In southwestern Spain, in the Andalusian province of Huelva, an emblematic crisis of contemporary industrial agriculture has been unfolding over more than four decades. Huelva is presently Spain's foremost producer of strawberries and, by extension, Europe's leading soft fruit exporter.1 The regional agricultural model is inscribed into a supra-regional division of agricultural production that has seen post-Francoist Spain emerge as one of the world's most important producers of fresh fruit and vegetables. The development of intensive berry production has been controversial from its origins, which can be roughly dated to the second half of the 1960s. The hyper-productivity characteristic of agricultural production in the region was made possible by the identification of reserves of underground water that allowed for the spread of irrigated agriculture in a region historically regarded as infertile. The dominance of berry production in the regional economic model was already a fait accompli in the 1980s, but the further expansion of the soft fruit sector has heightened the contradiction between agro-industrial production and its resource base. Decades of groundwater abstraction are a main cause of the environmental crisis into which the Doñana National Park, a wetland conservation area of international significance, has been immersed. Mounting international pressure against the effects of groundwater abstraction on the world heritage site has brought into focus farmers’ unrelenting exploitation of the aquifer and the insufficiency of existing measures for curtailing the proliferation of unlicensed wells. The exacerbation of a conflict presented as one between “agriculture and conservation” has led to heightened visibility of the farming sector's purported solution to the ecological stresses occasioned by groundwater abstraction: the substitution of groundwater by surface water through transfers.
Recent developments highlight the hegemonic categories through which the conflict is apprehended. On the one hand, after a protracted conflict between the national and regional government following the latter's initiative to legalize unlicensed wells, the parties have reached a provisional entente. This has materialized in an agreement (MITECO 2024) that opens the route to diminishing pressure on the aquifer by offering incentives to farmers to abandon or transform their existing operations. On the other hand, within a more general context of farmers’ protests across Europe during 2023 and 2024, the long-standing demands of the Huelva berry sector have been amplified and inserted into supra-regional struggles. Among the demands of Huelva farmers denouncing the “structural crisis that threatens Spain's food supply itself” (N.A. 2024), the repeal of measures intended to curtail water use and the demands for completing a set of hydraulic works that would enable the transfer of surface water feature centrally.
Both the environmental crisis connected to the Doñana park and recent farmers’ protests have put images of crisis center stage. The framework for a negotiated solution to the Doñana water conflict places the intended measures within the broader challenges of the green transition. While the language of transition is less present among the agro-industrial actors demanding support for the sector, not so the idea of a system coming undone. While those alerted by the unfolding environmental consequences of water overabstraction have singled out the proliferation of illegal wells, regulatory failures, and increasing concentration of capitals, agro-industrial interests have insisted on the crisis of profitability affecting farmers, the regional economy's dependence on the berry sector, and the domination of producers by intermediaries in the commodity chain. Yet, within the conflict a commonly accepted, self-evident assumption has gone mostly unchallenged: the equation of the farmer with the direct producer and of the farming sector with a vital economic activity. On the left, some have begun to raise the importance of differentiation within the sector, thus singling out the more recent trends toward the concentration of capitals and the differences between large-scale industrial farmers and intermediate and small ones. Farmers’ protests have also raised the spectrum of their co-optation by the far right, which has led to positions in favor of listening to farmers’ grievances and extensive analysis of the subordinate positions occupied by producers in agricultural commodity chains.
The overwhelming majority of approaches to the entangled crises of agro-industrial berry production perpetuate a structural silence about the social relations that have made possible the (now fraught) reproduction of the regional agricultural model. Thus, the overhanging question of a transition away from the present model has been posed as one about the future of farmers and farming, while agricultural labor has been largely written out of the conversation in all of its iterations. In what follows I argue that a fundamentally different approach to the entangled crises affecting intensive berry production is required in order to understand how agricultural relations of production and reproduction interact with broader socioecological structures. For this, some of Eric Wolf's insights as formulated in Europe and the people without history (hereafter EPWH) remain an invaluable guide, most notably his stress on social production as the dialectically related interaction between humans and nature. Yet, posing the problem of transition, analytically and politically, also raises some of the limitations in Wolf's approach. In order to understand the origins of a progressing crisis as well as to identify sources of change within the existing conjuncture, I bring into dialogue EPWH and the Brenner debate.2
EPWH, legacy, and method
Four decades after its publication, EPWH can still be celebrated as a prescient study of interconnection seen as both motor and outcome of global processes of accumulation. The study of interconnection acquires with Wolf broader heuristic and epistemological functions. The contributions of Wolf's program at the time of writing were manifold, but perhaps the most significant of these was that it came at a time when US anthropology was on the retreat in its willingness and ability to document how its traditional object of study, “the non-European other,” was an integral part of a global history of uneven development. For Wolf, revealing the histories of the people without history was a program of investigating how capitalist relations acquire their dominance in relation to noncapitalist formations. EPWH also demonstrates, outstandingly, that noncapitalist relations of accumulation that coexist with capitalist social forms are not adequately understood as survivals but must be treated as outcomes of the dynamic processes through which accumulation on a global scale proceeds. Four decades later this task has become programmatic, and where anthropology has failed to engage the actually existing histories of dispossession of capitalist-colonial modernity, other disciplines have stepped in. The dynamic analysis of what in Wolf appears as the long prehistory of capitalism and its accompanying production of cultural forms finds its continuity in the present varieties of global history, prominently so in global labor history; much of the program laid out in EPWH has become a required minimum (Kasmir and Carbonella 2022; Van der Linden and Eckert 2018; Van der Linden 2023). Is there a sense, then, in which Wolf's program for “uncovering the history of the people without history” still holds overlooked potential? Is there a way to work with Wolf rather than in the spirit of Wolf that now pervades the historically and ethnographically oriented critical histories of capitalist modernity?
