEDECAFE is to argue that they share many of the moral presuppositions which legitimate FEDECAFE's exercise of power over themselves and the industry as a whole [Corrigan, 1981]. The important issue then is how they come to hold these beliefs and then act upon them in participating in the construction of coffee capitalism. What follows is a profile of one such coffee grower. Santiago Mejfa is a coffee fanner in a small town some four to five hours south-west of Medellin.22 Mejfa worked the greater part of his life as a mayordomo but in 1984 he managed to buy 18 hectares of land from his then employer at a favourable price.23 Over the years working in the role of mayordomo Mejfa had the opportunity to plant many hectares of technified coffee. Indeed he claimed that he was perhaps the second person in his municipality to plant caturra in the late 1960s. In this manner he was able to apply techniques learned from demonstration plots, rural seminars, and from local extension agents without having to run the risks of capital investment by himself. Thus, once he acquired his own farm he was able to apply immediately those techniques which he deemed most suitable given the contours of his land and the means at his disposal. Of his 18 hectares, five were planted in coffee (all Variedad, though his first plot, which he eliminated in 1992, was caturra), two or so he gave to sons who also planted Variedad, the rest was in pasture or shrubs and trees, being rather steep for planting and also the source of his water supply. His house was built in the style for the region: four rooms, kitchen, a storage room, and the roofs which slide back to reveal beds for drying processed coffee. He had two mules, two dogs, a cat and some chickens. In his life Mejfa experienced upward mobility and fulfilled the ideal of many people in rural Colombia of becoming an independent smallholder. Throughout Mejia's adult life FEDECAFE designed and promoted its technical package with increasing intensity. In order to construct a sense of how his self-identity was shaped by this historical context, I will work through a series of quotations which situate him squarely within FEDECAFE's capitalist development project. That he is situated within this context is not to say that he is simply a construct of it. That is, as an historical being he is neither passive nor submissive, rather, to paraphrase the famous quote from the 18th Bntmaire, he constructs his situation within the parameters of society. Nevertheless I think his evaluation of his own circumstances reveals the degree to which he shares the moral evaluations of FEDECAFE concerning people such as himself.


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For Mejfa, technification means, simply enough, that you have to know how many trees you have and how' old they are, that they be planted with measured distances between trees and rows which facilitate fertilisation and weeding; weeding has to be done three times a year; fertilising has to be in quantities determined by the age of the plants and by a soil analysis and is also three times a year; in short, technification means managing the technical package of FEDECAFE. When asked in 1988 how he became convinced that technification was the way to go Mejfa replied that it was [B]ecause ... I did see [the model farm]24 and if one makes calculations, well, I'd say that I have some common sense and it's easy too, because, for example you see one pajarito bush occupying a bunch of land, and you say to yourself 'look here where today there's three trees of pajarito we can put nine trees of caturra; the production on those nine trees of caturra will surpass [the three of pajarito] 4 times'. In 1992 he told the same story but it was a one to three ratio and he attributed it to an extension agent. Whether it is an argument he made to himself or that was made to him, it is clear that what convinced him was contact with an extension agent and the basic mathematics of density/yield per hectare. The point to emphasise here is that his conception of technification is numerical: everything is conducted in measured amounts and by the calendar. This quantification of production is quite distinct, according to Mejfa, from traditional production practices. Mejfa has nothing but ridicule for the such methods of production. He characterises the apprehension some farmers express about eliminating an entire lot in order to renovate as a kind of paternalism in which the farmer treats the trees as part of the family and thus can not bear to part with them. He claims that in some respects pajarito was easier to manage because there was no need to fertilise (and fertiliser was too expensive anyway), family labor was sufficient, and one could sell anything regardless of quality because buyers weren't demanding. Today by contrast, fertilisation is obligatory, labor is an expense and the quality specifications of FEDECAFE are stringent. Nevertheless, Mejfa's rejection of past practices is complete: Before ... [we planted] pajarito because there wasn't any other more productive variety, so indisputably it had to be the one we used. What else could a coffee grower sow? What else would be as profitable? One cultivated pajarito in a rustic manner, rudimentary, with whatever resources one happened to have because he didn't have anyone who could say 'we have a much better system', or that 'it's already been tested and proved' like the extension agents do, as in CENICAFE25 for

