LOOKING AT CAPITALISM FROM THE BOTTOM UP

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — For over three decades, the United Fruit Company owned and operated one of the largest banana plantations in the world, on Ecuador’s southern coast. In 1962, workers invaded the plantation and forced United out of direct production. The land they won, though, was soon lost to capitalists who contracted to produce bananas with Chiquita, Dole, and Del Monte.

Today United Fruit Company is now Chiquita Brands and the workers are again laboring on the plantations for the same multinational corporation they once forced out of the country.

Steve Striffler, a social anthropologist at the University of Arkansas, traces the emergence of multinational corporations turning to contract labor in his book In the Shadows of State and Capital: The United Fruit Company, Popular Struggle, and Agrarian Restructuring in Ecuador, 1900-1995, to be published in November by Duke University Press.

"My book is a social history that tries to look at capitalism from the bottom up, through the global banana industry," said Striffler. He spent two years in Ecuador, conducting interviews and at times working side by side with plantation laborers to gain first-hand experience of the labor process and to understand how the workers felt about themselves and their work.

"Contracting emerged because the old system of producing bananas came under attack from workers. In contract farming, multinationals avoid all of the risks associated with labor, agricultural diseases, and weather, while retaining all the profits. It’s quite good for Chiquita, Dole and Del Monte, not so good for the workers," said Striffler.

Striffler said that the banana industry serves as a particular example of the emergence of contracting, a process driven by a series of class conflicts between U.S. multinational corporations and foreign workers. "We see this in other industries as well, such as in the production of cars, clothes, and computer chips," said Striffler. "By subcontracting, corporations can elude problems with labor unions, effectively transferring responsibility for workers to foreign capitalists. It shifts the entire terrain of class conflict."

Citing Striffler’s study for its scholarly significance and interdisciplinary reach, the Social Science History Association has awarded the book its 2001 President’s Book Award, a $1,000 prize that will be presented November 17 during the Association’s meeting in Chicago. The interdisciplinary association is comprised of anthropologists, social scientists, economists, and sociologists around the nation who are engaged in historical research.

In the Shadows of State and Capital is part of a series on "American Encounters/Global Interactions" published through Duke. Stiffler is also editing Banana Wars: Power, Production, and History in the Americas, scheduled for publication by Duke next year.

In 2000-2001, Striffler won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study migration as a visiting scholar in the Transnational South Project at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Striffler joined the Fulbright College Department of Anthropology in fall 1999, after earning his doctorate from the New School for Social Research in New York. A past recipient of a Fulbright dissertation fellowship and a Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Dissertation Award, he served as a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in 1998-1999.