Peonage

From Hobson's Choice

A type of servitude in which the "master" does not own the person of the "servant" outright, but rather, has such obligations on the servant that essentially preclude freedom. For example, the peon has debt obligations that are unilaterally imposed by the master; the peon may not leave the master's service until these obligations are met, but he is effectively compelled to buy only from the master, and work for no other employer but the master.

The system of peonage is strongly associated with Latin America, where it emerged as a result of the peculiar nature of European conquest and ecological redemption. However, it has also been observed in the modern United States, Pakistan, and many other places besides.

1 Context
2 Forms of Peonage
3 Notes
4 See Also
5 External Links

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Context

Initially, the European conquest of the Americas employed a system of political-cum-economic control known as the encomienda. Under this system, the nobleman (or adventurer) was awarded powers to enforce the sovereign's will on a grant of land; this included, naturally, expropriating labor and tribute from the residents. In return the grantee was theoretically obligated to protect his wards, to instruct them in the Christian faith, and to defend their right to use the land for their own subsistence. Encomiendas posed serious administrative problems, since vast numbers of the conquered peoples died, the grantees were engaged in intrigues against the audiencias, and the governments of Portugal and Spain had little influence in their New World dominions.^[1] So the encomiendas were replaced by haciendas, in which the grantee received ownership of the land underneath his Indians. Haciendas and their Brazilian equivalent, latifundias, were going concerns intended to export farm commodities to urban markets; for much of their history they had a large cohort of enslaved Indians or Africans.

The abolition of chattel slavery in the Americas was stimulated in part by the challenge to orderly government of sovereign estates in the countryside. Whether in Venezuela, Brazil, the United States, or Colombia, the existence of plantations with captive labor, jeopardized the political security of the nation-state. The plantation owner was a rival concentration of sovereign power; in Latin America, this power was somewhat mitigated by the banning of chattel slavery, but survived through the accumulation of financial power over the tenants. Legally, nations with chattel slavery simply denied the slaves membership in the human race, but politically this required ever-more sweeping capitulations to the big landlords who held them. In Mexico, for example, the large plantations of the Northeast (in Tejas) were alienated by Anglophone settlers from the southeast.^[2] Opposition to the mere regulation of slavery often became so explosive as to led to attempts at political power grabs. In the chaotic civil conditions that followed independence or abolition in the American republics, large cohorts of workers were left in a state of complete dependence on landlords. The landlords often were able to monopolize both access to economic inputs and markets for products; moreover, in order to maintain property in the form of livestock, the peasant required land. A loss of access to pasture often meant the landlord could easily expropriate the livestock without payment. Without a legal apparatus in place to protect the peasant's rights, his claims to water or common grazing lands were a dead letter. Often illiterate, it was highly improbable that he even knew he had rights, or what those rights were.

In short, while chattel slavery often required extensive action on the part of the state to enforce the slaveowner's claims, as well as convenient access to cash markets, peonage usually arose in the absence of a strong state; the inefficiency of the system was of little or no opportunity cost to the landlord, since he accumulated power and land by gradually driving his smallholding neighbors from pillar to post.

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Forms of Peonage

Peonage usually arose in one of two ways: through a state-coordinated scheme of conquest, in which the state rewarded individual adventurers with territory and a legal "right" to coerce native peoples into labor; or, alternatively, through the degeneration of a system of legally free labor into debt and exploitation. The former began with encomiendas and latifundias; the latter usually arose from industrial failure.

In many cases nations with a revolutionary system of free land and free labor succumbed over time to depressions, in which smaller enterprises went under; former yeomen lost their land and were obligated to become wage laborers, then tenants. In cases such as Mexico, the conditions shifted over time; when that nation experienced an export boom, as it did in the 1880's and 1920's, the large estates were able to liquidate the more prosperous peasants (medieros al rajar) with the help of friendly officials, thereby increasing the cohort of peasants employed in cash crops (mediers al quinto). In the Yucatán Peninsula and Chiapas, peonage flourished and became a tool of revitalized European Mexican colonization of the periphery: the government before and after the Revolution supported the big estates, allowing them to confine laborers to the grounds until they had paid their debts and ensuring they never did.^[3] This also occurred in Southern states of the USA after Reconstruction: White-controlled governments in the South facillitated the use of force and fraud against Black property owners, and reduced many to penury. Frequently the legal system was designed not only to put freed Blacks on chain gangs and contract them out to the private sector—a practice supposedly banned by United States v. Reynolds (1914)—but also tended to make it almost impossible for African American entrepreneurs to recover damages in the wake of racial violence, pogroms, and terrorism.^[4] Peonage in the United States has never actually vanished; examples of it in Florida, for example, have been documented well into the 1960's, while extremely corrupt plea bargaining and parole systems have frequently been a major source of revenue for some counties.^[5] The role of the plea bargain is significant because it allows juridical intimidation without due process: accused suspects can merely be threatened with lengthy prison sentences, which they avoid by accepting probation. In cases where the presiding judge is a party to the process of intimidation (or even public defenders), it is easy to see how the legal system can use "usual suspects" and the probation system to wrest money from the most vulnerable share of the population.