In EPWH, reclaiming the erased histories of coproduction of the modern world system appears as both object and method. To write a different history of European expansion takes the form of documenting and analyzing the multiscalar transformation of the social deployment of labor. The main analytical device for Wolf's endeavor is the concept of mode of production. Wolf's tripartite division of modes of production is well-known: the tributary, kin-ordered, and capitalist modes of production are the lenses through which he presents “the encounter between the West and the Rest” (Roseberry 1989a). The achievements and limitations of his analysis are both outcomes of this framework. Four decades after publication, the historical prowess of this schema can be relatively easily questioned, yet the objections should be raised with caution. The recurrent insistence that his classification and use of modes of production is neither evolutionary nor exhaustive must be taken seriously in order to do justice to Wolf's agenda. However, there remains in Wolf an unresolved tension between the awareness of the heuristic nature of his tripartite classification (and its inherent limitations) and his own historical analysis.
Wolf's methodological caution is to a certain extent rendered inoperative by his own historical conclusions, and this is at its most evident in the periodization of capitalism. His rich and forward-looking analysis of the dynamics of imperial expansion sits awkwardly alongside his identification of the capitalist mode of production with a narrow reading of nineteenth-century industrial capitalism. The limitations of this view are sharply evidenced by the work of his colleague and collaborator, Sidney Mintz, whose research into the role of the sugarcane plantation economy in the gestation of capitalist forms of the organization of labor has become a milestone in the analysis of the relationship between colonial domination and capitalist expansion (Mintz 1986). The constricted conflation of industrial wage labor in nineteenth-century England with its capitalist commodity form appears, especially in the light of subsequent theoretical developments, limiting. The tendency to reduce the capitalist mode of production to a particular form of production has become increasingly unconvincing.
But alongside what appears to be a theoretical straitjacket, Wolf's reliance on a mode of production framework also enabled him to develop some of his most durable and, I argue, still forward-looking contributions. Wolf's definition for mode of production fits within what has become commonly accepted as the standard formulation in the Marxist tradition. Consequently, his concept points to the unity of forces and relations of production within a dynamic totality. Wolf's theoretical treatment of forces of production stays quite close to Marx's formulation, but it is Wolf's outstanding achievement to both recover and successfully deploy a nondeterministic, relational conceptualization of forces of production. In EPWH, forces of production, understood as the methods and means for the appropriation of nature, are conceptualized and historically analyzed in a way that constitutes a powerful corrective to technological determinism. The appropriation and transformation of nature are not simply the canvas upon which an evolutionary sequence of technological conditions unfolds. The substance of the concept is deeply relational: the focus is on historically particular relationships with nature and the conditions under which they are established.
