Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-ecological Crisis 1032519126, 9781032519128

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‘This outstanding book extends Eric Wolf’s classical text on the peasant wars to the present. More remarkably it is able to gain a fuller and more inclusive understanding of the rural movements in the global North as well as of the peasant wars in the global South by exploring their linkages to a greater variety of agrarian transitions through their own more comprehensive Marxist analysis.’ Cristóbal Kay

Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-Ecological Crisis

This book utilises a new theoretical approach to understand the dynamics of the peasantry, and peasant resistance, in relation to capitalism, state, class, and imperialism in the global South. In this companion volume to Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf, the authors further develop their thinking on agrarian transitions to capitalism, the development of imperialism, and the place of the peasantry in these dynamics, with special reference to the global South in an era of politicoecological crisis. Focusing on the political role of the peasantry in contested transitions to capitalism and to modes of production outside of, and beyond, capitalism, the book contends that an understanding of these dynamics requires an analysis of class struggle and of the resources, material and discursive, that different classes can bring to bear on this struggle. The book focuses on the rise of capitalism in the global South within the context of imperial subordination to the global North, and the place of the peasantry in shaping and resisting these dynamics. The book presents case studies of contested transitions to agrarian capitalism in Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, and South Asia. It also examines the case of transition to a post-capitalist mode of production in Cuba. The book concludes with an assessment of the nature of capitalism and imperialism within the context of the contemporary politico-ecological crisis, and the potential role of the peasantry as agent of emancipatory change towards social and environmental sustainability. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in the areas of peasant studies, rural politics, agrarian studies, development, and political ecology. Mark Tilzey is an Associate Professor, Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University, UK. He is also co-author of Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf: Reviving Critical Agrarian Studies (Routledge, 2024). Fraser Sugden is an Associate Professor, Department of Geography, Uni­ versity of Birmingham, UK. He is also co-author of Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf: Reviving Critical Agrarian Studies (Routledge, 2024).

Earthscan Food and Agriculture

The Sociology of Farming Concepts and Methods Jan Douwe van der Ploeg Genetically Modified Crops and Food Security Commercial, Ethical and Health Considerations Edited by Jasmeet Kour, Vishal Sharma and Imtiyaz Khanday Climate Neutral and Resilient Farming Systems Practical Solutions for Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Edited by Sekhar Udaya Nagothu Sustainable Apple Breeding and Cultivation in Germany Commons-Based Agriculture and Social-Ecological Resilience Hendrik Wolter Food Policy in the United Kingdom An Introduction Martin Caraher, Sinéad Furey and Rebecca Wells Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf Reviving Critical Agrarian Studies Mark Tilzey, Fraser Sugden, and David Seddon Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-Ecological Crisis Mark Tilzey and Fraser Sugden Genome Editing and Global Food Security Molecular Engineering Technologies for Sustainable Agriculture Zeba Khan, Durre Shahwar, and Yasmin Heikal For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ books/series/ECEFA/

Peasants, Capitalism, and Imperialism in an Age of Politico-Ecological Crisis

Mark Tilzey and Fraser Sugden

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Mark Tilzey and Fraser Sugden The right of Mark Tilzey and Fraser Sugden to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tilzey, Mark, author. | Sugden, Fraser, author.

Title: Peasants, capitalism, and imperialism in an age of politico-ecological

crisis / Mark Tilzey and Fraser Sugden.

Other titles: Earthscan food and agriculture.

Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2024. |

Series: Earthscan food and agriculture |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: LCSH: Peasants. | Agriculture--Economic aspects. |

Agriculture and state--History. | Capitalism--History. |

Capitalism--Social aspects.

Classification: LCC HD1521 .T54 2024 (print) | LCC HD1521 (ebook) |

DDC 305.5/633--dc23/eng/20230717

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018956

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018957

ISBN: 978-1-032-50844-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-51912-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-003-40440-8 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

PART I

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

11

1 Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery: A Typology of

Agrarian Transitions

13

2 Typology of Agrarian Transitions as the Basis for the Case

Studies: Forms of Peasant Protest

44

PART II

Wolf’s Latin American Case Studies 3 Revisiting Wolf on Mexico 4 Revisiting Wolf on Cuba

87

89

116

PART III

Other Case Studies of Peasant Resistance in the Periphery

137

5 Latin America

139

6 Bolivia

179

7 Ecuador

206

8 Guatemala

228

9 Peru

261

viii

Contents

10 South Asia

293

PART IV

Whither the Peasantry?

315

11 Peasants, Politico-Ecological Crisis, and the End of Capitalism

317

Index

343

Preface and Acknowledgements

The present volume owes its original conception to David Seddon, who, in 2017, suggested to myself and Fraser Sugden that we collaborate on a book to commemorate and ‘revisit’, on the fiftieth anniversary of its first publica­ tion in 1969 (Harper and Row), Eric R. Wolf ’s renowned classic of historical and political anthropology, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. We agreed that this would be a very worthwhile and exciting project, since we all took the view that Wolf ’s consistent determination to render anthropology (and, by implication, sociology, politics, economics, and allied disciplines) both historical and political was, notwithstanding the vicissitudes of academic fash­ ion, as relevant today as it was when he was writing in the late 1960s. Our intention, however, was not merely to commemorate the publication of Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, but also to undertake a constructive, and broadly sympathetic, critique of it from a Marxian perspective. In undertaking such a critique, we were inevitably influenced by Wolf’s own adoption of a fully Marx­ ian theoretical frame in his magnum opus, Europe and the People Without His­ tory (first published in 1982 by the University of California Press). This adoption itself marked a transition from what we perceived to be the predominantly Polanyian orientation of Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century in 1969 to the fully blown Marxian theoretical framework of Europe and the People Without History in 1982. As our book project proceeded, it became increasingly clear, therefore, that what we were trying to do was to view and assess Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century through the Marxian theoretical lens that Wolf himself articulated in Europe and the People Without History. Since our intention was also to assess the character, or indeed existence, of ‘peasant wars’ during the neoliberal and current conjunctures, again drawing on Wolf’s own Marxian perspective, it became almost inevitable that the scale and scope of our book would grow commensurately. One significant result of this enlarged ambition has been the decision to split into two books what was originally intended as one. While each of the resulting separate books should be regarded as self-contained and stand-alone, the two books are in effect companion volumes. The companion to the present volume we decided to entitle Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf: Reviving Critical Agrarian Studies. The present book focuses on the development

x

Preface and Acknowledgements

of our own perspective after Wolf, and deals with peasant dynamics in response to capitalism and imperialism in the ‘periphery’, or the global South, adopting the case study approach utilized by Wolf in Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century to explore a number of country-specific agrarian transitions in Latin America and South Asia. It also articulates a political ecological view after Wolf and explores the relevance of the peasantry today in addressing our deepening politico-ecological crisis. One pragmatic consideration arising from our enlarged ambition embodied in the present volume and its companion, and their consequently longer-than­ anticipated gestation, is that the objective of commemorating the original dates of publication of Wolf’s two books of concern to us, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century and Europe and the People Without History, necessarily became more flexible. We decided, consequently, upon a sort of ‘hybrid’ commemoration, taking-into-account the later publication, in ‘English’ (British) editions in 1971 and 1973, of Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century by Faber and Faber. Many thanks are due to Tom Hardwick (formerly of Routledge) for originally commissioning what was intended as one book, and to John Baddeley (formerly of Routledge) and Katie Stokes (Routledge) for their forbearance, patience, and help in the long gestation of what has, in the event, turned out to be two books (the present volume and its companion). Thanks are due also to the University of California Press and to Faber and Faber Publishers for granting, or clarifying, permissions to use extracts from, respectively, Eric R. Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History and Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. Mark Tilzey

Introduction

Given the conjuncture of events defined by the fortieth anniversary of the pub­ lication of Europe and the People Without History (EPWH) and the fiftieth anniversary of the British publication of Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (PWTC), together with the enduring relevance of the subject matter and theore­ tical problematic addressed and deployed by Eric Wolf in these two books, we considered it both opportune and important to commemorate these works by embarking on the project presented primarily in our companion volume, Pea­ sants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf, but also in the present book. This project is designed to critically assess and, as appropriate, ‘update’ Wolf’s contribution to the study of the peasantry and its relationship to the emergence and subsequent expansion of capitalism, and the latter’s global manifestation as colonialism/imperialism. The fruit of this project, as set out primarily in our companion volume but also, although to a lesser degree, in this book, is, we hope, a comprehensive and broadly sympathetic evaluation of this contribution in terms of Wolf’s conceptual premises, methodology, and the pertinence of his understanding of the peasantry to the contested emergence of capitalism. These conceptualizations remain relevant, in the current context, to the burgeoning politico-ecological crises wrought especially by extractive imperialism in the per­ iphery. This current context, one we address particularly in the present volume, is characterized not only by continuing capitalist expansion, but also by persistent political resistance to that expansion, building on the long history of contestation between the peasantry and superordinate classes in feudalism and capitalism. It is important to note, however, that such resistance today encapsulates elements that were necessarily only marginal to Wolf’s problematic, formulated as it was half a century ago, notably the capitalogenic ecological turbulence that has rapidly accelerated since the publication of his two books. Albeit with considerable debt to Wolf ’s own ‘mode of production’ approach as expressed in EPWH, our principal purpose in this present volume is to articulate our own stance in relation to the dynamics of capitalism, state, class, imperialism, and to their resistances and contradictions, especially as mani­ fested in peasant mobilizations and the ‘agrarian question’ more widely. Indeed, it is important to emphasize that a considerable part of both our books, but especially the present volume, is in fact devoted to this latter DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-1

2

Introduction

undertaking. Here we might recall that the agrarian question, central to the development of our own thesis, refers back to the original work of that name by Karl Kautsky (1988), and explores the impact of capitalism (subsuming coloni­ alism and imperialism) on agrarian society, the role of agriculture in the course of capitalist (and, more widely, state socialist/capitalist) development, and, par­ ticularly, the political role of the peasantry in facilitating or obstructing agrarian transition, whether towards capitalism, state socialism/capitalism, or towards a variety of alternatives (which may be ‘conservative’ or ‘radical’). Among the key questions that we will be asking in the present volume are: � �

� � � �

What is the nature of capitalism, the state, and class today, is the global system still characterized by ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, and are the notions of imperialism and colonialism still relevant? What is the nature of the peasantry today, does it indeed still exist, and how does it relate to the changed character of global political economy and ecology (having passed from the predominant ‘developmentalism’ at the time of Wolf ’s writing of PWTC and EPWH, through neoliberalism, and now to a tendential re-emphasis upon state management of the ‘economy’ and its relationship to the biophysical domain)? What has become of the ‘peasant wars’ that Wolf analysed (and others that he did not address) and why? Is the notion of ‘peasant wars’ still relevant today and how does it relate to current protests and rebellions of the peasantry, and to rural social movements more generally? Have the aims and objectives of peasant protest changed, in relation, for example, to issues of ecology, ethnicity, gender, and to the very question of ‘development’ itself ? Might the future, and the solution to poverty, precarity, social injustice and the ecological crisis, lie with the peasantry and its advocacy, inter alia, of agroecology and food sovereignty (and, more inclusively, what Tilzey 2018 has termed ‘livelihood sovereignty’)?

Again, our use of the terms ‘peasants’ and ‘peasantry’ may appear con­ tentious to some. There are those, notably the so-called ‘proletarianists’, for whom these terms are essentially anachronistic, since the great bulk of the peasantry now technically comprises a semi-proletariat, deriving the majority of its income from the sale of labour power to agricultural or non-agricultural capitalists, and frequently migrating annually, or on a longer-term basis, within the nation or internationally, to find employment. While it may appear ‘structu­ rally’ as if such peasants are now de facto proletarians, normatively, however, remaining ties to land, even where such holdings are very small (as many are), assume disproportionate significance in relation to income derived, since such holdings and associated pre-capitalist modes of production represent a degree of security and autonomy from capitalism under conditions of endemic under­ employment and precarity. Normatively, therefore, and under the prevailing

Introduction

3

conditions of off-farm employment precarity, such semi-proletarians tend to espouse ‘traditional’ peasant political demands for greater and secure access to land (the fundamental means of production) in order to enhance food and live­ lihood security through non-market-dependent subsistence production. In this regard, we recognize the existence of different class fractions within the peasantry (which we denote as ‘upper’, ‘middle’, and ‘lower’ peasantries), and make a fundamental distinction in class position between market-depen­ dent peasants (principally the upper peasantry which derives the great majority of income from the exchange value of commodity sales), and actual or normative non-market dependent peasants (the middle and lower peasan­ tries) who strive to maximize the production of use values in order to mini­ mize exposure to capitalist market forces. Here the aspiration of most of the lower peasantry, in the main semi-proletarians, is to secure more land in order to cover annual subsistence requirements in the manner of the middle pea­ santry. In this recognition of differing class interests within the ‘peasantry’ and the fundamental line of differentiation running between market-depen­ dency and market autonomy we follow Wolf. Here it is again worthwhile quoting at length his own differentiation between the middle and the upper peasant, the latter described by Wolf as a ‘farmer’: If we distinguish peasants from primitives [that is, tribal people], we must also differentiate them from ‘farmers’. The major aim of the peasant is subsistence and social status gained within the narrow range of social relationships. Peasants are thus unlike cultivators [farmers], who partici­ pate fully in the market and who commit themselves to a status game set within a wide social network. To ensure continuity upon the land and subsistence for his [her] household, the peasant most often keeps the market at arm’s length, for unlimited involvement in the market threatens his [her] source of livelihood. He [she] thus cleaves to traditional arrange­ ments which guarantee his [her] access to land and to labour of kin and neighbours. Moreover, the peasant favours production for sale [exchange value] only within the context of an assured production for subsistence [use value] … products are sold on the market to produce the extra margin of returns with which to buy goods one does not produce on the homestead. In contrast, the farmer enters the market in full, subjects his [her] land and labour to open competition, explores alternative uses for the factors of pro­ duction in the search for maximal returns, and favours the more profitable product over the one entailing smaller risk. The change over from peasant to farmer, however, is not merely a change in psychological orientation; it involves a major shift in the institutional context to reduce his [her] risks, but when alternative institutions are either too chaotic or too restrictive to guarantee a viable commitment to new ways, that is when the psychological, economic, social, and political tensions all mount towards peasant rebellion and involvement in revolution. (Preface to PWTC, Wolf 1973: xviii)

4

Introduction

It is also important to note in this passage Wolf ’s very insightful remarks concerning the lack of secure and remunerative livelihoods (usually employment) as alternatives to production for subsistence as constituting vital predicates of peasant rebellion and revolution. We shall, in this book especially, but also in its companion, similarly identify the lack of such ‘safety valves’ as an important predisposing factor behind peasant mobilization. If our position, following Wolf, differs from the ‘proletarianists’, it also contrasts with the ‘agrarian populists’ or ‘peasantists’, who fail to recognize any class differentiation within the ‘peasantry’, considering the lower/middle and upper peasantry (the latter comprising small commercial farmers) to share essential characteristics related to smallness and family-centric scales of produc­ tion. For contemporary ‘peasantists’ it is the localization and ‘ecologization’ of production that are seen to be the key differentiating factors vis-à-vis capitalist production, thus failing to recognize the continuing operation of market depen­ dency in generating competitive pressures among the upper peasantry and the relentless ‘micro-capitalism’ that this brings in train (Bernstein 2014). Similarly, the ‘agrarian populist’ tendency to evacuate class fractional interest differentia­ tion among the peasantry has serious adverse implications for the analysis of agrarian dynamics in the emergence of capitalism, as our companion book, especially, demonstrates. Our use of the term ‘imperialism’ in preference to ‘colonialism’ in the present book, especially, where we have given it titular prominence, perhaps requires some explanation and justification. That our preferred term is ‘imperialism’ arises from a number of reasons. First, the term ‘imperialism’ is more con­ ceptually encompassing than ‘colonialism’ since we take the first to mean the politico-economic dominance of one state or territory by another, whether for­ mally annexed or not (with the implication of the exploitation and cultural denigration of the former to the benefit of the latter), while we take the second to refer to formal political annexation alone (although still with the connotation of sustained subordination of the colony to the colonizing power), with some authors employing a still more restrictive definition to refer to settlement in the annexed territory by settlers from the home country (for example, Gilmartin 2009). Secondly, the term ‘colonialism’ has become increasingly associated with ‘postcolonial’ or ‘decolonial’ discourse and the latter’s tendency to elevate race, ethnicity, and culture as sui generis explanations of exploitation bereft of their essential class dimensions. While this association probably accounts for the wider contemporary ‘audience appeal’ of the term colonialism vis-à-vis imperialism, imperialism as a concept, by the same token, has not relinquished the necessary causal relationship between class exploitation and its over-determination, in the quest for super-profits, by ethnicity and race (and, it should be said, by gender). Perhaps the most consistent and prominent area of alignment between our approach and Wolf’s own is our common deployment of, and debt to, Marxian theory. Wolf’s own embrace of Marxian theory was evidently something that took place between the writing of PWTC and EPWH, since his approach in the former owes much more to Polanyi than to Marx, while in the latter the debt to

Introduction

5

Marx is quite explicit and absolutely central to his thesis. Moreover, Wolf is an advocate of Marxian, as opposed to Marxist, theory, a distinction which we, like Wolf, consider to be very important and one which we also endorse wholeheartedly. Here, it is again worthwhile quoting Wolf at length: I acknowledge my debt to Marxian thought without apology. There is nowadays a temptation to consign this body of ideas to the scrap heap of intellectual history, as part of the unusable wreckage of the ‘really exist­ ing’ socialist systems that collapsed at the end of the 1980s. We need to remind ourselves that the Marxian tradition encompassed many variants of thought and politics, some of which are intellectually richer than the ortho­ doxies that prevailed politically. I use the term ‘Marxian’ advisedly, to refer to the variants of the tradition, in contrast to the term ‘Marxist’, which has come to denote a particular kind of politics. Our intellectual and political world would be greatly impoverished if we could not draw on this Marxian legacy … Using Marxian concepts also draws us into long-standing debates that raise questions about the Marxian tradition as a way of thinking about the world. That tradition has sometimes been defined as falling into two categories: ‘Systems Marxism’ and ‘Promethean Marxism’. Systems Marxism wanted to be a science, a disciplined body of logically enchained postulates that could be used to formulate general laws of social development in history. Promethean Marxism embodied the hope for human liberation from economic and political exploitation and celebrated the revolutionary will as opening the way to that desired future. (Preface to EPWH, Wolf 1997: xxi) The first part of this passage points to the abrogation of the ‘Marxist’ char­ acteristics of political vanguardism, statism, productivism, totalitarianism, and economism associated with the state capitalism of ‘actually existing soci­ alism’. Relatedly, it points to an abrogation of the ‘base’–‘superstructure’ model of the mode of production, or economic determination ‘in the last instance’, beloved of orthodox Marxism, in favour of a model that focuses much more openly upon the social relations of power, the class coordinates of which rely equally upon the deployment of material and discursive resources in sustaining the exploitation of one group by another. The second part of the passage addresses the long-standing debate between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, the resolution to which is largely captured in Marx’s own celebrated aphorism wherein ‘people make their own history, but not in conditions of their own choosing.’ In other words, people are necessarily part of determinate social relations, but the reproduction of (or challenge to) those relations cannot occur without the reflexive agency of actors, whose actions nonetheless are enabled or constrained by the initial parameters of those social relations. Wolf ’s work in both PWTC and EPWH reflects and mobilizes this ontology, one which we entirely support and have elsewhere termed ‘structured agency’ (see Tilzey 2017).