However, as the case history in the USA indicates, the persistence of peonage arises mainly from the ease with which it can be perpetrated as a violation of the laws. We might judge the Usonian legal system (to take a well-documented example) as derelict because of the persistence of high rates of homicide, yet clearly homicide is illegal and significant resources are deployed to capture and punish perpetrators. While state-inflicted peonage through the medium of flimsy prosecutions may be regarded as a melodramatic characterization (since people are usually prone to assuming suspects are guilty anyway), private peonage is frequently "discovered" by law enforcement using illegal immigrants or drifters. Given the extreme difficulty for released prisoners in finding work, they also are frequently caught up in rural systems of peonage. ^[6]

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Notes

↑ For more details on the encomienda, see Meredith Scott, "The Encomienda," Millersville University (1992); or Michael Busbin, "Encomienda System and the New World Indians". The Audiencia was the royal envoy to from the kings of Spain and Portugal to colonies in the Americas or the Philippines.
↑ The settlement of Anglophone settlers in Mexico began on the eve of independence from Spain (1821); prior to that time, political upheaval in Spain, lack of money for border patrols, and the fierce conflict between Roman Catholics and Protestants had motivated the Spanish government to discourage any European settlement in the region at all. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 was intended to end forever Usonian efforts to alienate Texas, but adventurers continued to cross into the territory and set up independent republics, right up until Mexican independence from Spain.

During the reign of Emperor Iturbide (1821-1823), Texas was rapidly settled by thousands of Usonians; but by the latter 1820's tensions between assimilated Mexicans and Anglo-Usonian settlers were severe. In 1830, the Mexican government finally ordered the Texans to liberate their slaves. They were nominally converted by the Texans to indentured servants. In 1832, changes in Texas law made this much more difficult, and the Anglophonic population began to prepare for independence.
↑ See Friedrich Katz, "The Liberal Republic and the Porfirito," anthologized in Mexico Since Independence (Leslie Bethell, editor), Cambridge University Press (1998`)., pp.99-102
↑ One book on the leasing of chain gangs is Matthew J. Mancini's One Dies, Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1928 University of South Carolina Press (1996); better known is David M. Oshinsky, Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice Free Press (1997). Many accounts exist describing the systematic emiseration of African American property owners after the end of Reconstruction. W.E.B. DuBois' Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-188 Free Press (1998/1935) is but one of many; my knowledge of this came sporadically, from reading about hundreds of cases in which disenfranchisement, racial pogroms, and legislation, as well as police forces wholly subservient to White Power, conspired to reduce Africans to conditions little better than slavery. This process can be said, at the most optimistic, to have ended in the mid-1960's, when White supremacist violence in the South ceased to have macroeconomic effects.
↑ Frontline, "The Plea" PBS (2004) introduces the concept of plea bargains combined with parole arrangements; for documentation of how this system works in several states, see Christian Parenti, "Pay now, pay later: states impose prison peonage". The Progessive (July 1996).
↑ The US Department of Justice estimated in 2004 that perhaps 200,000 youths were in sexual peonage. See "Assessment of U.S. Activities to Combat Trafficking in Persons" , US. DOJ, p.2. A problem here is the immense gap between the scale of prosecutions (on the order of a few dozen per year) and the estimates of the problem (up to 3 million; see Nena Torrez & James Dulgeroff , "Disposable Humans: The Growing Problem of Human Trafficking in the U.S.", National Social Science Association-Jan 2006). Danish author Jakob Holdt, who hitchhiked across the USA in 1971 and published an account of intense Usonian poverty, American Pictures, (complete text online, minus photos), cites a claim that the US Justice Department reported more Blacks lived under peonage (this claim was actually made by the Atlanta Daily World in 1940; cited in Stephen G. N. Tuck, Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia, 1940-1980 University of Georgia Press (2001), p.2). Jerry Markon, "Human Trafficking Evokes Outrage, Little Evidence", Washington Post (23 Sept 2007) describes the situation more skeptically; hundreds of cases involving thousands of victims per decade, but nothing like the gigantic armies of actual peons and slaves estimated by activists. A common thread is the problem of definition: sex work is usually illegal, and employees are almost necessarily exploited. Also, sexual servitude is inherently more terrifying. In the case of US DOJ prosecutions, a key factor in the decision to prosecute is egregiousness and perceived net harm: cases usually involve kidnapping and use of violence, whereas debt peonage may usually involve depriving a worker of means of travelling away from and settling outside of the plantation. Doubtless grinding poverty and exploitation do affect millions of people.