How agrarian cooperatives fail: Lessons from 1970s Peru

Given current interest in the agrarian cooperative as an egalitarian institutional form to counter the economic effects of neoliberalism, considered here is how class divisions/distinctions operated inside one such unit in the 1970s. Of particular interest is the way idioms and forms of struggle used by bureaucrats, peasants and agricultural labourers in a Peruvian agrarian cooperative during that decade challenge one of the enduring myths of development theory. The latter invokes a familiar dichotomy to explain the failure of rural cooperatives: a powerful state bureaucracy imposing inappropriate policy on an undifferentiated and uniformly powerless peasantry. The case study presented here suggests that, on a number of crucial issues (privatization of co-owned means of production, the employment of labour-power that was unfree), it was much rather better-off peasants who overruled bureaucrats and imposed their own accumulation project.