6

Introduction

The purpose of the Marxian approach is not merely to understand, how­ ever, but also, through that understanding, to critique. This is to understand modes of production, such as feudalism and capitalism, as exploitative and class-riven systems, and to emphasize their social and ecological contradictions. The logic of these modes of production is not the betterment of the generality of the population but the appropriation of greater levels of surplus from subaltern classes by superordinate classes, irrespective of the poverty, suffering, and ecolo­ gical destruction that this may bring in its wake. This is why Wolf chose to write a book about peasant wars, essentially a tale of resistance to capitalism and colonialism/imperialism, and why EPWH is actually about people who did have their own histories and did not simply succumb passively to the devastating impacts of European expansion globally. A focus on the peasantry as a means of pointing up both the political and the ecological contradictions of capitalism is important not only historically but is also of vital contemporary significance. The peasantry (or, more accurately, the middle and lower peasantry) as a structural class element of tributary (feudal) and peripheral capitalist modes of production (and also potentially, as indepen­ dent land holders, constituting a ‘peasant mode of production’), has sought his­ torically and contemporaneously to minimize or eliminate lordly exactions and/ or to avoid undue exposure to market dependency under capitalism. Thus, as Robert Brenner (2007) notes of the feudal lower and middle pea­ santry, these peasant class fractions did not, as a general rule, wish to spe­ cialize and compete against each other in an emergent market. This latter point speaks strongly to Wolf ’s characterization of the middle peasantry quoted earlier and its strong desire to seek autonomy from capitalist market dependency, especially under conditions of employment precarity such as are per­ vasive within the context of contemporary peripheral capitalism. This points in turn to the characteristics of the peasantry – commitment to meeting fundamental needs (or use values) rather than capital accumulation through exchange value, commitment to communal values and social equity rather than competition and individual advancement, respect for, and dependence on, ecological boundaries and functions in meeting those fundamental needs rather than their transgression and degradation through the thirst for profit – which embody those anti-capitalist principles key to addressing the unprecedented politico-ecological crisis of our age. As noted, our purpose in the present book is to focus on the dynamics of the peasantry in relation to capitalism’s colonial and imperial manifestations in the ‘periphery’ and, in its companion, on their relation to the emergence of capital­ ism in the ‘core’. We should note here that we address and ‘update’ in the present volume some of the case studies of peasant wars that Wolf presented in PWTC, since the case studies in question, Mexico and Cuba, are located in the global ‘periphery’. It is interesting to note, however, that, despite his move to Marxian theory, Wolf addressed the ‘peasant question’ only very tangentially in EPWH, thereby perhaps missing the opportunity to follow through his analysis in PWTC from this new perspective. This does, however, present us with an opportunity to attempt to fill this ‘gap’. This, indeed, is what we hope to achieve,

Introduction

7

both in terms of a more general treatment of the ‘agrarian question’, and, more specifically, in terms of ‘updating’ Wolf ’s case studies in respect of Mexico and Cuba, together with other case studies of ‘peasant wars’ that Wolf did not address. The present volume is structured as follows. In Part I, we present a ‘typology’ of forms of contested agrarian transition to and within capitalism, with a primary focus on the periphery and the place of the peasantry within those forms of transition. We attempt to define the theoretical basis for the case studies of agrarian transitions and peasant/rural protest which occupy the bulk of our book. Here, we point to Wolf’s quite sketchy theoretical justification for his case studies of ‘peasant wars’ in PWTC. We indicate that this deficiency is something that we endeavour ourselves to rectify by formulating a more rigorous, ‘comparative his­ torical’ basis for case study selection based on a critical reading, inter alia, of Barrington Moore (1966), Theda Skocpol (1979) and, particularly, Terry Byres (1996) in his Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below. Chapter 2 examines how peasant unrest, protest, and rebellion ‘map onto’ our typology of transitions, and explains why there is a broad differentiation between the global North and South in terms of the prevalence of ‘rural movements’ in the former and ‘peasant wars’ in the latter. Within the global Northern imperium, the peasantry has been transformed, through ‘real subsumption’, into a proletariat (or, alternatively, into commercial farmers) whose com­ pliance with capitalism has been secured through consumerism, nationalism, and welfarism. This contrasts with the ‘formal subsumption’ and, therefore, survival of the peasantry in much of the global Southern periphery, where piecemeal industrialization, poor employment prospects, a ‘functionally dualistic’ relation to export-oriented capital, and resistance to full expropria­ tion imply continuing links to land for subsistence production. The continu­ ing presence of the peasantry in the periphery and its disappearance from the core are dialectically related phenomena, however, as a result of the operation of imperialism and ‘combined and uneven development’, as Tilzey (2018) terms it in a reversal of Trotsky’s (2008) original term. Because of this dia­ lectical relation, our companion book addresses agrarian change in the core, while the present volume has its primary focus on the periphery. In Parts II and III we turn to case studies of peasant resistance and per­ sistence in the periphery. We begin, in Part II, by addressing ‘peasant wars’ in two out of the case studies covered by Wolf in PWTC, namely, Mexico and Cuba. Here our purpose is not principally to revisit Wolf ’s own analyses of these wars (although this is something we do undertake) but, perhaps more importantly, examine what became of them in the decades following the (some­ what arbitrary) endpoints in Wolf’s narrative in PWTC. Since Wolf chose not to pursue analysis of ‘peasant wars’ from his new theoretical perspective as deli­ neated in EPWH, this lacuna presents us with an opportunity to address these later developments through the Marxian theory articulated by Wolf, and devel­ oped further by ourselves in the present volume and its companion, Peasants, Capitalism, and the Work of Eric R. Wolf. While recapitulating coverage of the

8

Introduction

periods addressed by Wolf in PWTC, our analysis focuses, then, on the neo­ liberal/neo-imperial era, and synthesizes experiences concerning capitalism, the state, and imperialism in relation to the peasantry, together with processes of reformism and class co-optation. It also draws lessons from agrarian transitions in industrialization strategies, especially relevant to Mexico, detailing the poli­ tical and ecological contradictions of the proletarianization process and agri­ cultural productivism. The chapters conclude with an assessment of the current status of the peasantry, and the nature of ‘peasant-related’ discontent, in both of the states examined. In Part III, we employ the typology of agrarian transition types developed in Part I to identify case studies for detailed analysis of peasant dynamics in relation to the contested spread of capitalism in the periphery, these being case studies not addressed by Wolf in PWTC. The rationale for these case studies derives from the identification of the principal agrarian transition types, the causes of which lie in state-level dynamics of class contestation between hegemonic, sub-hegemonic, and counter-hegemonic interests, set crucially within the wider global imperial centre-periphery structure of capit­ alism. We select three important peripheral ‘transition’ types from our typol­ ogy: ‘farmer road’ partial transition to capitalism; ‘Junker road’ partial transition to capitalism (within these two we discuss ‘semi-proletarianization’ and ‘petty commodity production’ types); and articulation between feudalism and capitalism, and the semi-colonial social formation. This selection yields case studies that focus on Latin America (‘farmer road’ partial transition represented by Guatemala and Peru, and ‘Junker road’ partial transition by Bolivia and Ecuador) and South Asia (feudal-capitalist articulation in India and Nepal). Part IV, is entitled ‘Whither the Peasantry? Peasants, Politico-Ecological Crisis, and the End of Capitalism’. This chapter, by way of conclusion, draws out key lessons from the case studies in terms of the status of the peasantry, peasant wars, and rural movements more generally, both in the current con­ juncture and looking to the future. It examines the peasantry’s role as agent, not only of resistance and rebellion, but also of revolution and transforma­ tion, and its potential as the leading advocate for, and practitioner of, social and ecological sustainability. Here, we reiterate the importance of keeping the discussion of the peasantry firmly grounded in the agrarian question, since contemporary peasant ‘wars’ are less ‘urban’ than might be supposed. This, we argue, is because the bulk of subaltern classes in the global South, rather than being a fully urban proletariat, are semi-proletarian, retaining links to land, however tenuous, while reliant on ‘off-farm’ and urban employment to make ends meet. But the links to land, ideologically, culturally, and materi­ ally, are of disproportionate significance to subalterns relative to off-farm employment, constituting a very strong normative image of how the current politico-economic system might be changed to the benefit of the majority rather than the few. Here, following Wolf, we re-affirm the importance of the middle peasantry in resistance movements, and its structural links to the

Introduction

9

urban proletariat through the prevalence of semi-proletarianization. Here, also, our political ecological perspective problematizes fundamentally any notion of universal transition to urban, industrial, productivist capitalism, or even to a ‘green’ capitalism no longer premised on fossil carbon, since the latter would still retain a strongly imperial relation between North and South. In other words, it serves strongly to validate a broadly ‘pro-peasant’ view of a post-capitalist, agrarian-based social system.

References Bernstein, H. 2014. Food Sovereignty via the ‘Peasant Way’: A Sceptical View. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41, 1031–1063. Brenner, R. 2007. Property and Progress: Where Adam Smith Went Wrong. In: Wickham, C. (ed.) Marxist History Writing for the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Byres, T.J. 1996. Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below: An Essay in Comparative Political Economy. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Gilmartin, M. 2009. Colonialism/Imperialism. In: Gallaher, C., Dahlman, C.T., Gilmartin, M., Mountz, A., with Shirlow, P. Key Concepts in Political Geography. London: Sage. Kautsky, K. 1988. The Agrarian Question. Volumes 1 and 2. London: Zwan Publications. Moore, B., Jr. 1966. The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Skocpol, T. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tilzey, M. 2017. Reintegrating Economy, Society, and Environment for Cooperative Futures: Polanyi, Marx, and Food Sovereignty. Journal of Rural Studies, 53, 317–334. Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Trotsky, L. 2008. The History of the Russian Revolution. 3 volumes. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Wolf, E.R. 1973. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. Second English edition. London: Faber & Faber. Wolf, E.R. 1997. Europe and the People Without History. Second edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Part I

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

1

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery A Typology of Agrarian Transitions

In Chapter 2 of our companion volume, we set out our theoretical approach with respect to capitalism, the state, the peasantry, and the agrarian question. In the present chapter we will first present a ‘typology’ of forms of contested agrarian transition to and within capitalism with a primary focus on the per­ iphery, and the place of the peasantry within these forms of transition. As explained in Chapter 2 of our companion book, this typology represents the forms of transition that both comprise, and lie between, the binary ‘poles’ of ‘pre’ and ‘fully’ capitalist agrarian relations delineated there. In the next chapter, we will attempt to define the theoretical basis for the case studies of agrarian transitions and peasant/rural protest which occupy Chapters 3–10 of this book. The last section of the next chapter will examine how peasant unrest, protest, and rebellion ‘map onto’ this ‘typology’, and explain why there is a broad differentiation between the global North and South in terms of the prevalence of ‘rural movements’ in the former and ‘peasant wars’ in the latter. This explains why this chapter and the next (and indeed this book) have their principal focus on the periphery, a fact which should also be evident from Chapter 2 of our companion volume – this is where the overwhelming bulk of the peasantry today is located, the peasantry having largely dis­ appeared from the imperium. Within the imperium, characterized by social articulation, the ‘freeing’ of labour with the advent of capitalism has fulfilled the double purpose of providing the basis of relative surplus value and its transformation into profit through the realization of an expanding market for wage goods. In other words, the peasantry has been transformed, through real subsumption, into a proletariat whose compliance with capitalism has been largely secured through consumerism, nationalism, and welfarism (Tilzey 2018, 2020), a phenomenon which we may term integral hegemony (Gramsci 1971; Femia 1981; Morton 2013). However, as we have explained earlier and elaborate further below, the continuing presence of peasantry in the periphery and its disappearance from the core are dialectically related phenomena as a result of the operation of imperialism and ‘combined and uneven develop­ ment’. Because of this dialectical relation, our companion book addresses agrarian change in the core while the present volume has its primary focus on the periphery. DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-3

14

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

In the periphery, proletarianization provides the basis for profits as it does in the core, but, due to social disarticulation and therefore unlike the latter, realization of the value of commodities does not depend appreciably on the level of workers’ wages. Consequently, subsistence economies, and hence the peasantry, tend to be maintained for as long as they contribute to the costs of labour reproduction and permit the further lowering of labour costs from the perspective of the capitalist sector. Surplus is appropriated to the traditional colonial core and emerging sub-imperium directly through profits on the export of goods and labour (through migration), while some is absorbed locally – either by pre-capitalist classes, through the informal sector, or by both a national and comprador bourgeoisie. The fully proletarianized worker in the periphery, often the victim of land grabs and other forms of accumulation by dispossession, loses both control of the production process and ownership of the means of production. This dis­ possessed population, often ‘surplus’ to the needs of capital (and therefore not strictly ‘functional’ for capital but rather ‘collateral damage’ as the result of accumulation by dispossession), enters a vast labour reserve army with wages often pushed down to the physiological minimum (Li 2010). The semi-prole­ tarianized worker in the periphery, by contrast, whose numbers likely com­ prise the largest share of the labour force, maintains these two forms of control to varying extents. A land-owning peasant maintains full control over his/her land and the production process. Those who are subjugated under precapitalist modes of production, such as the semi-feudal tenant, may control the production process but not the land, and be subject to simultaneous sur­ plus appropriation from a member of the pre-capitalist dominant class, such as a landlord. Nevertheless, since both groups of semi-proletarians seek to protect this control (so that the relation with capital again cannot considered to be simply ‘functional’ but more the outcome of ‘struggle’), particularly under conditions of increasing precarity, they compete fiercely on the labour market alongside fully proletarianized workers to make up for shortfalls on the land, and accept wages below the price of subsistence. In the product market meanwhile, they compete against commercial farmers, who employ their own semi-proletarian labour. Thus, in the periphery, the semi-proletarian, who may simultaneously be part of various pre-capitalist modes of production, provides the cheap labour and cheap food that increase the level of exploitation of labour and extraction of absolute (rather than relative) surplus value in the ‘capitalist sector’ to levels that eventually exceed those in the imperium. The capitalist agriculturepeasant sector binomial is, in part, the structural reflection of the rationality of peripheral accumulation. It ‘temporarily’ constitutes a functional system that symbolizes and embodies the contradictions of peripheral capitalism. These contradictions, however, are the very basis of the negation of its reproduction over time – in other words, peripheral accumulation, while dependent on the peasant sector, erodes the latter’s reproduction through the

