Capital concentration in and through class differentiation: A case study from Pampean agribusiness

Abstract

The National Agricultural Census (NAC) held in Argentina in 2018 shows that the concentration and centralization of agrarian capital in this country's heartland of grain and oilseed production is an ongoing process. An extensive academic literature has attributed this trend to the dynamics of capitalist development in agriculture in general and to Argentina's political economy in particular. Tying into these discussions and based on a case study, this paper argues that an analysis of how the growth of large corporations works in and through class differentiation helps to further explain the dynamics of concentration and centralization. This includes (i) examining the strategies of big companies to diversify capital functions across various value chain links and (ii) elucidating how they have established particular relations to smaller capitals, intermediate classes, and workers, as well as the related patterns of exploitation and appropriation of surplus value.

La construcción de alternativas a las formas hegemónicas de producción agraria

“…Si bien en términos absolutos este proceso afectó a todos los estratos, las explotaciones de menos de 200 hectáreas se retrajeron un 64,3 % y por primera vez abarcaron a menos de la mitad del universo productivo provincial. De esta manera se consolidó una concentración y centralización agraria donde las grandes empresas tienen una fuerte preponderancia y flexibilidad para controlar el proceso productivo (Bernhold & Palmisano, 2022;Fernández, 2013;Gras & Hernández, 2016;Sosa Varrotti, 2019), ya sea por el desplazamiento de los productores familiares (Giarracca & Teubal, 2008) como por la configuración de alianzas de clases para reproducir el modelo de producción (López Castro et al, 2019).…”

Social Partners for Social Upgrading? On Corporate Strategies in Argentinian Agro-Industrial Value Chains

“…8) Furthermore, this has been accompanied by a process of relative proletarianisation: In absolute terms, the demand for labour has been reduced considerably with the increasing labour productivity, leading to a competition among workers and a huge dependency on the jobs that exist. Relative to the remaining productive labour, a growing share is commanded by capital and done by wage workers who produce a surplus value that does not remain in their own hands (Bernhold 2019;Bernhold and Palmisano 2021). The outsourcing of labour to contratistas, which has been analysed as a strategy of flexibilisation that allows firms to reduce risks and labour costs by reducing permanent employment, has also gone along with a shift from permanent employment to temporary work (Neiman 2010; Sánchez Enrique 2016).…”