CHAPTER 9 TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF MESOAMERICA 361Of great interest to students of peasant societies is the issue of the possibilities
for capital accumulation and capitalist development. Social scientists wonder whether
peasants are in the process of becoming capitalists and disappearing as a group, or
whether peasantry is a lifestyle that allows for only fairly limited changes (including
marginal capital accumulation that would not lead to capitalist development). Are
these petty producers developing larger concentrations of capital and greater in-
tensification of both labor and technology, just as large capitalist enterprises do in
the developed world? Or are they following demographic cycles that allow for peri-
ods of greater productivity and profits, to be followed by periods of decline, with no
significant accumulation of capital?
The first position roughly describes the claims once made by Vladimir Lenin
and came to be known as the Marxist or de-campesinista(de-peasantizing) perspective.
According to this perspective, peasants would slowly become wageworkers for in-
dustry and service, and a few would become capitalists themselves. The second po-
sition roughly describes the argument of Alexander Chayanov, known as the
campesinista(peasantist) perspective. According to this view, peasantries are seen as
a changing but almost perpetual category, sometimes exploited by the capitalist sys-
tem as they provide cheap foodstuffs to the cities, and sometimes remaining rela-
tively marginal to the capitalist world.
Students of Mesoamerican peasants have found evidence to support both view-
points. Some social scientists have concluded that petty commodity production as a
system is limited. Because of the low level of investment, it does not allow for signif-
icant capital accumulation, nor the segregation of the population into two definite
classes: one of owners of the means of production (land, labor, and capital) and the
other of dispossessed people who constitute a full-time proletariat (wageworkers).
Others point to the existence of a combination of full-time and part-time wageworkers
with access to limited resources (that is, a small plot of land). Finally, the presence
of people being capitalized and doing significantly better than the average peasant-
artisan or cash-crop agriculturalist leads scholars to believe in the possibility of gen-
erating capitalist accumulation from the peasant-worker workshop or industry. These
diverse positions are not necessarily in contradiction to each other, and much re-
search is ongoing to understand and predict future developments among the peas-
ants of Mexico and Central America.
Cottage Industries
Of the several possible ways of generating an income that are now practiced in the
region, home work is a relatively recent one and is becoming quite widespread. Home
work, or work done at home (also called the ”putting out” system), is quite common
in the garment industry, but it is also found in several other industries. It consists of
work that requires simple and available technology (a sewing machine, needle and
thread, and a loom). In general, the employer puts out the raw materials and specific
assembling instructions for each piece. In the case of the embroidery industry of
Ocotlán, Mexico, “outworkers” get the sections of material to be embroidered, and
sometimes the yarn, and return the assembled piece to the merchant for a lump sum
of money.