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example. Because, in CENICAFE when they say to people, to the coffee grower 'do this', it's because they already have a farm done up experimentally where they have harvested for 4,5, or 7 years since they made the experiment and they know that when they go and say to a coffee grower 'this' it's because they have already experimented with it. So, for that reason we and our grandfathers had to do it that way [that is, plant pajarito] because it was the first thing that appeared. But as all things evolve so one has to be in agreement with development. It is interesting to note the historicism in Mejia's argument. He maintains that they only sowed pajarito because there had not been any other varieties. The cropping system receives the same evaluation: they only used it because they had no other options. This supposes that they never believed that they were working well, which, by his own account is not true: if someone loves a system so much that they can not bear to change it implies that, at least at some point, they believed it was good. What is clear though, is that the negative evaluation of traditional practice is derived from the relationship with the 'men of science' working with the resources of FEDECAFE. What was lacking in prior production methods it would seem, was that a leader come along with something better to show farmers how development should be done. This illustrates that Mejfa is totally committed to the process of technification, his own past (given that he did not start working within technification until his early thirties) is seen as being primitive and better for having been left behind. One has to be in agreement with development. There is moral censure in Mejia's statements for all those who do not practice the technical model that FEDECAFE promotes. In a veiled reference to his former employer, he refers with disdain to those growers of wealthier classes who do not have, in his opinion, well managed coffee fields in spite of their resources. They don't have good fields, according to Mejfa, because 'no creen en la tecnica\ they do not believe in technology. Technification, afterall, is a leap of faith: you have to believe in what the technicians-apostles tell you so that you may step onto the path of higher development. Those who do not conform to this path might as well get out as they'll be forced out sooner or later. It's obligatory today: either ... you learn to be a coffee grower, you learn how to manage coffee, or you learned how to stay up the creek without any other income off of which to live. That's how it is: either you are or you aren't. [The present times are like] a sieve with many men in it and many are falling out underneath, that's the way it is ... [TJhose who stay on top are the good coffee growers and those who leave are the bad coffee growers.



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There are several things to be noted about this passage. First is the idea that farmers have to learn to do their work. This is a hotly contested issue among growers. Many growers, even Mejia in crankier moments, resent the actions of extension agents. They complain that all they have is book knowledge whereas growers have 'real', practical knowledge. Second, in spite of the fact that Mejfa does agree with this theory/practice distinction to some degree, he nevertheless feels that he has to keep up on the information that is being generated by FEDECAFE if he is to survive as a coffee farmer. This openness to FEDECAFE's suggestion is precisely what FEDECAFE hoped to achieve with its extension service. Third, the metaphor of the sieve is also one that extension agents have used in presenting FEDECAFE's model. So again, there is a question of just how much the images that Mejia uses to rationalise his own actions are in fact his 'own'. Finally, what is clear about this passage is that the family farm is perceived to be unable, either materially or mentally, to survive unassisted in today's economy. This filtering process reveals the basic character of the present day family farm. Mejia attributes many of the current problems of family farms to their own failure (and he includes himself in this criticism) to hedge against crises and maintain food crops. In Mejia's town, before FEDECAFE became the primary purchaser of coffee in the 1960s farmers had to sell to local merchants at whatever prices were being offered and they had no way of knowing beforehand what that price was going to be. As a consequence, the family farm economy was prone to periodic crisis. Farmers like himself, he argues, were able to deal with these problems because they were diversified: they produced several crops if not for market, at least for personal consumption. With the arrival of FEDECAFE as a direct purchaser prices stabilised, credit became available, and everyone became animated by the possibilities of coffee. As Mejia put it, they planted right up to the limits of their farms and left no room for planting foodstuffs. Thus the difficulties family farms were having were due in part to the fact that they had become over-specialised in coffee. In the context of the descending financial crisis of the coffee industry in 1992 Mejia sensed that you become aware that you're working as your own wage laborer ... you become self-employed on the same property. We can't say that this is a benefit because it is not a benefit, but at least it gives you a kind of system to subsist on ... You can continue to subsist with the little bit of coffee that you get, there isn't any other alternative. Family farms, Mejia argues, have always been and will continue to be the foundation of the coffee economy simply because they do not have a choice, they are a captive population of producers. But what is central here is not that costs are 'internalized' without being calculated, the conventional

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argument advanced concerning family farm coffee production or family farming in general. Rather, Mejfa sees it as a self-exploitation, one is one's own wage labourer. But, as Marx forcefully argued, to conceive of oneself as one's own wage laborer is to be exploited through the mystifications of money, science and technology, subsumed into the fetishised commodity culture of capitalism.


