Towards a “new” peasant question in Argentina?

Abstract

In the last decades, Argentine rurality has changed and, along with it, so have peasants’ conditions of subordination in the capitalist system. This article dismisses the false paths to which abstract models of the peasantry as a “concept” lead; our argument is based on detailing the characteristics of the direct producers in the current context in which they live. Through documentary research on agrarian social studies, we compiled a corpus with the main academic and state-produced contributions referring to similar socioeconomic, political, and cultural issues about the peasantry and we present this as a “first peasant question”, focused on the period between 1970 and 2000. Then, we present six theses that cut across the current social experiences of family farmers: social decomposition and exclusion; the eco-territorial turn; the emergence of social movements; re-ethnicization; agroecology and food sovereignty, and statehood. We conclude that these topics have opened a “new question” that points to lines of research with new theoretical and epistemological consensuses for understanding the actually existing Argentine peasantry.

Keywords

• capitalism
• peasant class
• social studies
• social exclusion
• political movement
• agricultural production