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

15

very process of accumulation – by squeezing the amount of land available for peasant production, by continuing to erode the market for basic food staples produced largely by the peasantry, and by failing to afford remuneration for off-farm employment adequate to meet the reproductive needs of the pea­ santry. However, precisely because such accumulation cannot assure the reproduction of subalterns as full proletarians, together with the continuing erosion of access to land and decline in the market for traditional food sta­ ples, the peasantry actively resists through class struggle the continuing threats to its reproduction as a peasantry, and this is the principal source of resistance to capitalism in the current neoliberal conjuncture. The status and survival of the peasantry cannot simply be ‘read off’ from the accumulation logic of peripheral capitalism, therefore, but is, rather, the outcome, as we saw in the Introduction, of ‘structured agency’ (Tilzey and Potter 2016), encapsu­ lating Marx’s aphorism that ‘people make history, but not under conditions of their own choosing’. This enjoins us to integrate the modern state into the analysis, since this represents the arena of political contestation and struggle around capitalist dynamics, its role being not merely to facilitate capital accumulation, but also to attempt to legitimate capitalism through varying degrees of conciliation with non-capitalist classes. Social and sectoral dis­ articulation in the periphery implies, however, that the state-capital nexus is characterized either by minimal hegemony (Gramsci 1971; Femia 1981; Morton 2013) (failure to integrate subaltern classes as a really subsumed proletariat) where the social formation is dominated by agro-export oligar­ chies and comprador bourgeoisie (principally characterized by ‘Junker road’ to capitalism); or by what we choose to term here medial hegemony in cases where the developmentalist state attempts (usually unsuccessfully) to forge socially and sectorally articulated production and consumption relations through land reform and redistributive policies along the ‘farmer road’, entailing alliances between sub-hegemonic national bourgeoisies and upper fractions of the peasantry. Given these opening remarks, we can suggest that the nature of agrarian transition to capitalism, and within capitalism, in the periphery, and the place of the peasantry within it, arise from four principal factors: �

�

Firstly, it is associated with structural constraints arising from dis­ articulated accumulation and social disarticulation, phenomena which are determined largely by the prior power of the imperium to enforce these relations, as well as its ability to co-opt a ruling class within the periph­ ery, often a comprador bourgeoisie, sometimes in collusion with a precapitalist rural elite. This is typified by a situation of minimal hegemony in the peripheral state-capital nexus. Secondly, it is derived from variations in the predominant form of capit­ alism over time, flowing largely from the imperium and sub-imperium, in response to the accumulation and legitimation dynamics of the imperial state-capital nexus, for example, shifts between ‘free trade’ regimes and

16

�

�

Developing Our Theoretical Approach more interventionist, reformist regimes (oscillation of the Polanyian ‘double movement’). The latter episodes may afford ‘windows of opportunity’ for more state developmentalist policies in the periphery, involving shifts to medial hegemony. Thirdly, it is linked to reflexive responses to the above by sub-hegemonic classes within the peripheral state-capital nexus, often expressed as national developmentalist reformism and medial hegemony, the dynamics of which can be understood only at the level of the state in question. Occasionally, counter-hegemonic forces may subvert peripheral capitalism, as in the case of Cuba, for example. Finally, it is associated with the modes of production on the ground within peripheral social formations, including those that predate coloni­ alism, including their capacity to ‘resist’ capitalist expansion, as well as those which are restructured to supply surplus to capitalism, and the asso­ ciated political alliances and struggles between capitalist and pre-capitalist ruling classes.

We now seek to mobilize the vast empirical data from the ground to better identify a typology of transitions in the contemporary periphery which lie between the ‘pure’ capitalist and pre-capitalist modes of production. In iden­ tifying this typology, we do not assert that these transitional pathways are idealized models, but simply case studies of particular sets of agrarian rela­ tions, which emerge when the peasantry encounters capitalism under unique ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ contexts. This echoes Bois (1978), who makes the crucial point that the evolution of social formations does not follow a pre-determined logic identifiable at the level of theoretical abstrac­ tion. Instead, the underlying dynamics of social transformation can only be uncovered through the historical analysis of empirical data for geographically and historically specific conjunctures. The typology aims to demonstrate that transitional types vary in their spatial and geographical extent. Importantly, some may not represent an actual ‘transition’ to capitalism, but instead represent a stable and long-term relationship between capitalist and pre-capi­ talist formations. At the same time, transitions can be reversed, or can shift from one type to another, or hybrid trajectories of change may emerge at the level of a national or regional social formation, with elements of multiple transitions occurring side by side. Moreover, we can also see that some of these types are not ‘self-contained’ but, rather, because they entail inter-class relations of production, are mutually defining. Thus, for example, a ‘Junker road’ to capitalism within the structures of social disarticulation (Transition Type 2) implies the creation of a semi-proletariat, the latter having a relation of ‘functional dualism’ with the former (Transition Type 5). It should be emphasized again that the following transition types do not follow a pre­ determined ‘structural’ logic, but are, rather, instantiations of ‘structured agency’ predicated upon contestation, struggle, compromise, and alliances between classes and class fractions within and between social formations.

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

17

Transition Type 1: Differentiation in the Periphery – Farmer Road A first step to developing a typology of agrarian transition involves returning to Lenin and Marx’s classic models. First is Lenin’s so-called ‘American road’, whereby differentiation takes place through ‘economic’ processes alone, or ‘capitalism from below’ (in reality, of course, this process of differentiation is not ‘self-contained’ but takes place within parameters defined by wider class relations and the state, for example, the alienability of land, private property rights in land, finance capital, etc.). While this may not always result in the full development of capitalism, across the periphery one can observe peasant differentiation and what may emerge into proto-capitalist relations of pro­ duction. For example, Byres (1981) classic study of class formation in parts of the Indian countryside undergoing the Green Revolution represented a com­ prehensive study of farmer differentiation, whereby land-poor farmers who lack capital to invest in commercialization are compelled to sell their land to an emergent capitalist farming class. The partial proletarianization opened up avenues for emergent forms of class mobilization. Recent scholarship has shown how neoliberal economic policies have intensified peasant differentiation, representing the ‘full’ implantation of capitalist social relations following the establishment of absolute property rights over land. The latter ushers in the unmitigated operation of the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’. Processes engendering neoliberalization include cuts in subsidies and price supports, the deregulation of land markets, com­ modification of seeds, dependence on chemical or hydrocarbon-based inputs, and export-oriented production (Akram-Lodhi 2007, 2008; Araghi 2012; Bernstein 2003). Oya (2001), for example, demonstrates how the negative and positive effects of agricultural market liberalization in Senegal vary according to the class of the farmer, intensifying the process of differentiation. Further­ more, many of the high value crops introduced under commercialization programmes to be produced for the international market have such high start­ up costs that they exclude more marginal producers (Bernstein 2003). Socalled ‘market-led agrarian reforms’, meanwhile, rather than improving access to land for poorer producers, primarily benefit emerging capitalist farmers, thus intensifying differentiation (Akram-Lodhi 2007). Dispossession of pea­ sants was also intensified by the emergence of an international food regime, whereby global market prices were universalized through liberalization, while being often suppressed by overproduction in, and the ‘dumping’ of food sur­ pluses from, the global North onto the global South (McMichael 2006). This was particularly pronounced in the period between the mid-1980s and the global food crisis in 2008, after which there was a shift in the nature of the global food regime towards production of cheap wage foods in the periphery destined for the core (McMichael 2012) (see Transitions 2 and 3). Capitalist transition through peasant differentiation is arguably important in regions dominated by land owning peasants and not in thrall to what Bernstein (2006) terms ‘predatory landed property’. Indeed, regions such as

18

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

the Indian Punjab included in Byres (1981) study which have experienced some level of proto-capitalist differentiation were not part of colonial zamin­ dari system. Revenue collection was undertaken by family farms or village heads, and owner cultivation emerged into the predominant form of produc­ tion in the post-colonial era, with a long term impact on the level of dyna­ mism and capital investment in agriculture (Banerjee and Iyer 2005). This contrasts which regions such as the Eastern Gangetic Plains, which were under the influence of the zamindari system, whereby there is a legacy of landlordism (see Transition 6). Other examples occur in regions which experienced successful redistributive land reforms in the 1960s and 1970s. These represent examples not of ‘capit­ alism from below’ through peasant differentiation as discussed above, how­ ever, but rather of ‘capitalism from above’, undertaken by the state, typically where the urban and rural bourgeoisie displace the landed oligarchy from control of the state and, usually, in an attempt to pre-empt peasant unrest from turning in more radical directions. This rural bourgeoisie represents ‘commercial farms’ that are larger than upper peasant holdings, a situation that tends to lead to further peasant differentiation through marginalization of the middle and lower peasantry, as commercial farms and the upper pea­ santry, favoured by the state, acquire land from lower peasant fractions sub­ sisting increasingly at the margins of economic viability. For example, de Janvry (1981) identified how land reforms in Latin America, which imposed ceilings on the pre-capitalist latifundia, opened up opportunities for the emergence of commercial farms, some of which emerged into capitalist farms over time. This represented, then, a transition from pre-capitalist, feudal lati­ fundia mode to capitalist farmer road. This entailed a transition in both the agrarian mode of production and the classes in control of the state. Under this scenario, agriculture is transformed from pre-capitalist to capitalist, with semi-proletarianization becoming ‘external’ rather than ‘internal’. Pre-capi­ talist estates are replaced by commercial farms (that is, as noted, smaller than Junker estates but larger than upper peasant holdings) as size limits are imposed on landownership through the creation of a reform sector. As noted, the urban and rural bourgeoisie displace, in alliance with the peasantry, the landed oligarchy from control of the state. This road is exemplified by reforms in Chile (1967–1973), Mexico (1934–1940), and Guatemala (1952–1954). A much rarer form of transition, again entailing state reform as ‘capitalism from above’, involves a shift from Junker road to farmer road: these reforms occur within the capitalist mode of production, however, and bring about a shift from the Junker road to the farmer road of development. Since their objective is the transformation of the basis of the agrarian structure from capitalist estates to commercial farms, ceilings on the size of land-holdings are imposed. The landed oligarchy is eliminated and the bourgeoisie assumes control of the state. The sole example of this transition in Latin America is the Peruvian land reform of 1969 undertaken by the military (de Janvry 1981). Under the earlier 1964 land reform, pre-capitalist relations of

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

19

production (yanaconaje) had been prohibited and a Junker road to capitalism had been created. This was effectively destroyed, together with the landed oligarchy, by the military by means of the imposition and enforcement of size limits on land-holdings. It should be noted that the Peruvian agrarian reforms were stimulated in considerable degree by increasing peasant unrest during the 1960s in response to the full emergence of capitalism and the anti-capi­ talist example of the Cuban revolution of 1959. The military regime of 1969 attempted to pre-empt the more radical (counter-hegemonic) change deman­ ded by the lower/middle peasantry through (sub-hegemonic) reformism ‘from above’, envisaging transition to a modern, industrial capitalist state. In addi­ tion to the creation of middle-sized commercial farms, the agrarian reform sector involved extensive collectivization of former latifundia (Kay 1982; Assies 1987) (see case study below for further detail). In more recent years, a peasant differentiation-led transition towards proto­ capitalist development is evident in post-socialist contexts whereby decollec­ tivized farmers were initially allotted equitably distributed holdings. In Viet­ nam, for example, Sikor (2001) notes that despite the initial equitable allocation of the means of production to each household following de-col­ lectivization, growing inequality has been observed across the country. In the north-western highlands, Sikor notes how the family cycle was important initially in driving stratification. Households with more labour could increase the income from collective rice farming and could also increase the accumu­ lation of livestock and upland fields which were privately owned. Surplus could also be invested in aquaculture and high value agricultural inputs, not to mention cultural capital ‘prestige’ investments (Sikor 2001). However, eco­ nomic liberalization has encouraged differentiation independent of the family cycle. Cash crops such as corn offer significant surpluses for enterprising young families involving minimal labour input, resulting in differentiation between households at the same stage in the family cycle (Sikor 2001). This is not framed as a transition to capitalism, and whether this differentiation will go on to include capitalist class formation is debatable, particularly when the state is still the ultimate owner of land, although it represents early stages of processes widespread in regions without a socialist history. Also with regard to Vietnam, Akram-Lodhi (2005) points to expanding class stratification as markets to buy or sell land use rights have emerged in some regions such as the river deltas – particularly in the former South Viet­ nam, where collectivization was not fully completed, and the land redistribu­ tion was more closely aligned to pre-communist period (Luong and Unger 1998). Akram-Lodhi (2005) identifies an emerging class of rich peasants who are commercialized, make intensive use of hired labour and equipment, and have high productivity. Alongside this is a large stratum of small peasants and an expanding class of landless wage labourers. A significant factor driving this trend are distress sales of land due to indebtedness, a result of formal credit facilities being made available in the early 1990s. Land may also be sold due to output failures and ill health, not to mention the increased prosperity of an

20

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

accumulating minority who are willing to buy up the land of their poorer counterparts (Akram-Lodhi 2005). While it is clear that ‘differentiation’ is underway in many parts of the world, it remains to be seen whether this constitutes the emergence of ‘capi­ talist’ class relations. Even Byres (1981) termed his observations on the Green Revolution a form of ‘partial proletarianization’. Crucial in the emergence of ‘fully’ capitalist relations is whether secure and full-time employment oppor­ tunities emerge off-farm for semi-proletarians and the landless, as they have done in the capitalist core states. Here socially and sectorally ‘articulated’ development has enabled differentiation to take its full course, with most peasants becoming proletarians whose labour power is fully reproduced within the capitalist sector, and the upper peasantry becoming commercial farmers. ‘Disarticulated’ development in the periphery, however, means that full proletarianization is not, in most cases, taking place – land remains an important refuge from precarity and limited growth in industry, and access to more land is a continuing aspiration.

Transition Type 2: The Junker Road, (Semi)-Proletarianization and Accumulation by Dispossession The second of Lenin’s paths of agrarian transition was the so-called ‘Junker road’, whereby capitalist class relations were created through the appropria­ tion of land by the feudal nobility. Research from Latin America by de Janvry (1981) points to a pattern of transition akin to the Junker road of central Europe whereby the pre-capitalist latifundia estates were transformed into capitalist plantations, usually through the intervention of the state. He points to 1960s land reforms, for example, in Colombia and Ecuador, which regu­ lated or abolished pre-capitalist tenurial arrangements which impeded increased production and productivity. Kay (1997) similarly points to gov­ ernment interventions to provide subsidized credit, improved inputs and live­ stock, and technical assistance to modernize latifundia estates, encouraging landlords themselves to transform their holdings into commercial profit-orien­ ted capitalist farms. This entails a transition from pre-capitalist mode to Junker capitalist road. This transition was induced either by threatening expropriation if land remained under-utilized, or by rendering semi-feudal relations illegal. The internal subsistence economy was eliminated, and the pre-capitalist estate was thereby transformed into a large-scale capitalist (‘Junker’) enterprise hiring wage labourers, primarily semi-proletarian peasants who formerly subsisted ‘internally’ to the estate. Under this scenario, the landed oligarchy typically retained control of the state. The 1968 land reform in Colombia and the 1964 reform in Ecuador represent unqualified examples of this form of transition. Bolivia is another good example, although rather less clear cut than Colombia and Ecuador. As part of the above process, these reforms essentially proscribed the exchange of labour services by the peasantry for usufruct of land (aparceria in Colombia and huasipungaje in Ecuador).

