Forms of production and work statutes in the Portugueses agriculture

Abstract

The theoretical discussion on the modalities of integration-subordination of the agricultural sector to the urban-industrial economy has been mostly conducted in terms of intensification of the flows of goods and services between the agricultural sector and the rest of the economy. The present text tries to enlarge, as far as the Portuguese case is concerned, the scope of the analysis sustaining that the integration modalities of agriculture in the capitalist development of urban basis have been mostly structured by means of the labour force. Once identified the relative dimension of the different forms of agricultural production according to the kind of labour force used, one wants to take into account the importance of the pluri-activity and/or the pluri-income as central manifestations of some modalities of such an integration. Henceforth one discusses, once more, the issue of working in agricuture, formulating the problem of using the current analytical categories and introducing corrections and estimations aimed to account for the diversity of statutes that it assumes. One concludes that the analysis of those statutes cannot be achieved only at the level of a work processus and must be enriched by introducing the dimension of the worker, namely expressed by the backwardness of the professional agricultural activity and the simultaneous reinforcement of the completing agricultural activity.