This holds true for the theoretical as well as the historical level. Regarding the first, Wolf's brilliantly synthetic discussion of production and social labor offers a remarkably powerful statement on the specificity of humans as a part of nature that has learned how to oppose the whole that encompasses it. Alongside the similarly sharp insistence on the unity of the material and the ideational, EPWH encompasses a program that anticipates by decades contemporary discussions revolving around the concept of Capitalocene and also circumvents some of the spurious conversations about Cartesian dualism that have tagged along (for a discussion see Bessire and Bond 2014; Moore 2015). But the strength of Wolf's treatment of forces of production as the historically variable forms through which the appropriation of nature proceeds is also a result of his historical ethnographic analysis. Wolf's method as a historical ethnographer encompasses a refusal to separate theory and history, yet it is true that while the unity is evident in his historical analysis, the separation occasionally returns in the theoretical synthesis. Where that happens, the historical ethnographic analysis feels ahead of its theoretical distillation, but his dialectical interpretation of the relationship between the deployment of social labor and the transformation of nature is one instance where the unity of theory and history in Wolf's method remains outstandingly represented. The analysis of the North American fur trade or the ravages of silver and gold mining are demonstrations of the simultaneous domination of human and nonhuman nature achieved under imperial expansion and the necessary character of their unity. Nonetheless, Wolf's analysis is undeniably skewed toward the analysis of forces of production. His treatment of relations of production often appears illustrative rather than organically emerging from the historical record, and it is in the identification of a principle of movement from one mode of production to another where Wolf's reliance on the concept of mode of production encounters one of its more evident limits.
From interconnection to change, from Wolf to Brenner
In the tradition that Wolf situated himself in and roughly around the time he was working on the manuscript for EPWH, the problem of sources of change and principles of movement in history was most prominently addressed in a set of exchanges today known as “the Brenner debate.” The Brenner debate can be regarded as a second stage of a more encompassing one regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Brenner's initial intervention (Brenner 1987a), the responses to it, and his follow-up article (Brenner 1987b) revolved around the problem of how a system of feudal property relations was transformed into a capitalist one. In addressing the question of the origins of capitalism, Brenner opposed established interpretations of the transition. He also advanced his own analysis of the role of class struggle between lords and peasants in the late medieval and early modern periods, which, in his reading, was the main factor behind diverging trajectories of economic development in Europe. Brenner addressed the economistic tendencies in interpreting the origins of capitalism, which he classified into two models: the Malthusian demographic model and the commercial model. To these prevailing interpretations he opposed his own reading, according to which it was the special character of class relations in agricultural England that made possible Britain's capitalist development. In building his case, Brenner stressed the importance of a fully historical and nondeterministic reading, which could be summed up in his insistence that in order to not project upon the past capitalist categories, one had to account for “feudal actors pursuing feudal goals in feudal ways” (Harman and Brenner 2006).
In the most succinct of summaries, the Brenner position could be summed up in the view that the origins of capitalism in Britain are to be found in the relative weakness of the peasantry: that is, while peasants succeeded in overthrowing lordship, they failed to gain control over property in land. This particular outcome of class struggle was to be found behind the rise of the landlord/tenant relationship that brought co-operation in investment and improvement and which proved the necessary impulse to the development of capitalist labor relations. Brenner's analysis is comparative: he contrasts the British case to those of France and Eastern Europe, where he argues a different course of class struggle hindered the emergence of capitalist social property relations. It is the comparative framework that underlies one of the major achievements of his analysis, an open-ended analysis of class struggle that focuses on its unintended consequences. In Brenner's own reflection upon the implications of his analysis, such a reading rules out “any attempt to account for the onset of capitalist development by reference to the growth of the productive forces” (Harman and Brenner 2006).
To bring the “Brenner debate” into dialogue with EPWH is to engage in a missed conversation. The two sit in an awkward relation. Despite being roughly contemporary and despite their overlapping concerns, Wolf glosses over this major episode of the transition debate. EPWH, published six years after Brenner's intervention, includes barely two references to it. One of them is in a note from which it becomes clear that Wolf was not, at the time, well acquainted with Brenner's work.3 Why this dialogue never directly occurred is a historical riddle of its own, but not a question that I seek to tackle in this article. Rather, by bringing the Brenner debate to bear upon EPWH, I aim to reveal some of the merits and limits of Wolf's recourse to mode of production analysis. Doing this not through an anachronistic reading but through placing it in the intellectual conjuncture in which it emerged seems to me the superior analytical and political approach in a theme section devoted to Eric Wolf. The heuristic value of the confrontation goes beyond this, I argue, because Brenner's contribution to the transition debate raises similar theoretical concerns and offers different resolutions, so it works as a counterfactual to some of Wolf's choices. Additionally, the Brenner debate is interesting because it stands between Wolf's two most influential contributions, Peasant wars of the twentieth century and EPWH. EPWH only obliquely takes up the peasant question, and this feels like a missed opportunity since it prevents Wolf from reworking questions of resistance through a Marxian framework and sidelines the role of agrarian relations of production in the emergence of capitalism.
