MILPAS OF THE MILLENNIUM: WHERE WILL THE EXCLUDED ONES GO IF THE SYSTEM IS GLOBAL?

Abstract

Legitimate exploitation confers status and dignity. That is why for peasants and their ideologists it was important to discover in the so-called “universal exchange” why the “surplus value” was snatched away from them. The famous San Garabato’s Law – “buy low, sell high” – was transformed, then, on the basis of exaction of peasant labor for capital, in the hostile but justifying mechanism, by which smallholder direct producers would acquire function and meaning within the modern system of accumulation of wealth. Thus paradoxically, despoilment became raison d’être and a symbol of identity.

Citation

Bartra, A. (2003), "MILPAS OF THE MILLENNIUM: WHERE WILL THE EXCLUDED ONES GO IF THE SYSTEM IS GLOBAL?", Bell, M.M. and Hendricks, F. (Ed.) Walking Towards Justice: Democratization in Rural Life (Research in Rural Sociology and Development, Vol. 9), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 35-42. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1057-1922(03)09003-6