ABSTRACT
Arguing that the economic development in Brazil of a commercial latifundist agriculture has depended historically on access to and control over labour-power, the crisis resulting from slave emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century was met by immigration and settlement of European workers plus internal migration. Usufruct rights in export agriculture (coffee, sugar and rubber) meant the emergence of dual identity, whereby smallholding was combined with working for others. Capitalist expansion in the twentieth century resulted in casualization and/or dispossession of the agrarian workforce in commercial agriculture, undermining the peasant economy. The reproduction of the latter, however, has remained a focus of agrarian struggles, not least because of the ideological role played by non-peasant ‘mediating groups’ (the church, political parties), a process culminating in the emergence of what is now termed a ‘new’ rural subject. Such a designation, it is argued, fails to capture both the socio-economic diversity of the rural workforce and also the way in which the ‘voice from below’ conceptualizes agrarian reform.
