E. Worby, WHAT DOES AGRARIAN WAGE-LABOR SIGNIFY - COTTON, COMMODITISATION AND SOCIAL FORM IN GOKWE, ZIMBABWE, Journal of peasant studies, 23(1), 1995, pp. 1-29
In the decade following Zimbabwe's Independence, the idea of a homogen
eous, subsistence peasantry was soon dissolved by the 'discovery' of a
grarian wage relations in the former African reserves. Simultaneously,
residual collective labour forms were identified both as signs of a p
re-capitalist past and as institutional templates out of which a socia
list future in agriculture might be imagined and constructed. In this
article, I examine the complex history of commodity production, domest
ic relations and labour forms in Gokwe - a particularly intense and re
cent venue of agrarian commoditisation focused around cotton in the no
rth-west. In Gokwe, an idealised contrast between collective and wage
labour - taken as tokens of a historical sequence - fails to capture e
ither the variety of labour forms, their interrelationship over time,
or their relation to shifts in the regional agrarian class structure.
Indeed, the increase in intensity of agrarian commodity production has
been accompanied by an efflorescence of co-operative or collective la
bour forms.