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Of Planters, Politics, and Development

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Joseph L. Love
Joseph L. Love*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois
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Mauricio Font's “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” raises a number of central issues about the nature of the polity and economy in São Paulo during the critical transition from export-oriented agriculture to domestic-oriented manufacturing. Was the coffee economy fully capitalist? What was the relation between coffee and industrialization? Was there a “sectoral clash” between planters and manufacturers? To what degree did planters control the political parties and the state? In particular, was the state relatively autonomous of the most important economic group?

Type
Commentary and Debate
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , 1989 , pp. 127 - 135
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Mauricio Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development in Brazil,” LAR 22, no. 3 (1987):69–90.

2. See especially Font, “Planters and the State: The Pursuit of Hegemony in São Paulo, Brazil (1889–1930),” Ph.D. diss. in 2 vols., University of Michigan, 1983.

3. For example, see Joseph L. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 1889–1937 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980), 225–27 (on planter dissatisfaction). See also Thomas H. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land: Coffee and Society in São Paulo, 1886–1934 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), chap. 6 (on immigrants as landowners).

4. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 72–73, 86. Compare the Marxist argument of José de Souza Martins that usufruct kept the colonos from becoming full proletarians because they were not completely separated from the means of production. Yet Souza Martins still views the fazendeiro class as capitalist. I prefer the view of Verena Stolcke and Michael Hall, who view the usufruct system as a means of minimizing planters' cash outlays and maximizing their profits. This situation occurred for three reasons: because prices of food were initially high, much of it being imported from other states; because usufruct would attract immigrants and therefore contribute to labor market saturation, forcing wages down; and because peak labor demands for coffee and food crops did not occur during the same season. See Souza Martins, O Cativeiro da Terra (São Paulo: Ciências Humanas, 2nd ed., 1981), 16, 19 (on fazendeiros as capitalists), and 18–19 (on noncapitalist features of the colonato). See also Stolcke and Hall, “The Introduction of Free Labour on São Paulo Coffee Plantations,” The Journal of Peasant Studies 10, nos. 2–3 (Jan.–Apr. 1983):184. Also relevant to the large issues addressed in the opening paragraph of this note is Stolcke's Coffee Planters, Workers, and Wives: Class Conflict and Gender Relations on São Paulo Plantations, 1850–1980 (London: Macmillan and St. Antony's College, Oxford, 1988).

5. Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 171.

6. Stolcke and Hall, “Introduction of Free Labour,” 185–86.

7. Small indirect subsidies were still being made to Japanese immigrants. For details, see Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 12.

8. Robert A. Lively, “The Government-Business Relationship in Historical Perspective,” in The Shaping of Twentieth-Century America, edited by Richard M. Abrams and Lawrence W. Levine (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), citing the work of Louis Hartz.

9. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 78, 79, 84.

10. Ibid., 73.

11. See Font, “Planters and the State,” 58 (on twenty thousand trees as a small farm); Holloway, Immigrants on the Land, 31 (on constant technology in the period) and 65 (on labor requirements); J. F. Normano, Brazil: A Study of Economic Types (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), 41 (on the 1927 survey); and on the dominance of large estates, Caio Prado, Jr., “Distribuição de Propriedade Fundiária Rural no Estado de São Paulo,” Boletim Geográfico 3, no. 29 (Aug. 1945):699 (originally published in 1935).

12. Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 112–14, 221–27.

13. Ibid., 117, 165.

14. Ibid., 253.

15. This subsidy was granted to an electro-metallurgical firm. Ibid., 257, 302, 304.

16. Winston Fritsch, “Aspects of Brazilian Economic Policy under the First Republic (1889–1930),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1983, 197, 249.

17. Ibid., 253.

18. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 77. Antônio Prado made all kinds of investments, as Font concedes. Cardoso de Mello Neto was the president of electric and telephone companies as well as a banker. Moraes Barros, Nogueira Filho, and Sampaio Vidal owned textile factories, and Sampaio was the director and largest stockholder in the Diário Nacional.

19. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 70; and Font, “Planters and the State,” 455.

20. Joseph L. Love and Bert J. Barickman, “Rulers and Owners: A Brazilian Case Study in Historical Perspective,” Hispanic American Historical Review 66, no. 4 (Nov. 1986):746.

21. Examples are Jorge Tibiriçá, Dino da Costa Bueno, Manuel Albuquerque Lins, Carlos de Campos, Rodolfo Miranda, and Altino Arantes, among others. See Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 296. Also see note 24 below.

22. Font, “Coffee Planters, Politics, and Development,” 70, 82. In “Planters and the State,” Font cites Gramsci as the source for his views on hegemony, 13–14. It is worth recalling, as Winston Fritsch has in this context, that Gramsci himself allowed for concessions by the hegemonic group. Gramsci asserted that “a certain balance of compromises [is presupposed in the notion of hegemony, in which] the leading group makes some sacrifices of an economic-corporative kind.” Fritsch, whom Font cites in “Coffee Planter, Politics, and Development” as supporting the thesis of increasing state autonomy (p. 82), believes that coffee interests were hegemonic in Gramsci's sense. See Fritsch, “Aspects of Brazilian Economic Policy,” 247, 248, 253; and Antonio Gramsci, The Modern Prince and Other Writings (New York: International, 1970), 154–55.

23. For example, see Joseph L. Love, Rio Grande do Sul and Brazilian Regionalism, 1882–1930 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1971), 118, 243.

24. See Love and Barickman, “Rulers and Owners.” The members of the political elite who were not members of the Partido Democrático included a smaller proportion of fazendeiros in the 1920s than in previous decades, as Font's thesis would indicate. One might expect this outcome from the increasingly differentiated economy. But in any case, the PD had a smaller share of fazendeiros on its executive committee than did the PRP (35 percent versus 60 percent) over the period of the PD's lifetime (1926–1934). Ibid., 762; see also Love, São Paulo in the Brazilian Federation, 165.

25. For a related finding on nineteenth-century Chile, see Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile (or the Bourgeois Revolutions That Never Were) (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). Zeitlin's reformist and revolutionary bourgeois leaders were not “‘relatively autonomous bureaucrats.‘ On the contrary, they were the consummate representatives of a distinctive bourgeois segment of the dominant class. …” Ibid., 8.

26. Cardoso de Mello and Tavares, “The Capitalist Export Economy in Brazil, 1884–1930,” in The Latin American Economies: Growth and the Export Sector, 1880–1930, edited by Roberto Cortés Conde and Shane J. Hunt (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1985), 82–136; and Wilson Suzigan, Indústria Brasileira: Origem e Desenvolvimento (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1986), especially 345.

27. The type of work needed is exemplified in a monograph that focuses on an earlier period. See Zélia Maria Cardoso de Mello, Metamórfoses da Riqueza: São Paulo, 1845–1895 (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1985).

28. Richard W. Miller, Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power, and History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 101–67.

29. Gunnar Myrdal, The Challenge of World Poverty: A World Anti-Poverty Program in Outline (New York: Pantheon, 1970), chap. 7, “The Soft State,” 208–52.