CONCLUSION Throughout this essay I have argued that capitalism is not a 'thing' that has properties of its own. Rather, and this is what Marx argued throughout his life, capitalism is a social relation and, as such, is a way of thinking. Capitalism is also, following the subsumption argument, fundamentally heterogeneous. The concept of subsumption then, requires the analysis of local capitalisms that more rigid criteria such as wage labour and the use of machines do not. This conclusion has particular significance for the analysis of agriculture, especially those sectors in which family farms are involved. While these farms might not necessarily conform to the parameters of a 'specifically capitalist mode of production' in its industrial-mechanical manifestations, they are not for this reason discontinuous with such a mode. While this has been generally recognised in the subsumption literature, instead of leading to an analysis of the historical formation of capitalist managerial strategies and their struggles with labour in the process of capitalist development, what has been produced is a sterile debate on whether or how family farms are 'really' or just 'formally' subsumed. A close reading of Marx's text though, reveals that far from being a typological exercise, the concept of subsumption demands that we pay attention to the multiple ways in which ruling classes attempt to control the minds and bodies of labour. Capitalism is realised by people embedded within institutional and historical relations. This recognition entails that capitalism be analysed as a social form and a flexible managerial strategy rather than as a predetermined structure. This analysis of capitalist development is premised on the idea that capitalists respond flexibly to the conditions within which they are operating; they are not automatons, any more than laborers are. As I argued above, perhaps the crucial transformation in the development of capitalism is the reworking of how labour processes are managed. This includes especially, as Marx argued, the use of the abstractions of money, science, and technology in the planning and execution of capitalist development projects. The bourgeoisie who ran FEDECAFE deployed both of these mechanisms in concerted fashion. But FEDECAFE's capitalist development project could not be realised simply through the design of



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technologies or the offering of credit. Farmers in fact have to use the technologies and accept the credit. That is, capitalism has to be instituted socially. In order to execute their capitalist programme the FEDECAFE bourgeoisie had to 'get into the heads' of growers, they had to win them over to FEDECAFE's way of thinking about coffee and about themselves as family fanners. This 'getting into the heads', as I argued above, is a key feature of subsumption processes: the embedding of a particular perspective on the world within the consciousness of labourers, incorporating them into capitalist projects and processes. What does all this mean for people like Santiago Mejia? It means, I think, that it is difficult to envision one's land and labour without reference to the guiding institution. Mejia has lived his life through the industry as shaped and run by FEDECAFE. His aspirations, his future, would seem to be inextricably tied to the fate of FEDECAFE. It is of profound import then, that the Colombian coffee industry is undergoing a significant restructuring, and the future of both FEDECAFE and coffee farmers such as Santiago is anything but clear [CRECE, 1996]. As the world moves from the developmentalist epoch to that of globalisation [McMichael, 1996a], the projects and processes of capitalist development in the coffee industry will change as well. But more than just a change in social organisation or the relations of production, this shift will also occasion a profound identity crisis for the Santiago Mejfa's of the Colombian coffee industry and their bourgeois patrons.