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

21

More rarely, there may be a shift from farmer road to Junker road (and occasionally to pre-capitalist mode). This represents a counter-reform comprising a shift from farmer to Junker roads within the capitalist mode of production, or, in other words, commercial farms conceding to capitalist estates of the oligarchy. This type of counter-reform occurred in Chile after the seizure of power by the right-wing military junta in 1973, entailing the return of expropriated lands to the landed oligarchy. A similar case is Guatemala after the overthrow of the Arbenz government and the reversal of land reform in 1954 (as in Chile, supported by the USA), although this entailed a return to non-capitalist estates employing extra-economic forms of labour control in the form of the colonato system (de Janvry 1981). In Latin America, pre-capitalist (feudal and semi-feudal) social relations have, thus, to all intents and purposes, been eliminated, a process dominated by the Junker road (although significant residues of pre-capitalist communal relations remain among indigenous groups in the Andes and Mesoamerica, while ‘tribal’ social relations [‘kin-ordered’ mode of production] still persist, particularly in the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin). This elimination has resulted from the incentive of ‘market forces’, from reflexive pressures exercised by ‘internal peasants’, and the coercion of reformist policies as ‘passive revolution’ from above. As noted, particularly effective have been land reforms that threatened pre-capitalist estates with expropriation if they refused to modernize (transition to the Junker road) and took control of the state away from the landed oligarchy to place it in the hands of the bourgeoisie (transition to the farmer road). Under these reforms, promoted against the remnants of feudalism, the conflict between accumulation and legitimation in the state was presumed to be non-existent. The reforms offered, as a result, common cause for the national and dependent bourgeoisies and their foreign allies. Such reforms also appealed to radical forces that saw land reform as a step towards the implementation of a national bourgeois revolution, which was deemed, in turn, a necessary first stage in the transition to socialism. Arising from this common support, these transitional reforms were actively implemented generally from the late 1950s, with the support of the USA. Since they engendered a full transition to capitalism, albeit of a socially disarticulated kind, these reforms may be considered to be successfully terminated from a capitalist perspective. The publicized goal of expropriation and redistribution towards the formation of a reform sector, however, has generally been realized only to a minimal degree (Kay 2006). There is limited contemporary research charting the transition from precapitalist landed estate to capitalist plantation, although one mechanism of transition that, like the Junker road, is driven by large scale plantations, has persisted, or indeed intensified in recent years. This is the process of neoliberal enclosure whereby land is forcibly seized by capitalist investors, often with the tacit support of the state – a process also known often as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey 2003). The difference between neoliberal enclosure and the Junker road of the past, is that land is generally appropriated by

22

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

corporations from outside, rather than involving the conversion of feudal estates into capitalist plantations. While the Junker road of transition from feudal estate to capitalist plantation involves dispossession to create a wage working class (e.g. loss of common lands or termination of leases for tenants), under neoliberal enclosure, many of those subordinated as wage workers are peasants who have lost their land. This contemporary wave of land grabs has been associated by scholars with shifts in the global food regime under neoliberalism. Akram-Lodhi (2007) points to the emerging export-orientated capitalist sub-sector in peripheral economies which can co-exist with subsistence orientated peasant sector. Although such sectors have their origin in colonial era land grabs, or the transformation of pre-capitalist landed estates (under the Junker path), today these farms are strongly linked to transnational forms of capital such as supermarkets and global food corporations. Central to this development is the emergence of a ‘corporate food regime’ under neoliberalism (or what Otero and Tilzey prefer to call the ‘neoliberal’ food regime, since this term acknowledges the continuing and central role of the state in enabling trans­ national capital to operate with minimal inter-state frictions; Otero 2018; Tilzey 2018, 2019b), whereby states in the periphery are encouraged to open their economies to the international food trade, dismantle protections for farmers, and reorient agriculture around export-led growth (McMichael, 2012). As noted above, demand for land has intensified since the 2008–2009 food crisis, with peripheral governments, the World Bank and global investors increasingly shifting the focus from high value food crops, which were hall­ marks of the post-colonial economy, towards ‘bulk’ crops, such as food grains, which can be produced at a substantially lower cost than in the core states (McMichael, 2012). This is again due to social disarticulation, and the ability to drive wages down below subsistence levels (Tilzey 2018). This represents a shift from the earlier agro-food regime dominated by the dump­ ing of subsidized food grains produced by industrial agriculture in the core (McMichael, 2012). Cheaper food supports lower wages and increases the rate of relative surplus value that can be produced in the core itself as their economies seek to compensate for the crisis of over-accumulation within capitalism brought about by the rising organic composition of capital (Akram-Lodhi 2007). It also serves to compensate for contractions in the scope and scale of the welfare state (Tilzey 2018). This, alongside the parallel sector of biofuels, creates a strong imperative for agrarian corporations to expand spatially in the periphery, encroaching upon the land of the peasantry (Akram-Lodhi 2007; McMichael 2012). Within this context, structured by imperial states in symbiosis with extroverted peripheral elites, agro-food cor­ porations have increasing control over how commodities are produced and wield monopsony power over commodity markets (Akram-Lodhi 2008). Within the periphery, movement in this direction under neoliberal restruc­ turing is alluded to by scholars concerned with a latest phase of primitive

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

23

accumulation, echoing Harvey’s (2003) ‘accumulation by dispossession’. The drive by capital, or, more specifically, certain fractions of capital under the aegis of the state, to avert crises requires differentiation by ‘extra-economic’ means (Akram-Lodhi 2007; Araghi 2012). Akram-Lodhi (2007), referring more specifically to agriculture, terms this process of forcible separation ‘neoliberal enclosure’. Examples include the privatization of collective farms in former socialist countries and of communal lands such as the ejidos of Mexico, to make way for corporate agribusiness (Akram-Lodhi 2007), pro­ cesses again enabled by re-regulation by the states in question in favour of transnational capital. Some of the most notable examples of this form of enclosure include the expansion of palm oil cultivation in Southeast Asia and dispossession of the peasantry, documented extensively by Li (2014). The processes of neoliberal enclosure or accumulation by dispossession have contributed significantly to the burgeoning global ‘reserve army’ of migrant labour, engaged in increasingly insecure employment, with wages below subsistence levels (Bernstein 2004; Walker 2008; Araghi 2003, 2012), often tied into casual contracts and without formal organization (Arnold and Pickles 2011). Li (2010), however warns against any assumptions that a functional relationship exists between the process of neoliberal capitalist expansion which drive dispossession, and the processes through which the resultant ‘surplus’ labour is mobilized. For example, plantations may displace peasants yet not absorb this surplus labour pool since they either bring in labour from outside, or generate profit by using labour-saving technologies (Li 2010). What instead is realized, is the release of a dispossessed and ‘pauper­ ized’ population which is surplus to the requirements of capital, and which resides in villages or urban centres without access to a living wage (Li 2010). In fact, we wish to use the term ‘accumulation by dispossession’ to refer spe­ cifically to this form of ‘primitive accumulation’. Accumulation by disposses­ sion in particular generates a renewed desire by the ‘dispossessed’ peasantry for ‘autonomy’ from capital and/or the state, manifest in demands for access to land to produce essential use values, most importantly, food.

Transition Type 3: Supply of Labour by the Subsistence-Oriented Family Farm – Partial or Semi-Proletarianization While land grabs, enclosure, and outright dispossession generate considerable academic interest, their presence appears to be highly context specific. As noted thus far, one of the most stable ways through which capitalism (including the export sub-sectors discussed above) can maintain a reliable, and self-reproducing labour force is through workers’ continued ties to the land. The below four models therefore are emblematic of a more drawn-out transition (which may never be complete), whereby the peasantry persists alongside capitalism. This semi-proletarianization road is, in Latin America particularly, the dialectical opposite of the Junker road (and to a lesser extent, the farmer

24

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

road) under conditions of disarticulated accumulation. It is characterized by the contradictory tendencies of full proletarianization and retention/acquisi­ tion of a family plot for petty-commodity production, self-subsistence, and social security, and is consistent with functional dualism. This precariat migrates within rural areas, from rural areas to urban centres, and across international boundaries to send remittances home. It enters the ‘informal sector’, both rural and urban, through activities such as petty trading, craftmaking, and flexibilized employment – yet retains a fundamental link to the land, often farmed by family members. This dualism frequently follows gen­ dered lines, whereby male migration is supplemented with the feminization of the agricultural sector. Most importantly from our perspective, this group of the peasantry forms the constituency that is struggling under neoliberalism for re-peasantization, sometimes with some success. Under neoliberalism, its ranks have been swelled by workers formerly relatively secure in employment in urban industries, mines, and farms, but now rendered precarious by struc­ tural adjustment, competition, and mechanization. Both Lenin (1964) and Kautsky (1988) observed the tendency for peasants to engage in labour outside as well as working on their own land. As workers already have some security from subsistence farming, capitalist enterprises can pay less to their workers – most notably through not meeting the repro­ duction costs of labour. The presence of these ‘allotment holding wage workers’ prolongs the life of subsistence agriculture under capitalism (Lenin 1964: 177). This has often been considered just a temporary phase in the longer-term process of transition to full capitalist social relations, often during Transition Type 1 for example (differentiation), whereby small farmers were able to hold on to small plots, which would inevitably be sold off to nascent capitalist farmers – as implied in Lenin’s The Development of Capit­ alism in Russia. However, this relationships between the peasantry and capit­ alism can also persist over time – and with the rise of migrant labour as an important feature of the world economy, this arguably is one of the most widespread forms of agrarian transition in the world today. The presence of peasants who are otherwise independent family farmers with control over their own land, and who simultaneously participate in wage labour, is particularly widespread in countries of the sub-imperium such as China. In China there is a huge population of independent family farmers who control their own land and surplus, yet who also participate in the capi­ talist sector through cyclical migrant labour. By maintaining their ties to the land the reproduction costs of labour are covered (Zhan and Scully 2018). This system, historically, was strongly supported by political intervention – the hukou system played a key role in regulating rural-urban migration. With the onset of rapid industrialization and rural-urban migration in the 1990s, the hukou obliged farmers to access services such as education and pensions in their home community, encouraging dependants to stay in the village. Per­ manently settling in the cities with one’s family was therefore challenging, and this ensured that part of the worker’s family would be supported by

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

25

agriculture (Alexander and Chan 2004). The workers themselves would spend a large part of their lives in the village (for example, during childhood, retirement and gaps in employment), where their subsistence needs would be covered by the farm. Zhan and Scully (2018) note how the hukou also played a role in protecting rural residents’ rights to a plot of land, which is allocated to all households by the village government. While this is an outcome of de-collectivization, the retention of strong land rights, which the peasantry still enjoys, is arguably linked to the peasant struggles of the revolutionary era (as described by Wolf in PWTC). Paradoxically though, this ‘social wage’ has served to perpetuate the low wage economy in the capitalist sector. Nevertheless, this also means that Transition Type 1 is less likely in the Chinese context. All farmers are given a fixed amount of land, and plots cannot be bought or sold (Luong and Unger 1998). This in effect impedes differentiation. This may occur on a more limited level through other means (for example, through leasing in land or adopting more capital intensive methods, not to mention investments in non­ farm enterprises) (Luong and Unger 1998), but not to the point that facil­ itates class formation. Zhan and Scully (2018) point out that relaxations in the Chinese hukou system in recent years mean family resettlement in cities is easier than before on a legal level, so farmers can in theory give up their rights to land and relocate with their families. However, this has not stemmed the articulation between the peasant and capitalist sector. Instead, while the ‘political’ mechanisms to stem permanent migration have declined, the economic imperatives among workers to retain their engagement in agriculture have intensified. Growing precarity in employment and rising costs in cities in an informalized neoliberal labour market mean that settling permanently in urban areas is out of reach for most workers, so families endeavour to main­ tain the dual livelihood strategy. They also suggest that the recent rise in land grabs and enclosure in China (associated with Transition Type 2), whereby land is re-allocated for com­ mercial or industrial purposes and farmers lose their inalienable rights, stems from the fact that neoliberalism has freed the state from the need to provide land as a ‘security’. This is because even fully proletarianized workers will be willing to receive wages below subsistence levels. Workers in turn have been active in resisting land grabs through struggles against the state and corporate capital. For the migrant worker, land provides income to supplement low and insecure wages, while also being a safety net in the case one loses one’s job or suffers a mishap such as an illness or work-related injury (Zhan and Scully 2018). This latter point is important, as it suggests that the shift from Transition Type 3, whereby workers (or their families) simultaneously farm their own land, to Transition Type 2, whereby the state appropriates this land ‘by force’, may take place at particular historical conjunctures. This may transpire in contexts where the size of the surplus labour pool means that workers will

26

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

continue to labour regardless of wages or conditions of employment. How­ ever, it is also clear that this process is actively resisted by peasants politically. Similarly, outside of the post-socialist context where land can be bought and sold freely, these same peasants may actively resist Transition Type 1, by the refusal to sell off their land to richer farmers, even when returns are poor. This, therefore, suggests that there are limits to how far capitalism can go in separating workers from their means of production, even in the context of socially disarticulated low wage economies.

Transition Type 4: Petty Commodity Production under Capitalism It would be premature to suggest that an emerging global food regime can only expand through the dispossession of the peasantry and the enlargement of the export-oriented capitalist farming sector. The World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report: Agriculture for Development emerged arguably at a time when interest in agriculture as a frontier for investment by capitalism was rising (McMichael 2012). Nevertheless, the report is oriented towards, not so much the expansion of export-oriented plantation-style agriculture, but the greater integration of the peasantry into the global economy through promoting commercially oriented, entrepreneurial smallholders and peasants (Akram-Lodhi 2008). Importantly, capitalism does not necessarily require peasant labour to extract surplus from the sector, if the peasant farm itself can become sub­ ordinate to capitalism. This reveals an alternative type of agrarian transition occurring in parts of the periphery, whereby the peasant farmer may hold on to their land, but rather than have surplus appropriated as a labourer, they produce their own surplus after meeting their food needs, yet the product of this surplus is appropriated through the market mechanism. Banaji (1977) defined petty commodity producers subservient to merchant or industrial capital as a ‘quasi-enterprise’. In such contexts it is no longer operating independently, but depends on the capitalist enterprise to control the input and outputs. In this context the price is manipulated and depressed through monopsony power, so it essentially represents a ‘concealed wage’. Historical examples include the colonial enterprises which used coercion to set up par­ ticular commodity production regimes (Banaji 1977). The perpetuation of peasant ‘mode of production’ (more accurately, form of production) through its ‘articulation’ with capitalism is made possible through the tendency for peasant producers to accept lower prices than a capitalist firm. As Marx argues, the primary goal for peasant producers is to meet their subsistence needs rather than produce a profit: For the peasant owning a parcel, the limit of exploitation is not set by the average profit of capital, in so far as he is a small capitalist; nor, on the other hand, by the necessity of rent, in so far as he is a landowner. The absolute limit for him as a small capitalist is no more than the wages he

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

27

pays to himself, after deducting his actual costs. So long as the price of the product covers these wages, he will cultivate his land, and often at wages down to a physical minimum. (Marx 1967: 805) If there is a surplus product to sell, it is considered as something which cost the farmers nothing, and is consequently often sold at a value below that which remunerates them for the labour realized to produce it. A portion of the surplus-labour of the peasants is, in Marx’s terms, ‘bestowed gratis upon society’ (Marx 1967: 806). In other words, peasant farmers ‘exploit’ their own labour, by working for more than is necessary for their own subsistence, and create a surplus which is initially appropriated by the household itself (Banaji 1977; Bernstein 1977). However, a large proportion of this surplus may be extracted by the buyer, making peasants effectively ‘disguised pro­ letarians’ (Bernstein 1977). Capitalist firms thus secure a supply of cheap raw materials without any costs of management or supervision of labour (Bernstein 1977). Even when output (and also input) prices cause an erosion of households’ subsistence needs, peasant farms may already be dependent on commodity production and trapped in cycles of debt. They may continue to produce by using their labour more intensively, thus yielding absolute surplus value for capitalist firms, a process Bernstein (1977) terms the ‘simple reproductive squeeze’. This may pave the way for Transition Type 1 (differentiation), but farmers may also strive to keep hold of their land, in spite of the poor returns. This echoes Kautsky (1988), who suggests that competition from modern industry will not necessarily cause the dissolution of small enterprises, but may cause them to persist in the short-term through the overwork and underconsumption of the workers. Ironically the apparent higher ‘productivity’ of the small farm championed in many rural development strategies (see Lipton 1982) stems from this tendency for overwork (Byres 1979; Dyer 2004). In terms of the extent of this model of capitalist transition today, this can appear in countries such as China whereby smallholders enjoy strong rights to land, yet are also intensively engaged in the market. However, this model appears particularly widespread in rural economies oriented towards com­ mercial cash crop production during the colonial era – in particular, large parts of sub-Saharan Africa and tropical Asia which today remain dominated by smallholder production of commodities such as tobacco, tea, coffee or high value vegetables – often alongside larger commercial plantations (emblematic of Transition Type 2). In the contemporary context, contract farming epitomizes this trend, whereby smallholders are institutionally linked through contracts to larger enterprises, often under conditions of relative un­ freedom in terms of control over what is produced and the prices received (White 1997; Pérez Niño 2016). Surplus is appropriated by corporate capital via the sub-contractors who purchase seeds and supply inputs and credit at unfavourable rates (Araghi 2012).

