A National Market in Progress. Traditional and Modern Agrarian Labor Regimes in Argentina, 1860s-1930s

DJENDEREDJIAN, JULIO; PAZ, GUSTAVO

Cambridge

Conferencia; Global History of Agrarian Labor Regimes, 1750-2000; 2013

Harvard University

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Argentina emerged as a unified nation where markets for factors were established and an export-oriented agrarian economy developed. Capitalist relationships permeated rural labor agreements in the major agricultural provinces of the pampas, but old labor relations did not disappear in the rest of Argentina. On the contrary, the rapid expansion of capitalist labor relations in the pampas (monetary wages, fixed working hours, specialized tasks, hierarchical organization of production) was paralleled by the relative revival of traditional labor forms (lower wages partly paid in goods, debt peonage, paternalistic relations between employers and workers) in the interior regions of the country. Furthermore, differences between regions not only remained but deepened over time. In this paper we advance an interpretation as to why some old labor relations were reinforced even when they were increasingly engulfed by new market ones. Also, we seek to elucidate how capitalist economy took advantage of the traditional labor relations in place, and which pathways of resistance or integration to this trend were developed by the workers.