NOTES 1. See Freire [1973], for a general discussion of extension as a form of domination. 2. This sense of ambiguity, if not confusion, about the status of family farms in capitalism is captured by the title of Llambfs [1988] article in the Journal of Peasant Studies: 'Small Modern Farmers: Neither Peasants nor Fully-Fledged Capitalists?' 3. It might be argued that focusing on this concept taken from a chapter that Marx decided was not worth including in the final version of Capital, is the utmost in Marxist fetishism: hanging on every last word of the master as if everything he wrote were sacred. The concept of subsumption, though, encapsulates in abstract form the much more detailed and historically based discussion of absolute and relative surplus value elaborated in Parts Three to Five of Capital. Perhaps Marx felt that the chapter on subsumption was simply redundant. 4. This is one consequence of the Chayanovian approach to the analysis of family farming, for example, Reinhardt [1988] (see Brass [1990] for a critique). Mann and Dickinson [1978] also perpetuate an image of family farming as having a natural foundation. 5. I will show below that this is diametrically opposed to what Marx meant by formal subsumption. 6. Chevalier's [1983] discussion brings to mind Brenner's [1977] critique of Wallerstein's work as being 'neo-Smithian Marxism'. 7. See Friedmann [1978], Lapping [1992], and Trachtenberg [1982] for the United States; Brew [1973] and Lopez Toro [1970], for Antioquia; Llambf [1989], for Latin America as a whole. Roseberry [1983] makes a similar argument concerning family farm coffee production in

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8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.


17. 18.

19. 20.

21. 22.

23.

24.

25.


Venezuela. All italics in citations from Marx are in the original. See Oilman [1993: 15] for a discussion of changed meaning within apparent continuity. See Marx [1976: 273-5] on the historical specificity of forms of labor management. This quote is taken out of its immediate context in the text; the general discussion in which it is located though concerns the ways that money can be used to measure and regulate an economy without ever being realised in metal. Thus I believe that my use of the quote remains true to the overall intent of Marx's discussion. See Reddy [1987] for an extended discussion of the liberal illusion of neutral money. See also Sayer [1989: 105] and Sayer [1991: 45]. The Revista Cafetera is the official journal of FEDECAFE. Henceforth I will cite this source as 'RC'. All translations from the original Spanish are my own. It was reorganised and expanded substantially in 1962. Now most towns which produce coffee have at least two resident agents. See Danbom [1979], for an analysis of similar images of and attitudes toward farmers in the US during the same period. The characterisation of cumpesino practice as regressive was not limited to the genetic effects on coffee but 1 believe was also meant to refer to the farmers themselves. 'Regression' was probably used in the sense current in the western world at that time: that 'social degeneracy' was caused by 'biological degeneracy' [Kevles, 1985]. The rhetoric that FEDECAFE was just looking out for the best interests of the farmers resembles that used by mid-nineteenth century Englishmen writing about social reform [Corrigan, 1981:328]. A few more of the duties of the agents were informing farmers about the AGDs, agrarian credit, and the laws, orders and decrees which regulated taxes and other factors of agriculture; promotion of coffee consumption; organisation of FEDECAFE's municipal committees; inscription of coffee farmers as members of FEDECAFE; visiting public schools and inculcating practicality into the students; conducting meetings on market days; distribution of FEDECAFE literature; etc. [RC, 1933 (48-50): 1657]. With caturra up to 10,000 trees per hectare is possible, though farmers generally plant around 5,000. With pajariw, 2,000 trees per hectare is considered dense. I lived with Meji'a and his family for two months or so in early 1988 and visited him repeatedly through the course of that year. I returned for a brief visit in 1992. I recorded two conversations with him, one in each of these years from which the following quotations are drawn. With these two interviews I have his perspective during both a high point in the coffee economy (when the effects of the 'mini-bonanza' of 1986 were still being felt) and at a point when that economy was heading toward a low (after the abrogation of the ICA in 1989 but before FEDECAFE began to roll back internal prices). In presenting this profile I am not arguing that this person is 'representative' of all growers. Rather, I maintain that he is one among the many with whom I conversed who hold similar beliefs and attitudes. That employer is one of the most important figures in the town in which Mejfa lives, and is a player in regional and national coffee politics as well. The land Mejfa bought is on the other side of the valley from the largest of this man's many coffee farms. Mejfa's sons occasionally did contract labour for him. An extension method used in the 1950s and 1960s was for a FEDECAFE agent to contract a piece of land from a large grower located near a crossroads and plant a demonstration coffee field using all of the recommended techniques with locally purchased inputs. The agent would keep accounts on the field and give farmers tours to show them the benefits of the FEDECAFE production model. FEDECAFE's coffee science and technology research and development centre. It also includes educational facilities and farmers are taken there on tours.


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