When reading EPWH alongside the Brenner debate, a general tendency can be noticed: the higher the level of abstraction, the more the authors seem to converge. Wolf and Brenner are both analysts of social change seeking to understand the relationships between different social formations. They are interested in “general processes at work in mercantile and capitalist development” (Wolf 2010: 23). They are similarly concerned with identifying sources of change in capitalism (and more at large sources of movement in history), and they agree that Europe is the birthplace of capitalism. Both authors address the problem of how capitalist relations acquire their dominance in relation to noncapitalist social formations. The convergences between them run deep, partly because in challenging the prevailing orthodoxies of their disciplines, both turn to the Marxist toolkit, and partly, I would suggest, because they share dialogue with dependency perspectives and world systems theory. One of the main stakes in Brenner's intervention, the rejection of the commercial (what Wolf calls the “circulationist”) model of capitalism is a point to which Wolf returns to repeatedly in EPWH. In rejecting the commercial model of capitalism, they both assign primacy to free wage labor. The dividing line between capitalism and other modes of production is for both drawn around the deployment of social labor. Brenner and Wolf are both interested in what separates capitalism from noncapitalism. Noncapitalism for both are alternative social formations. For Wolf these are the tributary and kin-ordered modes of production. The relevant other social formation for Brenner is European feudalism. The noncapitalism of both can be said to have a diachronic and a synchronic element. Thus, Brenner asks what separates English feudalism from English capitalism, but he also looks for noncapitalist relations in different contemporaneous geographical configurations. Wolf begins his survey of European expansion with a view of the world at 1400, but then quickly begins to trace how European capitalism subsumes noncapitalist relations of production.
In Brenner, the unit of inquiry and analysis, as well as his thesis, are refreshingly clear. The unit of analysis and inquiry in EPWH are, by comparison, much more elusive. In fact, one could argue that the difficulty of resolving the ambiguities surrounding Wolf's object of analysis is what makes it hard to pin down his theoretical contribution. His world historical survey of interconnection from the 1400s onward can, on the one hand, be read as a global analysis of the interaction between three modes of production: the kin-ordered, the tributary, and the capitalist. It is also a magisterial confrontation with anthropology's traditional subject, “the primitive,” with far-reaching implications for how anthropological subjects are imagined and constructed. Wolf's ability to synthesize in a manner that puts into sharp relief the core challenges in traditional Marxist approaches is outstanding, as evidenced by the introduction to the modes of production chapter.
Compared to Brenner's contribution, the question of sources of change is less directly formulated in EPWH. Nonetheless, the analytical challenge of identifying dynamics of transformation is implicit to Wolf's global history of interconnection. There remains, though, a pervasive feeling when reading EPWH that transitions from one mode of production to another, their interaction, are documented and shown rather than fully explained. As Roseberry has observed, it is hard to avoid the feeling that the conclusion to his analyses of how regions and peoples are brought into the orbit of European expansion “is often simply an assertion of connection” (Roseberry 1989a: 140). Put briefly, Wolf's historical ethnographic material allows him to analyze changing relations between producers and appropriators of surplus; at its best, the analysis shows how these are necessarily dynamic socioecological relations. Yet there are moments in EPWH when the dynamism inherent to a mode of production remains elusive. This can be largely attributed to the sidelining of resistance as a source of change. Class relations, in EPWH, seem to be class relations “from above,” meaning that the reinstated anthropological subject rarely appears as an actor aware of their own voice. Dynamics of resistance and accommodation bear little analytical weight upon the explanatory model. The result can feel as if Wolf's concept of mode of production is at times more useful as a classificatory tool than as a way of tracing processes of transformation.
Read alongside EPWH, Brenner's theses seem to have aged unevenly. Perhaps the most striking difference is that between Wolf's global analysis and Brenner's resolutely Eurocentric one. While Wolf does not channel his study of imperial expansion into a coherent analysis of primitive accumulation and his periodization is problematic, his global vision feels refreshingly contemporary. By comparison, in Brenner the dynamic elements of the feudal economy are superiorly theorized, yet the unit of analysis feels unsatisfactorily constructed. Nonetheless, capitalism is for both Brenner and Wolf of resolutely European origins, clearly locatable in time and place. Wolf pays virtually no attention to the agrarian origins of capitalism, which one might pose as a genuine biographical conundrum, given Wolf's seminal role in the study of peasantries. So, on the one hand we have a mode of production theorist with a global view but who does not question the industrial form of production as the matrix for the capitalist mode of production. By contrast, Brenner breaks out of the limitations of an industrial capitalist model, yet he does so while neglecting the international and global insertion of a transforming feudal economy.