28

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

This mechanism of subordination has supported a line of thinking which suggests the agrarian question is of reduced relevance today since capital does not require access to rural labour for accumulation (Bernstein 2006). Rather, it requires the ability to control markets through, for example, the ‘corporate’ food regime which sets the conditions for production and distribution of agricultural produce (McMichael 2006). In the context of India, for example, scholars such as Utsa Patnaik have moved away entirely from the traditional ‘agrarian question’ (see synthesis by Lerche 2013) as commercialization and market liberalization has left a majority of farmers vulnerable to falling prices and exploitation by global agribusiness (Patnaik 2006). Akram-Lodhi (2008) takes a more balanced approach to note that, in agrarian policy such as the World Bank’s 2008 World Development Report, petty commodity producers are expected to be integrated into global agro-food complexes, alongside the larger-scale productive sub-sector, and it is common for the two to co-exist. For the peasantry, this transition type presents a dilemma surrounding the question of the degree of subordination to, and the degree of autonomy from, the market under conditions of precarity within disarticulated accumulation. Thus, peasant commodity production within peripheral and socially dis­ articulated social formations undergoing neoliberalization, especially when peasants have direct access to non-commodified land, exemplifies a form of production in which the labourer still controls his or her labour power and, to some extent, the degree and form of integration into the market. Peasants, even those who depend on the market for the fulfilment of a significant pro­ portion of their subsistence needs, have more room for manoeuvre, through the adjustment of production and consumption, than producers subject to fully capitalist conditions (Vergara-Camus 2014). Wood (2009) develops a distinction between different types of market dependence which rely on dif­ ferent forms of market compulsion. Some producers would be subject to ‘market as an opportunity’, deriving ‘from the need to obtain subsistence goods by means of exchange, while others are subjected to the “market as an imperative”, which means that they are obliged to generate a profit in order to reproduce themselves’ (Wood 2002: 66). The major distinction is that the former is subject to the need to sell, while the latter is obliged to ‘attain an average rate of profit in order to survive, irrespective of [his/her] own con­ sumption needs’ (ibid.: 64). In this context, petty commodity production can also represent a limited middle to rich peasant road to capitalism (often overlapping with a ‘farmer road’, or Transition Type 1) created by a combination of generic tendencies to rural differentiation and active state policies. During the era of ‘devel­ opmentalism’, this upper stratum was subject to contradictory policies of low producer prices, subsidy, and land reform. Under neoliberalism, it has been subject to parcelization and de-collectivization, while frequently being left to survive as best it can under extreme competitive pressure from larger fully capitalist farms. It operates in a variety of tenurial arrangements, including both freehold and communal. In Latin America, this stratum has benefitted

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

29

from reformism under the ‘pink tide’ states, particularly in the case of Bolivia and Ecuador, where members of the upper peasantry form the political bed­ rock of the incumbent national-popular regimes. Farms may employ the labour of poor peasants and also have investments in off-farm activities. This stratum may also be embroiled in ‘contract farming’, whereby transnational capital and/or members of the oligarchy contract petty commodity producers directly, controlling their conditions of production (providing inputs, stan­ dards, and output markets) but without taking title of the land or becoming embroiled in labour issues (McKay 2018; Tilzey 2019a). It is clear, therefore, that this transition type includes divergent experiences, depending upon whether one is a member of the upper peasantry, which tends to be subject to the ‘market as an imperative’, and the middle and lower peasantry, which, when it has access to land, is subject to the ‘market as an opportunity’. Given this differentiation, peasant households (particularly the middle and large peasantry) with access to land have the opportunity to accumulate some wealth from the market, even if they are participating on unfavourable terms with agri­ business. However, these farmers also have the capacity to withdraw from the market and take advantage of the use-value of land and its produce if the price is unfavourable, or in the event of a biophysical shock (Vergara-Camus 2014). Nonetheless, for the lower peasantry, it is the case that, when peasant production is insufficient to meet the needs of the family unit, the household is often obliged to turn to the market to satisfy its needs (either through selling produce or labour power, or both). Monetization can erode the alternatives available to smaller peasant families, entailing the commodification of peasant agriculture and rein­ forcing the effects of market compulsion. The important point is that the middle and lower peasantries, together with landless peasants, seek, as an ideal, to retain or gain sufficient access to non-com­ modified land to produce use-values, and thus to abrogate the status of the ‘market as an imperative’. Any surplus over and above subsistence needs they may indeed wish to sell on the market, but, in this instance, the market functions as ‘oppor­ tunity’ and not as ‘compulsion’. As a consequence, land and access to land have a series of different meanings for the middle and lower peasantry than they have for the upper peasantry or capitalist farmers, with the former centred around the production of use-values and the realization of exchange-value representing an inessential opportunity to generate extra income. This desire for adequate land forms an essential backdrop for understanding peasant struggles for land and against the commodification of land, constituting the basis for ‘radical’ food sovereignty (Tilzey 2018), and a consistent element in the history of struggle against primitive accumulation and the development of agrarian capitalism. Discussion: Transition Type 3 and 4, the Mode of Production, and the Continuum from Pre-capitalism to Full Capitalism It is important to note that the persistence of the peasantry, either through the land-owning wage worker (Transition 3), or the commodity producing, market

30

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

dependent smallholder (Transition 4) – is not simply emblematic of a pre-capi­ talist ‘relic’ which is now part of capitalism. Such peasants can be part of a mode of production in its own right, with their own distinctive combinations of rela­ tions and forces of production and class interests. While these may be transi­ tional forms on the way to capitalism, they should be considered as a continuum. At one extreme there are peasants who are ‘functionally’ part of capitalism, such as the contract farmer, or a full-time family of wage workers who retain a small plot (such as a kitchen garden) on the side. On the other hand, there are also independent peasants with their own land, who are in control of their own sur­ plus (if any), who periodically do wage work in a factory or sell their produce in capitalist markets, and thus experience a drain of surplus to capitalism. This peasant farmer could thus be considered as part of a ‘pre-capitalist’ mode of production in its own right, which is articulated with capitalism – yet we would be hesitant to term this a generalized ‘peasant mode of production’. How one characterizes the mode of production within which independent producers cultivate varies by temporal and geographical context. For exam­ ple, the mode of production in post-socialist contexts such as rural China is characterized by smallholders with their own fixed plot of land, which ulti­ mately belongs to the state, who retain their own surplus and may be engaged in both subsistence as well as market-oriented production, and combine agri­ culture with livestock raising. Outside the post-socialist context, the mode of production may share similar characteristics, yet the means of production (land) is owned privately by the farmer rather than being allocated by the state. There may be further regional variations – for example, with regard to Nepal, Blaikie et al. (2001) note how the peasant economic formation also includes reciprocal relationships between households, such as labour exchange, or parma. These regional variations are present because often, if one leaves aside the post-socialist contexts,1 independent producers have emerged out of the relics of a more complex pre-capitalist mode of production. These include for example, the ‘lineage’ or ‘feudal’ mode. These may have in the past made their own transition to relatively ‘independent’ peasant farming brought on by internal or external processes through, for example, the breakdown in tribal relations, privatization of communal land, a drop in feudal levies/rents due to class struggle, or the flight of the old landlord class. However, even in parts of the world where lineage or feudal modes of pro­ duction remain characteristic, independent producers may co-exist with the latter within a complex social formation, and flows of surplus may even exist between them (for example, through a land-owning peasantry taking usurious loans from landlords [see Sugden 2017]). More significantly, just as the inde­ pendent family farm under Transitions 3 and 4 can supply surplus, or be entirely subordinated, to capitalism, more complex pre-capitalist modes of production such as the lineage or feudal mode can also supply surplus directly to capitalism. Carlson (2018) notes, for example, that labour for wages and the development of market-oriented production was widespread in

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

31

seventeenth-century Europe, in economic formations characterized by land­ lordism and feudal estates that can by no means be considered to be themselves ‘capitalist’. It is these forms of transition in a contemporary context, that the chapter will now go on to review.

Transition Type 5: Articulation between the Lineage Mode of Production and Capitalism A fifth type of transition exists in the context of the lineage (‘kin-ordered’) mode of production. While these exist in multiple forms, like in the case of the gen­ eralized ‘peasant’ mode of production discussed above, it generally refers to a mode of production whereby the means of production are owned communally by a clan or lineage. The development of the productive forces is often limited, with limited accumulation of surplus, but multiple mechanisms of surplus redis­ tribution, controlled often along generational lines (see Resch 1992 for a sum­ mary of these conceptualizations). While the extent of this mode of production today is less prevalent, with limited analysis of these formations since the decline in Marxian anthropology, there is an extensive body of research, particularly from West and Central Africa, published in the 1970s and 1980s. Pre-capitalist lineage modes of production are preserved in regions at the very periphery of the capitalist world economy. Like the persistence of the peasantry in the transition types outlined above, they are frequently preserved in national level social formations with very limited organic development of capitalist industry, and socially disarticulated economies, usually in the con­ text of imperialism and colonialism. Central to this transition type, however, is the process whereby these lineage-based modes of production are reconfi­ gured by capitalism to supply it with surplus. The French radical anthro­ pologists of the 1970s and 1980s mobilized ethnographic research in this region to understand the co-existence of the capitalist and lineage modes of production and the associated interaction between ‘economic’, ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ processes in the context of colonialism and imperialism (Dupré and Rey 1979; Meillassoux 1973, 1980; van der Klei 1985). For example, Dupré and Rey (1979), with regard to Congo-Brazzaville, noted how, during the early colonial era, the lineage mode of production purchased goods from the external capitalist sector in the core, yet was not by any means subjugated to capitalism. Exchange of commodities within the clan was for symbolic rather than productive purposes, and thus there was little interest in accumu­ lation. This was an obstacle for colonial capitalism in its desire to yield sur­ plus value in the form of labour or commodities. Rey notes that only the coercive political and economic interventions of the colonial state in later years were able to subordinate such modes of production, including taxation and the creation of a demand for cash, which translated into the need for wage labour (see Resch 1992). Meillassoux (1981) also engaged extensively with the concept of the lineage mode of production to identify how these older formations could be reshaped

32

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

to supply surplus to capitalism by colonial regimes without necessarily being dissolved. Most notable is his research on labour migration, and the role of the lineage mode of production in meeting migrant labour’s reproductive needs. With regard to the post-war guest worker migration from West Africa to France, Meillassoux (1981) notes how this generated super-profits for capitalism. Time limited contracts and restrictive work permits meant that labourers would maintain their links to the lineage mode of production, which would support the reproduction of labour. The lineage mode would provide ‘free’ for capitalism the cost of maintaining the workers’ families, the workers’ living costs during times spent at home, as well as the costs of their retirement. Wolpe (1979) made a similar argument with regard to the Apartheid era black reserve, whereby the kinship based units of production in the reserves would meet the reproduction needs of labour power for capitalism, with this articulation being supported through the political apparatus of the state and its racial ideologies. Whether one labels this the lineage ‘mode of production’ or a generalized peasant form of production (as implied by Zhan and Scully in their comparison between South Africa and China), is open to debate. Stuart Hall (1996) builds further upon the African cases analysed by scho­ lars such as Wolpe and Meillassoux. However, in his analysis of South Africa he usefully substitutes the Althusserian notion of ideology with Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to understand the means through which the ideological and political levels of social formations interact with the ‘economic’.2 Hege­ mony is defined as a system through which a dominant class achieves social authority, often through non-coercive means, on an economic, political and ideological level – in this case, through the prism of race. This fifth transition type has been most usefully applied to sub-Saharan Africa but it is arguably applicable in other locales at the frontier of the capitalist economy with a history of communitarian or ‘tribal’ forms of social, political and economic organization. Drawing on the work of Meil­ lassoux and others, Singh (2007), in a fascinating study from the hills of India’s Madhya Pradesh, analyses the evolution of the adivasi social forma­ tion, identifying its unique relations of production grounded in collective ownership of land and redistribution of surplus. It is driven by the survival and reproduction of the clan rather than accumulation of wealth, often asso­ ciated with the veneration of clan deities. The study analyses the internal changes in relations of production and its relationship with capitalism, draw­ ing links with the process of religious proselytization. Singh’s paper, crucially, again highlights the role of migration in mediating the articulation between the adivasi economic formation and capitalism, and its ability to generate substantial profits for capitalism through the role of the adivasi social system in meeting the cost of labour reproduction (Singh 2007). What was particularly important about the above research, (and relevant for the other types of transition described here), was that it highlighted the relative autonomy of the pre-capitalist mode of production, and its capacity

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

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to actually resist the incursion of capitalism. It thus breaks away from the conceptualization of articulations of modes of production being ‘functional’ for capitalism. The resistance to full capitalist proletarianization, however, is particularly pronounced with regard to our final transition type below where there is a pre-capitalist exploiting class – the articulation between feudalism and capitalism.

Transition Type 6: Articulation between Feudalism and Capitalism, and the Semi-Colonial Social Formation A sixth type of agrarian transition relates to the persistence of feudal or ‘semi-feudal’ modes of production. Crucially, these modes cannot be con­ sidered as static ‘relics’ in regions beyond the reach of capitalism, as implied by some research on the topic. Instead, feudalism itself is a dynamic mode of production which interacts with capitalism in unique ways, yet can also be reshaped by, and supply surplus to, capitalism much like the family farms under Transitions 4 or 5, or the lineage mode of production under Transition 5. The characteristics of feudalism as alluded to by Marx (1932)3 when dis­ cussing the European context, include firstly, control over the means of pro­ duction by a small land owning aristocracy with political, ideological and economic power over a peasant majority. A second attribute includes the appropriation of surplus (usually in kind), often through extra-economic means, backed up by the political-ideological power of landlords. Another element which Marx discusses in Grundrisse is the use of surplus for con­ sumption rather than productive reinvestment. Marx asserts that the feudal lord consumes the product of the land rather than investing it as capital to maximize productivity. Even if the surplus is sold, generating ‘value’, it is used for ‘luxury consumption’ (Marx 1973: 469). There was further elaboration in the Dobb–Sweezy debate of the 1950s on the transition from feudalism to capitalism (see summary by Hilton 1976). For Dobb, the emphasis was on the presence of a particular form of exploi­ tation, ‘serfdom’, whereby an individual provides labour services to an over­ lord through extra-economic coercion. Sweezy placed more emphasis on the sphere of circulation, and the production of commodities for use, rather than exchange (as is present under capitalism). An important intervention by Takahashi and Mins (1952), however, rightly emphasized that any definition of feudalism should be based on production not circulation – what is impor­ tant is the mode of exploitation, the property relationship and the form of labour power. Under feudalism, the labourer remains attached to the means of production (i.e. feudal landed property) and the appropriation of surplus takes place directly using coercion rather than the laws of commodity exchange. Their definition is more flexible, noting that surplus appropriation may occur through different forms including serfdom (extraction of labour tax) or ground rent.

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Developing Our Theoretical Approach

In terms of its application to the South Asian context, where discussions of feudalism in more recent decades have been mostly focussed, R.S. Sharma (1985) defined medieval Indian feudalism in a similar way to Marx. He refers to an agrarian system where the peasantry is subjugated to overlords who use extra-economic power to maintain control over land and appropriate surplus. These extra-economic methods include social, political and religious methods, and even ‘ideological power’ alone whereby peasants believe they are duty bound to pay tribute. He emphasized, like Takahashi and Mins (1952), that feudal social relations vary considerably in different historical and geo­ graphical contexts. The character of the land-owning class in medieval India was highly variable, as were the political-ideological mechanisms being mobilized to coerce the peasantry. Surplus was also appropriated in diverse ways (including rent and forced labour). There were also different hierarchies of exploitation, including sub-infeudation and simultaneous exploitation by centralized feudal states (known by some scholars as the Asiatic Mode of Production) as well as local functionaries (Sharma 1985). This typology utilizes Marx’s definition of feudalism – namely the con­ centration of landed property, surplus appropriation through rent and labour tax via extra-economic coercion, and use of surplus for consumption rather than productive reinvestment. It will, however, like Sharma, be flexible in identifying the component parts of feudalism which vary according to parti­ cular temporal and spatial junctures. In terms of post-colonial agrarian tran­ sition, the most extensive discussions of feudalism took place during the ‘mode of production debate’ in the 1970s and 1980s which revolved around the question of whether Indian agriculture was ‘feudal’ or ‘capitalist’. Analy­ sis of semi-feudalism in the post-independence period was carried out by Bhaduri (1973) and Chandra (1974) with reference to surveys from West Bengal, prior to the large scale land reforms of the late 1970s, as well as research by Prasad (1973) with reference to Bihar. At its foundation was the continued presence of landlords controlling large estates, which are farmed by sharecropping peasants. The coercive appropriation of surplus remained important, although rather than occurring through political-ideological means, the emphasis was on economic processes such as the interlinkage of land, credit and produce markets. Debt was shown to be used to bond tenants to money lending landlords, and even to merchants through ‘distress’ com­ mercialization. Under these ‘classic’ models of semi-feudalism, landlords were argued to have few incentives to improve productivity, as improved yields might undermine farmers need for consumption loans (Bhaduri 1973, 1977; Prasad 1973). The inclusion of market forces is one reason why such post­ colonial modes of production are referred to as ‘semi-feudal’ rather than simply ‘feudal’. As Bhaduri (1981: 44) notes: Translated into the language of daily politics in India, our schematisation of the class structure in Indian agriculture corresponds to the coexistence

Paths of Rural Transformation in the Periphery

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of ‘feudal remnants’ (or semi-feudalism) sustained by a nexus of forced commercial relations and ‘capitalist tendencies’. It is argued that the unproductive ‘drain’ of surplus by landowners and mer­ chants to meet the needs of simple reproduction only and debt bondage to landlords, block the development of the productive forces which is necessary for capitalist development to emerge (Bhaduri 1973, 1981; Prasad 1973). These analyses of semi-feudalism are critically important when identifying multilinear paths of agrarian change, as they cast doubt upon the apparent ‘inevitability’ of transition towards either the dissolution, or the subordina­ tion, of the peasant farm to capitalism. Of course, the concept was critiqued by the opposite side in the mode of production debate. Rudra (1974), for example, also drawing on data from West Bengal noted that there were clear signs of capital formation in agriculture. He noted that ‘landlords’ were increasingly making investments in irrigation infrastructure, high yielding varieties of seeds and other improved inputs, while providing tenants with their irrigation costs, part of the fertilizer cost, and interest free loans, sug­ gesting a transition along the lines of Type 1 or 2. In reality, there are likely to have been elements of both types of agriculture in India in the 1970s. Perhaps a more valid critique of these early studies on semi-feudalism was that they were, firstly, largely economistic in their expla­ nations. As a consequence, the concept of semi-feudalism was easily critiqued. Brass (2002) critiques its weak conceptual definition and linear con­ ceptualization of history, whereby semi-feudalism is defined by the presence of unfree agrarian relationships alone. They are interpreted as relics of the past, when in fact such relationships are widespread under capitalism. He also critiques the very term ‘semi-’, which suggests an ambiguity in systems which are defined clearly in Marxism. Hart (1986) launches a broader critique of the research on interlinked contracts, including the work of Bhaduri, given that conditions of unfreedom can appear in the context of productive reinvestment as well as apparently ‘backward’ agrarian contexts. They can be viewed instead as a means through which dominant groups exercise social control, rather than being emblematic of feudalism or a transitional stage in the development of agrarian capitalism. A second observation was that some of the idealized models of semi-feud­ alism, such as those of Bhaduri, appeared somewhat ‘static’ in their analysis, and their relationship with the larger regional capitalist economy was not clear. In the context of labour migration and unprecedented expansion of capitalist markets in South Asia, a body of scholarship has suggested that such models are no longer relevant in an era of neoliberalism (Harriss 2013; Basu and Das 2013; Rodgers and Rodgers 2001). Nevertheless, it is premature to dismiss the concept, as large parts of South Asia remain characterized by modes of production with significant ‘feudal’ elements (Kar 2018; Sugden 2017). What is a more useful project is to identify how these modes of pro­ duction are evolving and interacting with capitalism in the context of

