The land question: Statist planning and capitalist development in the Chilean countryside

Chilean agriculture in the last twenty years has recovered from years of diminishing returns. Suddenly, the same arduous work carried out by a declining workforce has attained higher productivity and, therefore, economic significance. Chile's new development strategy focuses on agricultural production for export. These exports underlie much of the growth that the Chilean economy has experienced since the mid-1980s.; This dissertation suggests that Chile has undergone a series of fundamental modifications in the last quarter of the twentieth century, which inadvertently have resulted in the intensification of capitalist development. It argues that the agrarian reform process—implemented and consolidated from 1964 to 1980—fundamentally reshaped the agrarian spatial organization and class structure of the Chilean countryside. As a result, the agrarian reform stimulated the development of agrarian capitalism by creating an open land market and inducing the development of an agro-industrial bourgeoisie. The most significant social class changes triggered by the agrarian reform were the further commodification of rural labor and the strengthening of a domestic rural capitalist class engaged in the global economy. These two interrelated changes, along with neo-liberal macro-economic policies, permitted the development of an export-oriented agriculture based on the exploitation of Chile's natural resources and its insertion into the global economy.; In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Chile has transformed its old agrarian oligarchic self, ending its long delayed transition to capitalism. The capitalist farmers seem closer to the Schumpeterian ideal of modern capitalists than the old hacendados. Capitalist forms of surplus extraction are the pivotal relation between this new capitalist class and the rural labor force. For the peasantry, the agrarian reform represented a Janusfaced legacy. The campesinos of the reformed sector were emancipated from the longstanding constraints of paternalism only to face an aggressively modernizing neoliberal capitalism, either as proletarians or as family farmers. The agrarian reform is central to understand Chile's transition to modern capitalism because this process gave a market-oriented resolution to the agrarian land question, which, in turn, triggered the intensification of capitalist social property relations.