It is, as if, read against each other, Wolf and Brenner provide two different Marxist solutions to envisioning historical process. A mode of production lens, in which the dynamism can be located in the transformation of the means of appropriating nature and labor, and a class struggle lens, whereby conflict, understood as the opposing actions of producers and appropriators of surplus, is the generator of motion. Regarding Brenner, such a reading is supported by Guy Bois. One of his sharpest Marxist critics, Bois argues that the error of political Marxism “lies not only in its neglect of the most operative concept of historical materialism (the mode of production). It also lies in its abandonment of the field of economic realities—to the great advantage of the Malthusian school” (Bois 1987: 116). While the latter part of the statement is unconvincing, especially considering Brenner's response (1987b) and the evidently narrow conceptualization of the economic, there is in Brenner a clear neglect or sidelining of the concept of mode of production. But rather than a full-on neglect, Brenner's engagement with the concept of mode of production can be seen as favoring relations of production to the detriment of the analysis of forces of production. While Brenner nominally acknowledges that “the ‘labor process’ or the ‘social forces of production’” and the “inherently conflictive relations of property” (1987a: 11) are “two analytically distinct but historically unified aspects” (1987a: 11) of class structure, he immediately withdraws from engaging with said unity in favor of a reading that gives precedence to “the property or surplus extraction relationship” through which, in his account, the fundamental classes in a society are defined. From here onward, the question of the historical unity of forces and relations of production is sidelined in Brenner's analysis. What does this mean for the actuality of Wolf's toolkit, and where does such a heuristic confrontation leave us when confronted with the need to explain the origins of a situated agro-industrial crisis and the contemporary reconfiguration of agro-industrial relations of production? In keeping with Wolf's dictum that such answers “cannot be provided on theoretical grounds alone” (2010: xxii), I return to Huelva.
Europe and the workers without history
In early 2023 more than fourteen thousand women embarked on a journey from Morocco to the South of Spain. Escorted on their trip, they disembarked in the port of Cádiz, from which they were taken by bus to Huelva, a province in southwestern Andalusia where they were to work until the beginning of summer. Tens of thousands of women have undertaken a similar journey in the last two decades, but their central role in the reproduction of the regional agro-industrial model has been suppressed by hegemonic representations of agricultural relations of production. Juridically construed as “temporary workers,” ideologically devalued as an annex to the labor process, these are the women who have supplied the bulk of the labor on which the reproduction of this export-oriented agricultural enclave rests. For over thirty years, women and men mostly arriving from two areas, Eastern Europe and Northern Africa, have ensured the continuous supply of Western European markets with out-of-season berries. Internal and external migration has accompanied the flow of capital into berry farming from early on. The consolidation of strawberry production from the 1980s onward can be told as a history of the successive displacement of groups of racialized migrant workers (Gualda Caballero and Ruiz García 2004; Reigada 2017, 2022).
Initially, work in the strawberry fields of Huelva was primarily carried out by day laborers from other provinces of Andalusia. By the early 1990s, however, the labor force had become internationalized, with Moroccan and Algerian men taking on the most demanding phases of the production process. Presently, the most demanding phases of the labor process in berry production are carried out through a hiring model known as “hiring at origin” (contratación en origen). Through it, thousands of Moroccan women of rural background, mostly between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five, arrive every year to Spain in order to ensure an “orderly” campaign and the frictionless functioning of the commodity chain (Hellio and Moreno Nieto 2017, 2021; Reigada 2022). “Hiring at origin” is a model of labor recruitment developed within a multiscalar framework for managing migration. It was implemented in the early 2000s, and initially Romania and Poland provided the majority of berry pickers. Following the Eastern European countries’ accession to the EU, hiring at origin switched to Morocco. Typically, the Moroccan women hired at origin are young and middle-aged and of rural background with ties of dependency. Women with dependents in their care are given preference, and repeat hiring is conditioned by having met the terms of return. In addition to the language barrier, the rural background of most women frequently means that they cannot read or write, which facilitates abusive practices in the drafting of their contracts.
The recruitment of women workers in their country of origin reduces the costs of reproduction of the labor force through externalization. In relation to the lifelong, generational reproduction of labor, it works by reducing the welfare obligations of the contracting country. The work permits of “seasonal” agricultural workers are conditional upon respecting the terms of “circular migration”—that is, on not overstaying their assigned productive period. Upon return to Morocco women are expected to resume their reproductive obligations in relation to dependents. At the level of the firm, sustaining wages below the cost of reproduction is facilitated by women typically being housed on the farm, where they are subjected to forms of discipline that ensure their constant availability. If housing on the farm expresses one aspect of the conditions under which control over the mobility of the workforce is achieved, the proliferation of informal settlements objectifies its limits and contradictions. Several thousands of those whose labor is absorbed by local agriculture reside in informal settlements known as asentamientos. Inhabited in the majority by African men, Moroccan women, and racialized Eastern Europeans, asentamientos are typically portrayed as populated by undocumented migrants, an assumption not confirmed by the estimates of associations involved in solidarity work in the settlements and likewise disproven by my own fieldwork. Yet, the function that both container housing on the farm and the segregation of workers in the settlements share is that of keeping the daily lives of migrant workers out of sight.