36

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

expanding global markets as one of several trajectories of agrarian transition in South Asia today. This is thus presented as a sixth transition type whereby feudal modes of production persist under unique economic, political, ecolo­ gical, and cultural contexts, yet also are restructured by, and articulated with, capitalism. Some interventions in the mode of production debate acknowledged both how semi-feudalism interacts with capitalism, and the potential for the two modes of production to co-exist. As noted in our companion volume, the persistence of pre-capitalist modes of production is often intertwined with sectorally and socially disarticulated capitalist development. In the case of semi-feudalism in India, it was argued in the 1970s that the combination of distorted capitalist development due to imperialism, combined with the pre­ sence of widespread landlordism and severe land inequalities, created an environment for feudal relations to remain entrenched in rural areas (Chan­ dra 1974; Sau 1975). This is because chronic under-employment in a national economy with a skewed pattern of industrialization oriented to low-cost exports, means the capitalist sector does not have the capacity to end the rural poor’s dependence on landlords (Chandra 1974; Sau 1975; Gupta 1977). What is critically important in the South Asian case, however, are the class relations on a political level which have reproduced this relationship. The areas of South Asia under the sway of feudalism were generally those which were under the colonial era zamindari system in India and the associated jimidari system in Rana-era Nepal. This system was itself adopted from the Mughal empire, whereby largely upper and middle caste elites were propped up to collect tax from the peasantry and emerged into a landlord class (Sugden 2017). In the post-colonial context, however, there was an accom­ modation between historically divergent interests of the old landed elite with the comprador bourgeoisie. The capitalists would be enriched by a share of imperialist profits, while the landlords would benefit in lieu of the failure of capitalism to draw the peasantry out of agriculture (Chandra 1974; Sau 1975; Lin 1980). The concept of a ‘semi-colonial’ social formation with a presence of ‘semi­ feudalism’ in agriculture arguably remains relevant in the post-liberalization context. With regard to Nepal, Blaikie et al.’s (2001) study offered a nuanced analysis of the overall social formation, including the coexistence of capitalist and feudal modes of production, and the important role of the state and political apparatus in the context of Nepal’s structural dependence on India, as well as its complex position (that is, as a periphery within a periphery) in the global capitalist system. Indeed this theorization was highly influential in shaping the early trajectory of the People’s War, before the CPM (Maoist) joined the political mainstream in 2008 (see Bhattarai 2003). In India, the concept of ‘semi-feudalism’ existing within a globalized, neo-liberal economy has been popular within segments of the political left for some time. In terms of recent academic scholarship, Kar (2018) reviews the utility of the concept with regard to India, highlighting some of the dynamism whereby

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‘semi-feudalism’ interacts with capitalist markets. Emphasis is placed on the continued concentration of land ownership, in spite of some reductions in the average size of landed estates, combined with persistence of ‘parasitic’ extractions of surplus which are not reinvested in expanded reproduction. It is noted how in regions with limited commercialization, surplus is appropriated mostly through rent and interest on consumption loans. In regions with greater commercialization and market integration, surplus is appropriated through usury, albeit linked to trade in farm inputs and outputs. Under both scenarios, money lenders and landlords find usury and leasing out of land more remunerative than direct production, with the latter being a preferred outlet in which to invest surplus rather than developing the productive forces. At the same time, the industrial sector continues to remain distorted by imperialism, with limited capacity to draw labour out of agriculture. Research from North Bihar and the Nepal Tarai-Madhesh (Sugden 2017, 2013) and in the eastern hills of Nepal (Sugden et al. 2018) also analyses the contemporary feudal mode of production in the periphery of South Asia. This research, framed more explicitly around an agrarian transition frame­ work, shows that concentration in land has declined, and the forms of total dependence upon landlords identified by the likes of Bhaduri have reduced since the 1980s. Nevertheless, in spite of the rise in a parallel class of rich farmers and reduced political and economic authority of the traditional landed elite, the fundamental relations of production remain feudal in char­ acter, being dominated by sharecropping, and the use of surplus for immedi­ ate consumption rather than expanded reproduction (Sugden 2017). It notes how usury has flourished in the context of rising agrarian stress under neoli­ beralism, with reduced public spending, monetization and rising costs of living, and climate change (Sugden 2017; Sugden et al. 2014), although it also notes that there is now a much larger money lending class, given that usury has become a popular avenue for investment for those with spare cash, a point also emphasized by Kar (2018). Importantly, and in common with several of our other transition types, the persistence of feudalism represents one of the mechanisms through which peasants retain a tie to the land, and thereby, the capacity to generate superprofits for capitalism. The studies from Nepal and Bihar outlined above (Sugden et al. 2018; Sugden 2017, 2013) apply the articulation of modes of production framework to interpret the rise in migration from the regions where feudalism is widespread. However, they note that, rather than migra­ tion ‘undermining’ the authority of landlords, there is a ‘sharing’ of surplus between employers in the capitalist sector and landlord-money lender in the village, suggesting that this sixth type of transition is particularly complex in terms of the class interests at play. Like Kar (2018) and others (for example, Blaikie et al. 2001; Bhattarai 2003), a link is drawn between semi-feudalism in the village and a larger semi-colonial social formation, whereby a distorted industrial sector, lacking (through the colonial legacy) linkages between dif­ ferent sectors of the economy to generate organic capitalist growth, has failed

38

Developing Our Theoretical Approach

to remunerate workers to a level at which there is any downward pressure on rents, or reduced demand for loans (Sugden 2013, 2017). In spite of the growth of capitalism in Nepal and India’s urban centres and rising rural-urban migra­ tion, labour is mostly casual, low paid and unskilled, being dominated by work in low value industries such as agro-processing, where wages and conditions of employment are poor (Bhaduri 2009; Breman 2009; Harriss-White and Gooptu 2009; Kar 2018). Industry, which remains largely subordinate to foreign capital, thrives off a vast surplus labour force which it can never absorb – paying below subsistence wages. As a result, workers themselves are obliged to pursue labour in both feudal agriculture and the capitalist sector, alongside their relatively more ‘fortunate’ workers who combine capitalist labour with independent peasant farming as per Transition Type 3.

Notes 1 In many post-socialist contexts, the socialist period represented a ‘break’ from the past, and thus relics of older economic formations are less likely to influence the mode of production today. 2 This expands upon Althusser’s notion of ideology which placed considerable emphasis on the role of the state. The concept of hegemony captures how ideology is reproduced through civil society, outside of the direct control by state apparatus (Hall 1985). 3 The conceptualization is dealt with most systematically in the discussion on ‘Rent of Land’ from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Marx 1932).

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2

Typology of Agrarian Transitions as the Basis for the Case Studies Forms of Peasant Protest

Theorizing the Basis for Case Studies of Agrarian Transition The rationale for our case studies, which we will present in later chapters (additional to two of Wolf ’s own case studies, which we will seek explain in terms of our own theoretical framework and typology), derives in part from the typology delineated in Chapter 1. The typology derives, in turn, from the identification of principal global trends within neoliberalism and preceding regimes of accumulation relating to the dynamics of the agrarian question and the place of peasantry therein. These trends comprise, in essence, statelevel dynamics of class contestation (subsuming ‘struggle’, compromise, and alliances between classes and class fractions) between hegemonic, sub-hege­ monic, and counter-hegemonic class interests, set crucially within the wider global imperial centre-periphery structure of capitalism (Tilzey 2019a, 2020). In attempting to define the theoretical basis for our case studies, we are very conscious of the tradition of comparative historical sociology and poli­ tical economy, in addition to that of Wolf himself, that has preceded our current study, including the work of Barrington Moore (1966), Skocpol (1979), and Byres (1996). Wolf himself was well aware of the work of both Moore and Skocpol (both referenced in EPWH), while that of Byres post­ dated PWTC and EPWH. As we have suggested in our companion volume, Wolf failed to articulate any rigorous basis for the selection of his case studies in PWTC, and we have demonstrated that a significantly larger number of ‘peasant wars’ could have been the subject of analysis rather than the six he actually chose. EPWH, while articulating an ontology of social change with which we concur, did not really employ the case study method, but rather deployed a globally encompassing narrative (albeit theoretically well-groun­ ded), rendering more selective analysis largely redundant. Given that the present work will make use of the case study method, and will attempt to do so on a theoretically rigorous basis, it is important to situate our work within the context of relevant works that have had the same aspiration. Consequently, it is useful here to refer at the outset to the tradition of comparative historical sociology exemplified by Barrington Moore’s now classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-4

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Making of the Modern World (1966). Moore’s work anticipates in many ways the ‘politically oriented’ Marxian approach, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Moore did not consider himself a ‘Marxist’ since he equated Marxism with ‘orthodox’ economism, and he was rightly critical of such reductionism throughout his work. However, while anticipating ‘politically oriented’ Marxian approach in several key respects, Moore adopted a rela­ tively static and ‘internalist’ approach which failed to take account of internal dynamics in relation to external influences. An interesting and valuable mediator between Moore’s work and an expli­ citly Marxian perspective is Terence Byres’s Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below (1996), mentioned above. In this work, Byres sought to explain the variety of paths of agrarian transition, that is, to capitalist agriculture, as indeed do we in the present work. Unlike ourselves, however, Byres was not concerned with resistances to these transitions, nor with the possibility that there may be emancipatory impulses (notably from fractions of the peasantry) that do not envisage capitalism either as desirable in its own right, or as a necessary prelude to socialism. He proposed a ‘case-oriented comparative approach’ that ‘needs to be ordered by, and rooted in, theory: in ideal types which theory establishes, and the hypotheses which theory sug­ gests’ (Byres 1996: 12), while the analysis ‘must be grounded on … secure theoretical foundations that remain sensitive both to diversity and historical contingency’ (ibid. after Fine 1993: 2, emphasis in original). Byres’s chosen ‘unit of comparison’ was the nation state, or, in political economy terms, as he suggests, the national social formation. As for Wolf in PWTC, and for Byres, so for us will the national social formation represent our principal unit of comparison. Byres helpfully delineated why this should be the case (Byres 1996: 9): Marxist discussion of the agrarian question has always proceeded in such terms. There are, indeed, strong reasons for so proceeding. Modern nation states do each have a unity which invites comparison at that level. In the attempted capitalist case, that unity derives from several sources. One is the existence of dominant classes, with a common set of interests, which operate at a national level. One such set of interests is given by the existence, increasingly, of national markets: product markets, capital markets, labour markets. Dominant classes, further, have a common opposition to subordinate classes, which may operate at supra-regional levels. A second source of unity is the nature of the state and its activities. The state acts on behalf of dominant classes, often at a national level; it is sometimes involved in some form of national planning, which, however ineffective, does reinforce national priorities; its fiscal efforts are national in scope and have a unifying influence; its creation and operation of a public sector straddle regional influences; it controls subordinate classes, and where they threaten class-for-itself action, perhaps on a national scale, it may move decisively against them; it takes steps, sometimes at

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Developing our Theoretical Approach variance with the interests of the dominant classes, to keep the whole social formation from bursting asunder, and this may underpin the unity of the nation state. These influences operate as much with respect to the agrarian question and agrarian transition as in other spheres.

He also stressed, however, the possible importance of sub-national, or regio­ nal, social formations, especially in the case of large nation states. In our own case studies, we will be especially alert to such potential sub-national differ­ entiation in the case of India. Following Kautsky and especially Lenin, Byres organized his case studies around two ideal types: transitions leading to ‘capitalism from above’, epito­ mized by the Prussian ‘Junker path’, and transitions leading to ‘capitalism from below’, exemplified by the ‘American’ or ‘farmer path’. The approach adopted by Byres was preoccupied with the ways in which capitalist develop­ ment takes hold in the countryside and ultimately contributes to the process of industrialization in the city. He highlighted five factors which are determi­ nant of the type of agrarian transition: class formation; peasant differentia­ tion; class struggle; the historical conjuncture; and the role of the state. Class struggle and peasant differentiation are prominent in his analysis, but, cur­ iously, he has relatively little to say about the state, despite acknowledging its key importance, as the preceding quotation implies. This importance is also conveyed in Byres’s (1996: 7) assertion that: class analysis must be accompanied by – must, indeed, include – treat­ ment of the state. Class analysis requires this, inasmuch as dominant classes may need state intervention at certain decisive moments. More­ over, their dominance may have to be underpinned by the exercise of state power … Political economy suggests that where agrarian transition has proceeded, it is likely that mediation of the state will have influenced cri­ tically the manner of that transition … part of the concern of this essay is with the nature and activity of the state in relation to the agrarian ques­ tion and agrarian transition. That, too, is crucial to an understanding of the relevant issues. It is impossible to consider the relevant issues without reference to the state. Following Robert Brenner (1977) (and this draws a direct connection, via Byres, between Barrington Moore and the school of so-called ‘Political Marxism’ – although it should be noted that Wolf, in EPWH, also draws on both Moore and Brenner), Byres considers that an analysis of the balance of class forces during an agrarian transition yields better explanatory results than analyses that emphasize other factors. This is a conclusion which we endorse fully and which seems to arise as the key explanandum in our own case studies presented below. Unfortunately, however, in neglecting a sub­ stantive analysis of the state, he does not really explore the relationship between class and the state (in terms of the theorization of the ‘state–capital

The Basis for the Case Studies

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nexus’), and almost entirely neglects the role inter-state dynamics in agrarian transitions. Thus, in respect of the latter, for example, the capitalist pre-eminence of Britain in influencing ‘capitalism from above’ in the German case study he examines is almost entirely neglected (see Tilzey 2019b). By implication, then, he has little or nothing to say about imperialism and ‘combined and uneven devel­ opment’, essential considerations in understanding transitions in the periphery and the persistence of the peasantry, as we have attempted to do above. His case studies, by contrast, are confined to the two main transition types of the core (Junker and farmer roads) in which the peasantry is more or less extirpated, is transformed into a proletariat and/or a class of commercial farmers, and where social articulation is secured within the social formation between production and consumption. In a later work (Byres 2009), peasant differentiation becomes the pre­ dominant explanatory factor in his assessment of the different agrarian tran­ sitions. For Byres, peasant differentiation is central to the process of agrarian transformation because it is often the rich strata (class fractions) within the peasantry itself which become capitalist producers while the other strata remain or are transformed into wage labourers, semi-proletarians, or sub­ sistence peasants (Vergara-Camus 2014; Tilzey 2020). Differentiation can only take place, however, once particular social property relations are established (for example, the alienability of land), something that is enabled through the balance of class forces in the state, that is, through class contestation. The emphasis in Byres is thus on the end result of class struggle rather than on the core object of class struggle itself, which, we suggest, is the control of the means of production and surplus, often mediated by the state. Moreover, Byres is not interested in drawing conclusions about the consequences of each path for subsequent struggles of subaltern classes (Vergara-Camus 2014). This is evident in Byres’s contention that the agrarian question needs to be ‘suc­ cessfully resolved’ for (capitalist) development to ‘take off’. Questions relating to whether this resolution is beneficial or not for peasants remain beyond Byres’s purview, although, almost by definition, a successful transition is not beneficial for peasants since it entails their extirpation (Tilzey 2018a, 2020). Byres is interested only in whether these dynamics lead to capitalist develop­ ment, presumably because, for him, this is an assumed and necessary prelude to a ‘socialist’ future, one based on industrialization and productivism. In this sense, and despite his avowed sensitivity to diversity and historical contingency, Byres analysis might be construed to be teleological, selecting only those transitions which led to capitalism (that is, in the core) while largely ignoring those where the peasantry has in varying degrees survived and/or pre-capitalist modes of production remain important (that is, in the periphery). Retaining Byres’s emphasis on class struggles in order to explain different types of capitalist development in agriculture, while treating the issue of pea­ sant differentiation as an outcome of class-determined social property rela­ tions, we propose a rather different approach (see Vergara-Camus 2014;

