In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995 (review)

In the Shadows of State and Capital blends analytical approaches from anthropology and history to study the interplay among peasants, capital, and the state. Steve Striffler integrates broad, global structural analyses with recent subaltern studies emphasizing particularity and local agency. Striffler uses the subaltern approach to explore state and capital, arguing that, like peasants, these categories are also fragmented and composed of individuals who exercise differing degrees of power. He uses this perspective to produce a nuanced study of the banana industry in twentieth-century Ecuador.

From the 1930s to the 1960s, most Ecuadorian bananas were produced in large-scale enclaves dominated by foreign corporations. Striffler's study centers on the Hacienda Tenguel in southern Ecuador, operated by the United Fruit Company beginning in the 1930s. Striffler paints a detailed picture of social structure, family life, and gender at Tenguel. The United Fruit Company took advantage of Tenguel's isolation from the rest of Ecuador to create a distinct society. Through its hiring practices, the company promoted the middle-class family ideal, where men worked and women stayed at home. The company built housing, schools, and hospitals for the workers, and sponsored occupation-based social clubs. For the employees of the company and their families, working for United Fruit was more than a job; it was a way of life. These steps constituted not simple corporate benevolence, but rather a way to create and sustain a docile labor force. This orderly social world began to crumble in the late 1950s, as global banana markets entered a period of turmoil, and the Panama banana disease appeared on the plantation. As the company tried to adjust to these changing conditions, it came into conflict with its labor unions. It also began to face challenges from landless peasants, who formed communes at the margins of the hacienda and then claimed legal title to the lands. Striffler eloquently shows how these peasant communes learned to negotiate state power in their struggle against the company. If one state agency decided against them, they approached a different agency. Ultimately, the workers at Tenguel took over the entire hacienda in 1962. The United Fruit Company ceased production and withdrew from Ecuador. Nonetheless, Striffler resists telling a linear story of the triumph of organized peasants against foreign capital. Since the early 1960s, the dominant mode of banana production in Ecuador has been contract farming. Conflict on the plantation continued, even though Ecuadorians controlled production. Now, the main locus of conflict was between peasants and the state. During these years, peasants formed many organizations to pursue agrarian reform and justice. They lobbied the state for formal title to the land they inhabited and for capital and technological expertise. Gradually, however, most of these organizations became clients of the state. The shift to contract farming also changed social life in the banana zone. Women became involved in labor and in political activism, although most were excluded from positions of formal power in the movements. Because of this, the workers tended to see their work as a job rather than as a way of life. The conflict between peasants and the state was exacerbated by chronic political instability during the 1960s and 1970s. Local capitalists, with tacit state approval, gradually appropriated communal lands and brought them back into banana production. Foreign capital, from companies such as Dole and Chiquita, returned to Ecuador, giving Ecuadorian growers capital and technical assistance but not getting directly involved in production. Conflict on the plantations continues to the present.

Striffler's analysis is strongest in its treatment of peasants/workers and their encounters with state and capital. The analysis of the state until the 1970s similarly gives...