When wage workers’ lives are brought back into accounts of agro-industrial berry production, this more frequently than not confirms the invisibilization processes at work. Inquiries into prevailing relations of agricultural production frequently depict the (over)exploitation of wage labor as an effect or a consequence of predatory relations of accumulation rather than as its main condition of possibility. The “social conditions” of laborers are an externality of the unchecked growth of a sector, alongside deleterious ecological processes. The writing out of history of agricultural wage workers is a process that has its origins in the central categories through which agro-industrial production is apprehended. To approach the entangled crises of the farming sector in Huelva with the Wolfian toolkit offers a radically different understanding, I maintain. The picture that emerges is not one in which wage labor is smuggled into the narrative through the back door but one in which the social deployment of labor is the constitutive moment of export-oriented intensive agriculture. To bring Brenner into the picture allows us not only to specify the mechanisms through which surplus is extracted but also to identify sources of change and pressures for transformation.
Historically unified aspects: Social forces of production and property relations
In order to develop a relational concept of mode of production, Wolf advances a reading of Marx that stresses the dialectical relationship between humans and nature. Clearly influenced by what has by now become Alfred Schmidt's canonical reading of the “question of nature in Marx” (Schmidt 2014), Wolf mobilizes an understanding of humanity in nature as “the part that has acquired the ability to oppose the whole that encompasses it” (2010: 73). For Wolf, a relational concept of mode of production is rooted in the idea of the active relations of species to nature, while the distinction between work and labor and the corollary conception of social mobilization and deployment of labor provide the foundation for an analysis of “how the technical transformation of nature is conjoined with the organization of human sociality” (ibid.: 74). Wolf insists on the unity of human-human relations, human-nature relations and the institutional structures that mediate them, and EPWH excels at tracing the ecological transformations accompanying the displacement of one mode of mobilization of labor by another. For this analysis Wolf relies on a nondeterministic reading of forces of production, one that brings together “the exosomatic means of technology, organization, and ideas” (ibid.: 73). The effective transformation of the environment is thus posited as the outcome of social labor “with both hand and head” (ibid.: 75) and necessarily mediated by the historically changing structures that govern its allocation.
Transformations in “the exosomatic means of technology, organization, and ideas” (ibid.: 73) are a pivotal dimension of the expansion of berry production in Huelva. The introduction of strawberry cultivation in the Palos-Moguer area in the 1960s was inscribed within the global search for increased agricultural productivity occasioned by the Green Revolution. In the words of Antonio Medina, an Andalusian businessman considered “the father of the Huelva strawberry,” Spain had to imitate the California model and redefine its agriculture as an export-oriented one, taking advantage of the process of consolidation of the common European market and the growing demand for fruit and vegetables. “Our tasty fruits and vegetables will be an extension to Europe, a constant reminder of the bright sunshine of Spain for those who visited our homeland.” And for the skeptic doubting the metropolis taking its cue from the colony four centuries later, a reminder: “It should be noted that until well into this century, California agriculture was essentially extensive and predominantly local” (Medina 1965). Berry cultivation in the sandy soils of Huelva is presently undertaken on land that for centuries had been regarded as unproductive. The historically limited agricultural productivity of the land is tellingly encapsulated in the fact that large parts of the sandy soils upon which intensive berry production is currently carried out did not even appear in the first land censuses, owing to the traditional yield-related measurement of land (Ojeda-Rivera 2023). The conversion of an “essentially extensive and predominantly local” agriculture into a globally leading export-oriented one was made possible by the generalized use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, the introduction of plastic covering, and, crucially, the discovery of groundwater deposits. In the second half of the 1960s, an FAO-funded development project, the “Guadalquivir project,” resulted in the identification of aquifers in the basins of three rivers: Guadalquivir, Guadalete, and Barbate. In Huelva, in the Guadalquivir basin, the mapping of the Almonte-Marismas aquifer led to an extremely ambitious agricultural development plan (Hamilton 2022; Ojeda-Rivera 2023). This was inscribed within the general orientation of the Franco regime's agrarian development policy, which tied together agrarian colonization and the expansion of irrigation. Supply-side water management, while anchored into differently inflected agrarian programs, overrode regime change. In the 1980s, under the leadership of the Socialist Party, the expansion of irrigation remained the fundamental pillar of agrarian policy. While early concerns about the impact of irrigation on the Doñana National Park led to the scaling down of the Almonte-Marismas irrigation plan, at the provincial level official state policy, aimed at transforming water into an agricultural input, and an aquifer management regime that favored the proliferation of individual wells led to the generalized reliance of berry production on groundwater extraction. It should also be noted that technical changes in groundwater extraction and delivery systems, particularly the spread of motorized irrigation pumps, made groundwater extraction a possibility within the reach of small-scale private initiative.