48

Developing our Theoretical Approach

Tilzey 2018a). This is one which considers all agrarian transitions to revolve around class conflicts over the control (appropriation, distribution of, and access to) of the means of production and surplus, the outcome of which is indetermi­ nate, depending on the relative strength of class forces. Our approach, then, is not so much interested in determining whether a particular transition path leads to ‘successful agrarian capitalism’ but, rather, in determining what kind of con­ sequences these paths have for the survival of the peasantry and pre-capitalist modes of production, the prospects for peasant farming and ‘livelihood sover­ eignty’, and the broad differentiation in the nature of ‘struggle’ between ‘peasant wars’ in the global periphery and ‘rural movements’ in the core. These two questions are in any case intimately (dialectically) related, since, as noted, a ‘successful’ agrarian transition to capitalism, as in the core, almost by definition entails the extirpation of the peasantry and the real subsumption of subaltern classes within capitalism in a relation of integral hegemony; while a ‘less’ suc­ cessful (medial hegemony) or ‘unsuccessful’ (minimal hegemony) transition, as in the periphery, entails, by definition, varying degrees of survival of the pea­ santry. The latter is due both to the peripheral nature of capitalism, as explained by de Janvry (1981) or the ‘articulation of modes of production’ and semi-feud­ alism scholars (Meillassoux 1981; van der Klei 1985; Gupta 1977; Lin 1980), and to peasant resistances to it, particularly in a contemporary context as ‘dis­ articulated’ neoliberal capitalism. This shift in focus is particularly significant, however, in that it reflects important changes in the normative valuation of conventional development, especially in Latin America, since Byres was writing, involving a significant de-legitimation, under the influence of ‘alternative development’ paradigms, of both capitalism in itself, and of capitalism as a putative prelude to ‘socialism’ (see Tilzey 2018a for further detail). More ‘traditionally’, Maoist movements, particularly in South Asia, also assert the impossibility of capitalist development in post-colonial social formations and point to alternative paths to socialism, with the peasantry as the ‘revolutionary’ class (Sugden 2013, 2017). Like Byres (1996) then, we consider an analysis of the balance of (hege­ monic, sub-hegemonic, counter-hegemonic) class forces during an agrarian transition within the social formation to be a key explanatory factor, while insisting crucially that this struggle needs, in turn, to be placed within the inter­ state structures of ‘combined and uneven development’, and within the temporal dynamics of global capitalism (Tilzey 2020), aspects neglected by Byres who adopts very much an ‘internalist’ approach in the manner of Barrington Moore (1966). Like Barrington Moore, Byres adopts a ‘case-oriented’ comparative approach, with comparison between cases having the advantage of: first, reveal­ ing significant historical regularities; second, within those historical regularities, demonstrating a variety of historical pattern; third, the questioning of stereo­ types; fourth, generating exciting new hypotheses and, abandoning Eurocentr­ ism, stressing the enrichment of the study of European history by hypotheses taken from the rich and powerful literature on the agrarian question in, for example, India (Byres 1996: 13). He suggests, importantly, that, in using the

The Basis for the Case Studies

49

‘case-oriented’ comparative method, researchers need to ensure ‘that the same questions are asked and the same analytical categories used consistently, across the individual case-studies’ (ibid.: 14). We will endeavour to follow this guidance in our own case studies. Our approach, unlike Byres, however, adopts a dialectical conceptualiza­ tion of ‘internal’ class dynamics in relation to ‘external’ power relations as ‘combined and uneven development’. Thus, our ‘case-studies’ are not con­ sidered to be entirely ‘self-contained’ but, rather, interact with other social formations, and this interaction may be asymmetrical, as in the case of ‘core’­ ‘periphery’ relations. Our approach thus has certain commonalities with the ‘incorporated comparative’ approach of McMichael (1990), which has sought to overcome the rather static and ahistorical comparative methods of scholars such as Barrington Moore (1966) and Skocpol (1982) (and the historical materialist, but nonetheless ‘internalist’, approach of Byres), whose methods Tilly (1984) described as ‘variation-finding comparison’ and ‘universalizing comparison’ respectively. McMichael contrasts his approach with what Tilly (1984: 82–83) terms ‘encompassing comparison’, which ‘places different instances at various locations within the same system on the way to explain­ ing their characteristics as a function of their varying relationships to the system as a whole’. Thus, McMichael has proposed the idea of ‘incorporating comparison’: Rather than using ‘encompassing comparison’ – a strategy that presumes a ‘whole’ that governs its ‘parts’ – [incorporating comparison] progres­ sively constructs a whole as a methodological procedure by giving context to historical phenomena … The goal is not to develop invariant hypoth­ eses via comparison of more or less uniform ‘cases’, but to give substance to a historical process (a whole) through comparison of its parts. (McMichael 1990: 386)1 This seems similar to the dialectical approach advocated by Levins and Lewontin (1985), by Morton (2013) in his analysis of passive revolution and uneven development in Mexico, by Tilzey (2018a) in his development of a political ecological framework for conceptualizing agrarian dynamics and food regimes, and by Vergara-Camus (2014) in his analysis of peasant resis­ tance to neoliberalism. This ‘incorporating comparative’ framework also appears to be similar to that of de Janvry (1981), where he states: internal and external factors are dialectically interrelated, and attempts at establishing the superiority of one over the other in explaining under­ development are superfluous. The essential analytical approach is instead the analysis of classes and the contradictions between them. The external factors can both transform the internal class structure and create the possibilities for the reproduction of hegemonic internal class alliances. (de Janvry 1981: 22)

50 Developing our Theoretical Approach Building on our typology of transitions, and the theoretical observations above, our case studies to be presented in our companion volume and later chapters will therefore be structured around: 1

2

3

The ‘core’ or imperium of the capitalist world system (North America, Western Europe, Japan, South Korea, etc.) generally taking, since the Second World War, a ‘farmer road’ to capitalism. The ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘state capitalist/socialist’ regimes of the capitalist world system (Russia, China, Vietnam, Cuba), involving heavy state control of the means of production, succeeded in varying degrees by privatization of land under neoliberalism. The ‘periphery’ of the world capitalist world system, comprising the transition types delineated above: a) Peripheral capitalism – Transition Types 1–4, that is, fully capitalist modes of production, albeit with noncapitalist forms of production undertaken by, for example, semi-proletarian peasantry; b) peripheral capitalism in articulation with non-capitalist modes of production (lineage and feudal modes), Transition Types 5 and 6.

We will, on this basis, present four sets of case studies: 1 2 3 4

The global North, concentrating on Western Europe, but also including the USA and Japan (presented in our companion volume). State socialist regimes, including one of those addressed by Wolf, namely, Cuba. Latin America, addressing Transition Types 1–4, including one of Wolf ’s case studies, namely, Mexico. South Asia, addressing, principally, Transition Type 5, but also other transition types as appropriate.

The purpose in developing the above typology of agrarian transitions and the case studies to be based upon it, has been to identify the differing class character of each transition type, the status of the peasantry within each, and the nature of class contradiction that forms the structural or ‘objective’ basis of potential resistance by the peasantry (that is, the ‘class-in-itself’ features of the peasantry). While the identification of such an ‘objective’ basis is an essential prerequisite for explaining resistance, it does not in itself, however, tell us why or how class con­ tradiction becomes transformed into reflexive ‘class struggle’ (or, ‘class-for-itself’ action, the manner in which class interests are pursued). The purpose of the next section is to discuss precisely this issue.

Class Contradictions, Agrarian Transition, and Peasant Protest We begin with some general observations. ‘War’, ‘rebellion’, ‘protest’, ‘mobi­ lization’, ‘social movement’, and so on are expressions of, and responses to, ‘contradictions’ generated by existing social-property relations/modes of

The Basis for the Case Studies

51

production. They may be manifested as, typically in relation to peasants, threats to, deterioration in, or unfulfilled aspirations in relation to, the conditions of livelihood. Additionally, changed circumstances may reveal deficiencies in current conditions of livelihood that had previously been ‘accepted’ by subalterns as the norm. At base, this refers to the ability to meet basic or fundamental needs (food, shelter, health, socio-cultural needs) without unacceptable compromises in relation to those fundamental needs. The inability to meet such needs at an acceptable level commonly derives from inadequate access to resources or income due to the exploitative character of social-property relations/the mode of pro­ duction (which may be seen in ‘personal’ terms in the form, for example, of the landlord, or in ‘impersonal’ terms in the form, for example, of the ‘market’, or in ‘intermediate’ form as, for example, the ‘state’ and its local/regional manifesta­ tions), compounded or ‘over-determined’ by the erosion or suppression of socio­ cultural facets in the form of language, ethnicity, religion, etc. associated with particular modes of livelihood. Exploitation may also be heavily gendered, with subaltern women often bearing the brunt of oppression not merely from the wider social property relations but magnified by patriarchal relations within family and community. Such ‘contradictions’ for subaltern classes are, of course, dialectically related to strategies to sustain or expand surplus extraction on the part of super­ ordinate (exploiting) classes, with the result that competing strategies of resis­ tance (by subaltern classes) and expanded accumulation (by superordinate classes) are complexly imbricated. Where these competing strategies can be lar­ gely reconciled through, for example, the distribution of material rewards and secure employment (as in the imperium), the result is integral hegemony; where there may be partially, if only provisionally, reconciled, as in national-popular reformism in the periphery, the result is medial hegemony; where they remain essentially unreconciled, as in peripheral states dominated by agro-exporting oligarchies and comprador bourgeoisies, the result is conservative regimes foun­ ded on minimal hegemony, or, more extremely, domination without hegemony. How, when, and why are contradictions ‘translated’ into various forms of pro­ test? In the first instance, contradictions can be expressed endemically as ‘every­ day’ forms of resistance, for example, as ‘weapons of the weak’ (Scott 1985). This represents a ‘pre-political’ ‘class-in-itself’ response by subalterns, seeking relief or escape from the daily grind and oppression of exploitative social relations. The desire of subalterns here is to seek ‘autonomy’ or undertake flight from exploita­ tive relations where it is possible to do so, typically to marginal and inaccessible lands beyond the effective reach of the oppressors. This response represents a line of least resistance for peasants, given the virtual monopoly of the means of vio­ lence by exploiting classes within or without the state, and is one that, under­ standably, is taken in preference to rebellion where escape routes are available (see, for example, Scott 2009). It also applies to conditions of ‘impersonal’ market compulsion, where ‘autonomy’ from the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ is sought through self-subsistence, an ever-increasing desire on the part of the pre­ cariat under neoliberal conditions. Such autonomy becomes ever-less feasible, however, under prevailing conditions of primitive accumulation and

52

Developing our Theoretical Approach

‘accumulation by dispossession’ since the very land that comprises the basis for peasant autonomy is subject to expropriation by exploiting classes. Similarly, uncultivated lands, or the so called ‘forest frontier’ which may have once been open for cultivation may be subject to enclosure by dominant classes, or the limits of cultivation may have been reached due to demographic stress (Sugden and Punch 2014; Ray 2013). Even when ‘escape routes’ are available, autonomy is an ‘option’, therefore, that does little or nothing to change the basis of exploitation in the mode of production/social-property relations (see Tilzey 2018a). When, therefore, do ‘everyday forms of resistance’ transform into more collective and politically reflexive forms of protest (‘class-for-itself ’ action) which represent attempts, in varying degrees, to challenge and change pre­ vailing relations of exploitation? Usually, it would seem, when escape routes from a deterioration in the conditions of livelihood are closed down or atte­ nuated beyond acceptable levels (escape routes may include ‘autonomy’ as above, relatively secure off-farm employment including migration to cities or abroad, or forms of welfarism which compensate for deteriorating incomes). These circumstances arise when there is a significant change within a mode of production (for example, raising rents, demand for greater labour service, erosion of common rights – all causing a deterioration in the conditions of livelihood) or a change to a new mode of production/social-property relations involving profound dislocations, material, cultural, and ideological. For example, transition to the capitalist mode of production may entail the extir­ pation of common land rights, the absence of formal property rights for many subalterns (or their restriction to land parcels below an economically viable threshold), and the substitution of the paternalism of pre-capitalist relations with impersonal market relations (see, for example, E.P. Thompson 2010). All these changes signal profound dislocations in the conditions of livelihood for the majority of subalterns, compounded by ‘cognitive dissonance’ engendered by the loss of reciprocal (albeit often asymmetrical), non-market relations within and between classes, as well as the economic stress brought about by rural monetization. Such changes need to be of sufficient quantitative and/or qualitative mag­ nitude and affect a critical mass of the population within spatio-temporal proximity, together with the absence of ‘safety valves’ or escape routes (as above), to galvanize protest. Such protest is facilitated where it is given coherence by some ‘master frame’ or ideological justification for resistance, which may be framed in political-economic terms (for example, in explicitly Marxist/Communist movements), but can also be subsumed, especially in the current conjuncture, within looser ideologies such as land rights, human rights discourse (‘right to food’, indigenous/peasant rights, etc.), environ­ mental justice, and so on. Protest may also (increasingly) be co-opted by ideologies antithetical or detached from peasants’ actual material struggles, such as those framed around ethno-nationalist, religious, or other discourse. Protest occurs, essentially, when there is no means of addressing grievances, or of addressing them adequately, within the prevailing mode of production

The Basis for the Case Studies

53

or within the formal institutions of governance, including the state itself, typically because that mode of production or those institutions of governance represent the causal basis of those very grievances. The belt of eastern India and Nepal which produced the Maoist movement in South Asia largely exemplifies this phenomenon – conceptualized in the Maoist sense as an ‘antagonistic’ contradiction which cannot be resolved within the current stateinstitutional framework (Prasad 1987). Thus, while the nature of struggle and long-term outcomes vary, subaltern protest is always anti-institutional or anti-state in some sense. In other words, the dominant classes are unwilling to amend existing institutions and modes of exploitation unless obliged to do so through protest or class struggle by subalterns. And, almost by definition, subaltern classes, historically, have been largely excluded from the definition of what those institutions should com­ prise and whose interests they should serve. This is characteristically the case in transitions to capitalism, for example, which have entailed passive revolu­ tion (transition engineered ‘from above’ by dominant class forces in the state) by means of conservative minimal hegemony. However, peasant unrest and sub-hegemonic national bourgeois interests may imbricate in more antiimperial transitions to capitalism, entailing the co-optation of counter-hege­ mony into national-popular reformism on the basis of passive revolution as medial hegemony. ‘Peasant wars’ in Latin America have typically experienced this latter fate (with the notable exception of Cuba), with the Mexican Revo­ lution being perhaps the archetype of peripheral capitalist transition through passive revolution (see Morton 2013 and below). It is not uncommon, indeed it has more often than not been the case, for subaltern proximate grievances to require reflexive ‘codification’ or political articulation by those whom Gramsci (1971) described as ‘organic intellec­ tuals’. These ‘organic intellectuals’, often from more privileged class back­ grounds than the mass of subalterns themselves, have the capacity to conceptualize and articulate the causal basis and wider issues surrounding subaltern grievances. This represents an invaluable, indeed indispensable, means of translating discontent and ‘everyday forms of resistance’ into more politically reflexive and strategic protest. Nonetheless, the different class position of ‘organic intellectuals’ (not uncommonly from the ‘enlightened’ bourgeoisie) may lead them to reify or abstract from the immediate reasons for grievance as experienced by sub­ alterns, and to construe the issues rather differently from the latter. In the current context, for example, human rights discourse, ‘right to food’, and environmental movements tend to focus upon ‘democratic rights’ abstracted from fundamental questions of livelihood which can be effectively addressed only through fundamental social relational change (that is, not merely through formal or ‘political’ democracy but also through economic democ­ racy) (see Tilzey 2017, 2018a, 2019c). This, additionally, has a global spatial expression, wherein the ‘new social movements’ (the characteristic home of such abstracted ‘rights’ discourse) have a differential location in the affluent

54

Developing our Theoretical Approach

global North (see Tilzey 2019c for detailed discussion of the causal basis of this, and see below). This has, as its corollary, a typical post-modern focus on ‘community’, ‘local’, and ‘autonomous’ action and issues, as if it were some­ how possible to pursue responses of this kind without sooner or later encountering the constraints imposed by the wider mode of production gen­ erative of the very causal contradictions underlying such ‘place-based’ initia­ tives. By the same token, ‘organic intellectuals’, while articulating the case for protest, may, due to their class positions, be more predisposed to ‘reformist’ or ‘progressive’, rather than ‘radical’ responses to subaltern grievance. This has typically been the case during the neoliberal era in which NGOs have often assumed leading roles in mobilizing ‘rights’ discourse among the pea­ santry and indigenous peoples, attempting to secure improvement in living conditions for these subaltern groups through consensual and non-violent ‘reformism’, while failing to confront the underlying relations of exploitation. Similarly, ‘organic intellectuals’ may assume elitist or ‘vanguardist’ positions, ‘leading’ the movement and predisposing it to centralization, ‘statism’, and authoritarianism. The dangers of this course of action are too well-known to require repetition. This was characteristically the case during the pre-neoliberal, ‘first round’ of ‘peasant wars’ associated with ‘national developmentalism’ as described by Wolf, wherein the peasant rank and file were led by ‘enlightened’ intellectuals, often from bourgeois backgrounds, into violent confrontation, through guerrilla warfare, with pro-imperial oppressor classes and the compra­ dor state (see, for example, Eckstein 2001; Wickham-Crowley 2001). Again, characteristically, such peasant movements were imbricated with, and became subordinated to, anti-imperial national bourgeois strategies of passive revolu­ tion, undergoing, through Gramscian trasformismo (Gramsci 1971), progressive loss of radicality through clientelistic co-optation into the reformist state, as in the case of the Maoist movement in Nepal, or, classically, with the PRI in Mexico, for example.

