Proletarianization of Uruguayan agriculture at the beginning of the 21st century: old and new images of a historical process

Abstract

The development of the capitalism on the Uruguayan farming sector during the last thirty years changed in an irreversible way an area that had been blocked for the first eight decades of the twentieth century. Among others, it emphasizes the change in the internal composition of the workers of the area, updating and renewing the debate about the countryside proletarization. This work, not only deals with this phenomenon from the point of view of the transition from the familiar producer of goods to the salaried, but also it proposes to understand the proletarization like a change of composition inside the farming workers that consolidate relations of salary that progressively dissolve the differences between the farming and non-farming workers (or rural and urban, in classical terms). Between the most important identity signs of this transformation, we can see the major relative weight of the salaried work above the familiar, registered at the farming census of 2011, the generalization of the urban residence of the farming work, the expansion of the female work and the labour intermediation and finally the process of normalization of the labour relations and the increase of the qualification of the farming work, each of those aspects demonstrate the deepening of the capitalist relations of the Uruguayan countryside.