Wicab-Gutiérrez, Omar; (2018) State-mediated Capitalism From Below and the Small-scale Peasant Aquaculture in Nayarit (Mexico). Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis presents a historical case study of small-scale peasant shrimp production and its forms of organisation in the region known as “La Costa” in the northwest Mexican state of Nayarit. This case study constitutes a good example of the evolution of peasant communities over a century of history in which various government policies left their mark on the development of the political economy of the region in the period following the Mexican Revolution. From that time, La Costa became the setting for a process of peasantisation and for a set of policies supporting the development of cooperatives for the exploitation of water resources. This period was defined by the struggle faced by these communities to consolidate their political, economic, and administrative autonomy. In the 1990s, these same communities and their cooperatives suffered the effects of neoliberal policies (privatisation, trade liberalisation, deregulation) in their Mexican incarnation, which have had the effect of undermining peasant production and promoting a search for new ways of surviving, along with the appearance of new strata and social actors. Using the concepts of early simple commodity production and advanced simple commodity production as used by Terence J. Byres (1996), the process described in this thesis constitutes an example of a process of capitalist development from below, in a region with a high population density and a significant level of state intervention in political and regulatory terms, in the context of a labour surplus (Lewis, 1954). It could be argued that it shows how neoliberalism has changed the way we need to conceptualise the "classical agrarian question" and to interpret the labour surplus in middle income societies as suggested by Bernstein (2009b).

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