This particular convergence of technological change and institutional organization quickly led to spectacular increases in productivity: strawberry yield per hectare increased from ten thousand kilograms in 1972 to thirty-six thousand kilograms in 1983 (Márquez Domínguez 1986: 48). The upward trend in productivity measured in yield per hectare continued to increase during the boom of the 1990s, and by 2010 average yields per hectare had surpassed fifty thousand kilograms. Presently, Spanish strawberry (and other soft fruit) farming is among the most high yielding in the world, but increases in productivity have been obtained, as recent developments show, at the cost of severe ecological imbalances: groundwater depletion and contamination are the most visible symptoms of a productive model eroding its own resource base. The transformations in the forces of production, which occasioned the rise of berry cultivation in Huelva, are simultaneously a process of the transformation of the social relations through which people are allocated to different positions in the labor process. Against hegemonic representations of farmers as direct producers and the centrality of family farming in Huelva stands the lived reality of agricultural labor relations: today, three out of four people employed in agriculture in Andalusia are salaried workers (Pedreño Cánovas and Riquelme Perea 2022). While recent disaggregate data for the berry sector is unavailable, ethnographic investigation indicates that this dynamic is significantly more pronounced in the labor-intensive soft fruit sector. Productivity gains measured in yield per hectare, or otherwise put the hyper-intensification of production, convert even the smallest farms into employers of salaried labor. While juridically this labor appears in the guise of the “temporary worker,” it is so-called temporal workers that provide the bulk of the labor required throughout the agricultural cycle. The most strenuous, harmful, and physically demanding tasks, such as preparing the soil before planting, fumigation, and harvesting, are overwhelmingly carried out by racialized migrant workers hired as day or seasonal workers. This is in line with the general picture of Andalusian agriculture: in 2020, at the level of the autonomous community, over 80 percent of so-called unskilled agricultural laborers were foreign citizens.
Conjoined with automation and mechanization processes, such as the automation of irrigation, the dominance of salaried relations of production, and the ethnic segmentation of the labor market have converted even the so-called small-scale farmer into an overseer of the labor process rather than a peasant-farmer. The farmer and the agricultural worker primarily encounter each other as buyers and sellers of labor power, and the last decades have seen not a reduction but a strengthening of the farmer's role as the one effecting the translation of labor power into labor. This is most evident with workers hired at origin, where the conversion of labor power into labor and the maximization of surplus is exacted through a strict control over the reproductive time of the laborers and their total subsumption to the rhythms of agro-industrial production. But it extends beyond the case of workers hired at origin, and it is also evidenced by the rise of practices such as the publication of productivity lists with individual workers’ daily performance. Emic and etic explanations regarding the so-called “overexploitation” of workers converge in attributing this to the squeezing of the farmer by market forces. Labor, it is argued, is the only factor of production over which the farmer can exercise control, as opposed to upstream and downstream factors (supply of agricultural inputs and commercialization). Thus, falling profits must necessarily translate into increased exploitation of laborers. How credible is this explanation? Is there, beyond the Marxist assertion that labor is the ultimate source of value, a way to disprove it? The litmus test for this lies with the origins of hiring at origin.
It is through struggle that we may write of structure
In June 2002, 475 migrant workers occupied a building of the Pablo de Olavide University in Seville. The workers were demanding the regularization of their situation and their legal recognition as residents, to which they were entitled according to the 2001 regularización extraordinaria (extraordinary regularization). In the spring and early summer of 2002, hundreds of workers across the Andalusian provinces participated in sit-ins (encierros) through which they sought to gain access to their formally recognized rights. The 2001 mass regularization had been the result of a wave of protests led by rural migrant workers. In February 2000, one of the most violent attacks against migrant workers in the recent history of Spain occurred in El Ejido. In the same year, the first group of women hired “at origin,” consisting of 600 Polish women, arrived in Palos de la Frontera in time for the strawberry harvest. By 2008, there were in excess of 35,000 such contracts in place (Gualda Caballero 2012). The definitive impulse to the feminization of strawberry picking coincides, then, with a series of protests led by migrant workers seeking the formalization of their status and improvement in their working conditions. It did not occur at a time of falling profits for agro-industrial capital, nor was it the result of the reconfiguration of market relations. Ever since its adoption in the early 2000s, the province of Huelva has been the main beneficiary of the program. Agribusiness representatives consider hiring at origin a success, a particular point of pride being the high rates of return. These are achieved not only through creating an exceptional juridical status for migrant workers but through hierarchically nested forms of disciplining. Farmers and representatives of the agribusiness sector naturalize the work process in order to justify the feminization of labor. This is evidenced by the prevalence of variations on the trope of “delicate hands and fingers for delicate fruit.” However, the everyday legitimation of the racialized and feminized hiring model does not require a cover, since most farmers and their representatives overtly praise the “nonconfrontational” and “docile” character of female laborers. As the process of selection illustrates, these qualities are not readily available but are arduously sought after and produced.
