Exploitative agrarian structures can persist after their original causes vanish

Evidence

Bliss and Stern discovered that because a public source of reliable and relatively cheap credit had emerged, and the landowners’ private lending correspondingly had declined, and because it had become possible to market whatever was produced at a reasonable and relatively reliable price outside the village; also because the risks of cultivation remained high for ecological reasons, because the landlords preferred to lease land out-to tenants rather than cultivate it themselves, and because active cultivators preferred to be tenants rather than labourers; so it had indeed come to be in the interests of both landlords and tenants to continue tenancy. But the reasons were not Bhaduri’s. Production was maximized and risk minimized; there was interdependence, not dependence, and accordingly no monopoly of power. — Diego Gambetta, Trust - Making and Breaking Cooperative…, 1609

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the blindness novel’s core: the institutional shell of oppression (like Luhmannian social order) can persist long after the relations of dependence that generated it disappear. Echoes how Saramago’s social hierarchy collapses the moment its monitoring substrate fails. — connects to: Taxation-driven manure scarcity trapped French peasants in soil exhaustion cycles — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 275; Organisms sometimes retain reproductive structures that have lost all function — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 367; Peasants in postwar Italy reorganized production around subsistence needs rather than profit — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 381 (+2 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes persistence of an external form (tenancy) from the actual power relations inside it — dependence vs. interdependence as rival diagnoses of the same institutional shape.