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Just because there's no market doesn't mean there's economic equality
by Eric Jackson

Let us first understand that Karl Marx was a 19th century pioneer in the fields of economics and sociology, but that certain of his ideas have been popularized in simplified terms to become what is known in some circles as "vulgar Marxism." The most common form of "vulgar Marxism" is an extreme economic determinism in social analysis, and there are other strains that ignore observations that Marx made about systems other than capitalism and pretend that the exploitation of human beings by other human beings is a uniquely capitalist attribute. If one adheres to the latter idea --- as Marx surely did not --- the one would likely figure that where there is no market economy, there shouldn't be much economic inequality.

But that latter idea has been demonstrated too simplistic by McGill professor Oliver T. Coomes, who spoke at a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute social science forum on February 2.

He worked in a community of "ribereños," cholos who have long been established along the upper reaches of the Amazon near Iquitos in eastern Peru. The people in his study use an indigenous-style mix of agro-forestry, hunting, gathering and fishing to support themselves, live on lands that were acquired by squatters' rights and only very tangentially participate in the market economy. This is a society of subsistence farmers where credit is hardly known and on the scale that would apply in places like Iquitos, Lima or Callao, everybody's poor. People work in family units.

Moreover, in the community where he worked Coomes was told again and again that its people don't tend to see themselves as stratified by class.

Nevertheless, he found, there are big inequalities in landholdings, which translate into other economic gaps. "The poor are being squeezed out of this community," he noted.

Basically you had a long-standing situation in which land was free to those who could make use of it, until the advance of the agricultural frontier hemmed the community in and the available land became finite. Thus the management of the land, with its typical poor rainforest soil, became a key to survival.

To a large family with a lot of land because it had many hands to claim and work the property before outside forces imposed limits, there is leeway to allow long fallow cycles that let the land recuperate. To a family that was small and only able to assert rights over a more modest stretch of land, and which may have since grown large, the land can't be left fallow because it must be used to produce food, but the lack of a proper fallow cycle exhausts the soil and makes it unviable for farming. What tends to happen is that the land-poor families are forced to emigrate and their properties are taken over by their wealthier neighbors.

So if you adhere to the vulgar Marxist idea that no market means no inequality, this particular experience is one of the proofs that you're wrong.

Moreover, Coomes said, the idea that traditional means of agro-forestry are sustainable, egalitarian and stable is challenged by his finding. So, too, is the notion that traditional livelihoods are a "win-win" arrangement among people and with the environment.

It adds up to a major policy dilemma for people in the business of promoting Third World development, Coomes pointed out. Is the goal to work for poverty reduction, or is it to promote sustainable use of rainforest resources? These two aims are not necessarily compatible. The challenge is "about ecological problems, but also social problems," he concluded.