The adoption of hiring at origin occurred at a conjuncture in which the specific practices associated with the agro-industrial transformation of the environment had already been tied to a specific form of deploying labor, that of a racialized salaried agricultural workforce. To approach the regional agricultural model with Wolf's toolkit allows us to see how the transformation of the environment and the creation and recreation of social ties are dialectically related: the domination of nature and the domination of labor conjoined. But behind the adoption of hiring at origin lies the principle of movement vehemently upheld by Brenner: open-ended class struggle. The Wolf-Brenner synthesis seems to be poignantly summarized in Roseberry's observation: “It is through struggle that we may write of structure, through struggle that we may envision laws of motion” (1989b: 173). At the time of writing, the class politics of agro-industrial capitalism is making headway on a European scale. In Huelva, the farming sector has maintained a unitary front, and powerful agribusiness interests together with middle-sized and small farmers have been demanding a turnaround of environmental protection measures and limits to irrigation. Following years of complaints about increases in the minimum wage (notwithstanding that the regional collective agreement for the farming sector stipulates the lowest daily wages for farmworkers in Spain), farmers also demand reducing capital's share in the remuneration of labor through state subsidies for compensating increases in the minimum wage. While this leaves little doubt about the pitfalls of representing the farmer as a property-holding rural worker of some kind, let us concede for a moment that the small farmer is not a business owner but a petty commodity producer who is occasionally cast into the role of buyer of labor power. The question remains, no less, whether the contradictory position occupied by such a farmer will be resolved in favor of capital or in favor of labor. If, following Roseberry, the challenge of writing a double history is that of imagining a “transition without an easily definable end point,” this is today also the political challenge. Since a victory resolved in favor of capital is easily definable as the exhaustion of both soil and laborer.
Writing about the merits and limits of mode of production analysis, Roseberry called for an approach “that uses the mode of production concept as a theoretical tool in outlining certain class relationships” (1994b: 174) but noted that once the object of analysis becomes the formation of classes themselves, the mode of production concept reveals its limits. These limits, Roseberry remarked, “cannot be transcended within mode of production analysis itself but only with the recognition that the subjects of history, the makers of laws of motion, are neither the concepts nor the conceptualizers.” “It would seem,” then, he argued, “that the theoretical problems associated with mode of production analysis point toward historical and anthropological solutions” (1989b: 174). The dialogue between Wolf and Brenner can point the direction, but it is neither the concepts nor the conceptualizers that will determine the outcome of the transition.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the workshop “Vision and Method in Anthropology: Forty Years of Eric Wolf's ‘Europe and the People without History’” (September 2022, University of Bergen), where I presented a paper that provided the kernel for this article. This article is the result of research supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 890611—ORIGINSOFS CARCITY—H2020-MSCA-IF-2019 and the project ID2020-114317GB-I00 (FOOD-Pan), funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.
Notes
The cultivation of berries began with strawberries, which are still the dominant crop, but a diversification strategy has led to the introduction of blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries, of which Huelva is also one of Europe's leading exporters.
The label “Brenner debate” is here used to refer to the second stage in the post–World War II debate regarding the transition from feudalism to capitalism. While the first stage was dominated by Marxist historians and centered around the interventions of Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy, the second major episode in the transition debate was opened by the publication, in 1976, of Robert Brenner's article “Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe” in the journal Past&Present. The most important interventions were subsequently collected in the volume The Brenner debate: Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe (Aston and Philpin 1987), which I use for referencing purposes.
In the bibliographic note on page 407, Wolf writes: “Robert Brenner's trenchant article on ‘Agrarian class structure and economic development’ (1976) throws light on the contradiction between the political gains of the English peasantry and its weakening grip on economic resources.” The summary distorts the Brenner thesis regarding the relative weakness of the English peasantry.
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