Latifundia System

a system of landowning based on large, landowners’ estates (latifundia).

Latifundia first arose in ancient Rome in the second century B.C., when the Roman aristocracy began to occupy the vast lands of the tribes they had conquered in Italy. The system became the universal form of landholding in the first century A.D. Most of the land of the latifundia consisted of vast plantations of olive trees, vineyards, and grain fields, which were worked mainly by slaves.

With the breakdown of the slaveowning system, the Roman latifundia were split up into small plots and then leased to coloni. During the period of feudalism, the latifundia system, which became the principal form of agricultural production, was based on the use of serf labor. The bourgeois revolutions of the 16th-18th centuries dealt the decisive blow to the feudal latifundia in Western Europe. The slaveowning plantations in America in the 17th and 18th centuries were another variety of latifundia. V. I. Lenin wrote: “America demonstrates clearly that it would be imprudent to confuse the latifundia with large-scale capitalist agriculture, and that the latifundia are frequently survivals of precapitalist relationships—slaveowning, feudal, or patriarchal” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 27, p. 170). The large latifundia of Prussia and Russia were survivals of feudalism.

The preservation of latifundia also entailed the preservation of medieval landed relationships, which were not suddenly eliminated but instead slowly adapted themselves to capitalism. Therefore, the system was a cause of the retarded development of capitalism in agriculture in countries on the so-called Prussian path of development. In the 20th century the development of capitalism in agriculture, along with the retention of entrepreneurial landlords’ latifundia, is taking place in such countries as Portugal, Spain, Turkey, India, the Arab Republic of Egypt, and Rhodesia and also in the majority of the countries of Latin America. Thus, in the mid-1960’s in Portugal, 0.5 percent of all landowners owned 40 percent of the cultivated land. A total of 1 percent of the landowners in Ecuador owned 50 percent of all the land. Latifundia landowners make wide use of hired labor, leasing part of the land to peasants on terms of servitude, mainly sharecropping. The industrial plantation estates of a number of the developing countries are also part of the latifundia system; such estates often belong not to individual landowner-planters but to monopolistic trusts of the developed capitalist countries, which have subjected the agrarian economies of the developing countries to their control.

The shortage or complete lack of peasant land under the supremacy of the latifundia, the spread of semifeudal forms of leaseholding, and the harsh exploitation of the farm laborers by the landlords all promote the continuation of the low level of technological agricultural development, the meager income of peasants and agricultural workers, and the beggarly standard of living of rural workers. The technological and economic backwardness of latifundia agriculture is caused by the lack of interest of the majority of landowners in technological progress, since cheap labor is readily available. In some countries, mainly in Latin America, the latifundia and their owners are a base of

reactionary political regimes, which often take the form of military dictatorships.

The struggle of the peasantry, workers, and middle strata of the population against the rule of the landlords has compelled the ruling classes in a number of countries, such as Italy, India, Iran, Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru, to embark on the path of agrarian reforms, which are undermining the basis of the latifundia system.