File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 84


Date: Tue, 3 Feb 1998 20:36:08 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: M-I: Primitive Accumulation


Lou P replied to me:
>Also, lots of peasants/indigenous peoples
>>who are being expelled from land now in the Third World are more likely to
>>go into the urban informal sector (peddling, hustling, going in and out of
>>personal service/petty production/casual labor, etc.) than become wage
>>workers. (I infer this from astonishingly high rates of Third World
>>unemployment rates.)
>>
>
>The phenomenon of the "informal economy" is so wide-spread in Latin America
>that it led Mexican journalist Jorge Castaneda to theorize a "civil
>society" based on street peddlers, etc., who would constitute a
>petty-bourgeoisie of a new type and provide a social base for democracy.
>This optimistic viewpoint is really at odds with Latin American reality.
>The street peddlers are outside of any political framework and are too
>marginalized to move in that direction.

This fact of marginalization--the likelihood that uprooted
peasants/indigenous peoples will be in the informal economy rather than
become wage workers, especially in Latin America--should, in my opinion,
highlight the importance of ongoing struggles for land.

Yoshie




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