ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author examines extraneous categories insofar as they express relations of production, therefore leaving aside those categories whose significance can only be explained at the level of the superstructure. As many descriptive texts demonstrate, the plantation’s workforce included free laborers whose relationship with the planter was founded on wages. As part of the Brazilian slave formation, there was as social category of free men that the sources sometimes referred to as agregados and sometimes as moradores (residents). In Brazil, the type of colonization and the vast availability of uncultivated lands allowed for the development of a marginal mode of production, predominantly for self-subsistence: small, non-slaveholding farmers. The evolutionary tendency of Sao Paulo was identical to that of the rest of the country during slavery: an extreme concentration of enslaved person and land ownership and a constant growth of the destitute free population.