Wolf and Other Scholars on Reasons for Peasant Protest Understanding the Roots of Revolt Scholars of peasant rebellions have identified the expansion of capitalism and state modernizing policies as two of the fundamental, although intimately related, processes that engender the agrarian changes underlying revolt. Together, these processes may be conceptualized as passive revolution (Morton 2013). This relationship between peasant rebellions and capitalist modernization of the peripheral state is the reason why we have sought to define the typology of transitions delineated above. This typology, as noted, also has a temporal dimension within capitalism and modernization. Thus, as we have seen, most studies of peasant rebellions, including of course Wolf ’s own, were conducted during periods when more traditional (feudal or semifeudal) agrarian structures still characterized the countryside. Consequently,

The Basis for the Case Studies

55

most scholars at that time inserted their analysis of the proletarianization process, for example, within a framework that attributed great importance to the peasant-landlord relationship, which was seen as quasi-feudal (Moore 1966; Wolf 1973; Paige 1975; Scott 1976). This was appropriate for a time when pre-capitalism was transforming into capitalism, entailing, for example, the transformation of the ‘internal’ peasantry into an ‘external’ peasantry characteristic of the Junker road. Such quasi-feudal relationships are still characteristic of Transition Types 5 and 6 above, particularly in large parts of South Asia. Indeed, the persistence of these relationships alongside dis­ articulated, imperialist driven capitalist development has been central to the rise of Maoist movements in the region. However, feudal relationships are of less relevance in Latin America, for example, and therefore are of little utility in trying to explain the resurgence of peasant struggles in this part of the world in the current conjuncture. In Latin America, at least, we are witnessing, under neoliberalism, new forms of peasant rebellions, arising principally from land dispossession and the experience of alienation through the labour market (see, for example, Vergara-Camus 2014). Vergara-Camus (2014) points out that scholars who have sought to characterize and explain peasant rebellions have focused primarily on four interrelated issues: 1 2 3 4

The The The The

conditions giving rise to peasant rebellions. social and political goals of the rebellions. class composition of the rebellions. reasons for the success/failure of the revolutionary movement.

He suggests that most scholars of peasant rebellions (for example, Moore 1966; Wolf 1973; Paige 1975; Scott 1976) agree that modern peasant rebel­ lions (that is, responses to capitalism and state modernization) are reactions to sudden, drastic agrarian changes that disrupt the daily lives of peasants and which trigger economic and political crisis. In relation to Latin America, Wickham-Crowley (2001) has shown that it is peasants with insecure land rights and inadequate access to land (whom he refers to as ‘squatters’ and ‘sharecroppers’) rather than those with secure and adequate access to land, who are most receptive to incitement to rebellion. Similarly, he indicates that those peasants who have undergone transition to proletarian status with secure employment are generally unreceptive to such incitements. Eckstein (2001) has also pointed out that the existence or absence of exit options for peasants has been crucial in determining whether or not a revolutionary movement emerged. When impoverished peasants are able to find work in agricultural enterprises or in cities, or when they can migrate to other regions, recruitment to revolutionary causes may prove difficult. Conversely, should no exit options exist, the like­ lihood of peasant rebellions increases. As indicated above, this observation is of great importance to our analysis. In contemporary Latin America at least, if not in South Asia (and other areas such Africa), it is not the emergence or expansion of capitalist relations, as in the transformation of ‘internal’ into ‘external’

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Developing our Theoretical Approach

peasants, but rather the restructuring of already fully capitalist relations in the form of neoliberalism, which explains the resurgence of struggles for land since the 1990s. Most particularly, it is the experience of precarity and insecure offfarm employment, including in the cities, which accounts for current unrest and demands for land access in this part of the world at least (see, for example, Ver­ gara-Camus 2014; Tilzey 2020). We suggested above that ‘organic intellectuals’ could facilitate peasant rebellion, or less confrontational forms of protest, by articulating and codi­ fying grievances within an ideological ‘master frame’. Equally important, of course, is the material and organizational support offered to peasants and landless rural workers in their radicalization (or in their adoption of more reformist positions under the influence of NGOs since the 1990s). Migdal (1974), for example, emphasized that peasant rebellions could emerge only where a revolutionary organization stepped in to fill the political void created by the decline of traditional village institutions and leaders. According to him, peasants would be willing to join a revolutionary organization only if it was able to offer concrete and practical solutions to their problems, such as providing them with services and material necessities, while also holding out the means of securing longer-term goals (Migdal 1974; Vergara-Camus 2014). The examples of the MST in Brazil and Bolivia, the Zapatistas in Mexico (Vergara-Camus 2014), FARC in Colombia (Zamosc 2001), the early phases of Sendero Lumi­ noso in Peru (McClintock 2001), and the Maoist movement in South Asia, indicate that, by controlling a territorial space, these organizations are able to replace the state and provide peasants with political representation and basic services that the national state, due to its domination by the agrarian oligarchy/ comprador bourgeoisie and subordination to the imperium, is unwilling to deli­ ver. From these ‘autonomous rural communities’ these organizations have been able to foster a radical understanding of politics and social change based on the re­ creation or strengthening of the bonds of solidarity among peasants and landless rural workers (Vergara-Camus 2014). Alternatively, and during the neoliberal era, particularly, NGOs have stepped in to fill the spaces vacated by the state, and have been instrumental in disbursing funds for poverty alleviation and rural develop­ ment accompanied by an ideology, not of rebellion and confrontation, but rather of compromise and consensus-building, de-radicalizing the peasantry through non-class conceptualizations of its marginalization and subordination. Importantly, there may in these contexts be an ideological disconnect between the proximate contradictions which drive peasants into a revolutionary move­ ment, and the larger scale ideological aims – although these two aims can usually be reconciled. Chapter 10, for example, suggests that throughout various stages of the Maoist movement, while the primary axis of peasant struggle was against the exploitation by feudal lords, peasant revolutionary consciousness was not always connected immediately with the broader aims of the movement, that is, the creation of a revolutionary socialist state. The leadership of the movement however, articulated the peasants’ grievances with the broader goal of over­ throwing the state which upheld the semi-feudal landed classes and comprador

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bourgeoisie, with the two groups closely connected – emphasizing that reformist paths to addressing proximate grievances such as land redistribution or unionism would degenerate into bourgeois reformism in the context of the Indian political economic reality. The movement underwent further changes in later years in terms of its mass support base – particularly as its support shifted from the ‘feudal’ heartlands of the plains to the Adivasi or ‘tribal’ uplands, although, the often-diverse proximate problems of faced by the peasantry can still be situated within the larger context of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation which such movements seek to eradicate. The Revolutionary Potential of Different Class Fractions within the Peasantry The identification of which class fraction of the peasantry is more inclined to adopt revolutionary strategies has been at the heart of much controversy among scholars of peasant rebellions. Lenin argued, of course, that middleincome peasants were a barrier to socialist transformation ‘because of their vacillating nature on the border of subsistence and profit-oriented production, and because of the brake they place on the development of the home market, given their tendency to be self-sufficient producers’ (Bryceson 2000: 10). Lenin added that, in contrast, landless rural labourers, because of their class position, could be considered allies of the industrial proletariat in a socialist revolution. The Maoist tradition in later years, challenged this assertion regarding the conservative orientation of peasants versus the revolutionary potential of rural labourers, a position for which Barrington Moore (1966) and Wolf (1973) sought to provide evidence. For Moore, Wolf, and Scott, land owning peasants were more inclined to rebel than landless peasants and rural workers (Skocpol 1982). In fact, the differences between these two intellectual schools may not be as great as is implied here since it needs to be borne in mind what the objectives of revolutionary activity might actually com­ prise. For Lenin, clearly, the objective was the transition towards national industrialization, preferably along the ‘farmer road’, with the consequent extir­ pation of a self-subsistent peasantry. Mao likewise sought national indus­ trialization, albeit believing, in contrast to Lenin, that the peasantry could support this goal. For Moore, Wolf, and Scott, by contrast, revolutionary action is directed, by the middle peasantry, not towards the dissolution of the self-subsistent economy, but rather towards its preservation and enhancement in the face of the pressures of capitalist transition. Thus, according to Wolf, as we have pointed out in our companion volume, poor peasants or landless labourers cannot be revolutionaries because they lack ‘tactical power’. Only the land-owning middle peasantry, or a peasantry located in a peripheral area outside the domain of landlord control, has suf­ ficient internal leverage to sustain a rebellion. For Wolf, as we have seen, it was essentially middle-income peasants ‘who work their own land with labour of their own family’ who were the ‘prime movers to rebellion’, because they possess the degree of autonomy required to initiate political action to become

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Developing our Theoretical Approach

viable allies for ‘outside agitators’. This is probably true in respect of the middle peasantry constituting an effective medium, given its ‘tactical power’, through which ‘outside agitators’ or ‘organic intellectuals’ could communicate the message of rebellion. It is probably less true, however, in terms of those most likely to rebel due to the direct impacts of insecurity and precarity aris­ ing from the dislocations of capitalist transition – here, as we have seen, Wickham-Crowley (2001) identified the lower and landless peasantry as those fractions most likely to be receptive to the incitements of would-be guerrilla leaders, although they lacked the ‘tactical power’ to act on this immanent receptivity without assistance from ‘outside’. Thus, while the latter fractions are most likely to be ‘economically’ receptive to calls for rebellion due to their precarity of existence, the middle peasantry is perhaps most ‘ideologically’ predisposed to this course of action, not so much through immediate economic threat, but rather because it is the upholder of a predominantly non-commodified mode of existence which it is eager to both protect and promulgate as an alternative to capitalism (and exploitative pre-capitalist modes of production). As indicated earlier, Wickham-Crowley also found that proletarians with secure, or moderately secure, employment were less likely to be receptive to revolutionary incitements than their precarious peasant coun­ terparts. Again, this highlights the potential divisiveness of different ‘revolu­ tionary’ objectives: for the middle peasantry it is likely to be the preservation of a predominantly non-commodified mode of existence; for the landless and land-poor lower peasantry it may be more secure and remunerative off-farm employment, something that, through transition to more ‘articulated’ devel­ opment, likely represents a threat to the middle peasantry. However, with continued precarity and lack of such employment under ‘disarticulation’, links to land and aspirations to greater land access are likely to be prevalent among both class fractions, with resulting class alliance between the middle and lower peasantries. This question relates, of course, to one of the major debates in agrarian studies, that is, concerning the characterization of the social condition of the majority of rural producers. Essentially, there are two positions within this debate: the ‘proletarianist’ position, arguing that the primary tendency, at least in Latin America, entails the progressive proletarianization of rural producers; and the ‘peasantist’ or ‘populist’ position, arguing that irrespective of the growing reliance of rural direct producers on wages, the peasantry as a class still resists the process of proletarianization and contrives to remain connected to land through kin or villages. Here, Bernstein (2010) is an as exemplar of a ‘proletarianist’ approach to the peasantry and its assumed, albeit tendential, demise, while McMichael (2013) may be seen as an exemplar of the ‘peasantist’ or ‘populist’ approach to the peasantry, emphasizing its resurgence but eliding class differentiation and the importance of state and institutional context for understanding class struggle and agrarian dynamics (see particularly Tilzey 2019b). In fact, as we shall see, both positions are correct in different ways, and this is perhaps

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captured best by de Janvry’s (1981) analysis: while the middle and, particu­ larly, lower peasant fractions are without doubt subject to continuing pres­ sures of proletarianization, the condition of social disarticulation in the periphery, as noted, engenders extreme precarity of off-farm employment, and therefore encourages peasants to treasure continuing links with, and to seek greater access to, land for the production of use values. As a consequence of the lack of effective escape routes from poverty via proletarianization (in contrast to the imperium) peasants actively resist further proletarianization, predisposing them to ‘revolutionary’ action, as an alliance of middle and lower peasantries, to secure land (from the ‘disarticulated alliance’ of land­ lords and comprador bourgeoisie) for the production of fundamental use values. These two positions, alongside Wolf ’s assertion regarding the importance of the middle peasantry, do not give an entirely full picture, however, when understanding which class fractions of the peasantry revolt. Peasant mobili­ zation has also taken place in the case of agrarian formations experiencing a blocked transition to capitalism, including those structured by feudal rela­ tions, marked often by the presence of a very small land-owning middle pea­ santry, or a dominance of tenants. The Chinese revolution, as well as the later manifestations of Maoist revolt in South Asia, the latter discussed in Chapter 10, depended heavily upon tenant or part-tenant farmers, who had access to the means of production, albeit on highly unfavourable terms. As noted above, they are often driven by immediate struggles over access to land and rents, and this is connected only indirectly to the process of capitalist devel­ opment, most notably through the alliance between a comprador bourgeoisie and landed classes, and the absence of ‘escape’ options from feudal exploita­ tion under the context of social and sectoral disarticulation and limited organic growth in capitalist industry. This does serve to point up, however, the fact that it is the inability to meet fundamental and socially prescribed needs, and the lack of appropriate ‘exit options’, that stimulates the peasantry to engage in rebellion, irrespective of whether this is related to the transition to capitalism or not, thus recalling that ‘peasant wars’ did not start with the advent of capitalism. Objective Class Position and Subjective Class Positionality These diverging peasant experiences are related to the question of the relation between ‘objective’ class ‘position’ and ‘subjective’ class ‘positionality’. Class and social reproduction cannot be grasped accurately by a structural reduc­ tionism that establishes the condition of social subjects according to their simple ‘material’ or ‘objective’ conditions of existence. Rather, the translation of class ‘position’ (structure or ‘class-in-itself ’) into ‘positionality’ (agency or ‘class-for-itself ’) encompasses political/cultural/ideological/symbolic elements (inseparable from the totality of social relations of production and exploita­ tion) that arise through the material experience of concrete social relations

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but are given form through the process of reflexive consideration of these real circumstances as discourse or ideology, often facilitated by ‘organic intellec­ tuals’, political organizations, or simply by exposure to wider experiences (see next paragraph) (see Potter and Tilzey 2005 for the relation between class and discourse). While class ‘position’ is clearly the explanatory starting point, subaltern agents will not become revolutionaries (that is, collectively become a ‘class-for-itself ’) as an ‘automatic’ result of such structural locations, but will only assume this role when they have both experienced, reflected on, and constructed a discourse around, the people, institutions, and mechanisms which have oppressed them or have failed to deliver expectations (for exam­ ple, land reform or prosperity), and have decided, as a result, to take action to address these sources of injustice (Vergara-Camus 2014). This relationship between class ‘position’ and class ‘positionality’ we earlier referred to as ‘structured agency’ (Potter and Tilzey 2005), a process that entails the trans­ lation of ‘objective’ structure into ‘subjective’ (albeit collective) agency that is mobilized by an ideological ‘master frame’ of discourse, embodying both explanation of, and response to, perceived disadvantage and marginalization. There is, of course, no guarantee that class ‘position’ and class ‘positionality’ will coincide and, indeed, many circumstances under which they may not (see below under Forms of Protest). Again, agency as positionality is not an ‘automatic’ outcome of class ‘position’, but rather one that has to be con­ structed often in the face of a wider array of potentially competing ideologies and class interests (see Otero 1999 for discussion of political class formation). Thus, under neoliberalism, in Latin America particularly, it is, as VergaraCamus (2014) points out, the wider experiences of wage labourers in the city or in the countryside that are extremely important in the construction of the radicalization of landless or land-poor rural workers (together with general­ ized access to education and to wider media). It is, thus, not so much access or exposure to revolutionary ideas today (as it was for Wolf in PWTC), but rather experiences of alienation, marginalization, unemployment, under­ employment, precarity and grinding poverty that lead land poor peasants and the landless to re-evaluate the advantages of having access to land, and to challenge the forces and institutions which prohibit or restrict such access (Vergara-Camus 2014). These wider, and generally adverse, experiences of rural and urban precarity act in the current context as a substitute for the raising of ‘class consciousness’ that was undertaken by the ‘organic intellec­ tuals’ during the previous round of ‘peasant wars’ described by Wolf. The Brazilian theoretician Ruy Mauro Marini (1974), whose work on imperialism we discuss in our companion volume, argued that expelled peasants would not be integrated (or ‘really subsumed’) as full proletarians into the ‘formal’ sector, as in the imperium, but would instead enlarge a marginal and unem­ ployed population that would endeavour to reproduce itself by means of var­ ious activities within the ‘informal sector’ (comprising a ‘formally subsumed’ labour force). Indeed, it is these wider social networks, so essential for the reproduction of the peasant family unit in the absence of secure and

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formalized employment, that are so important in political class formation as ‘positionality’ (see Otero 1999). Reflecting on this apparently systemic char­ acter of precarity, Kay (2000: 132) has argued that ‘most of the Latin Amer­ ican peasantry appears to be stuck in a state of permanent semiproletarianization’. The analysis of de Janvry (1981) provides perhaps the most well-founded understanding of this process as ‘social disarticulation’, as we sought to demonstrate earlier – although he seems to foresee the eventual demise of the peasantry, a prognosis which his own analysis does not really support given the assumption of continued social disarticulation. Peasant resistance as land struggles in the context of incomplete proletarianization are products of the experience of dynamic processes of de-peasantization/semi­ proletarianization/re-peasantization. In this context, rural direct producers, in response to the precarity of their wage-earning activities, oscillate between the condition of semi-proletarianized rural workers and peasants, combine both for an extended period, and often seek to regain or reinforce their peasant condition (these processes refer in the main to Transition Types 2 and 3 above). In the context of South Asia, radicalization of the peasantry has taken on quite different forms. In the productive heartlands of north-west and parts of southern India, where transition pathways to capitalism displayed elements of the ‘farmer road’ (Transition Type 1), peasant mobilizations, such as the socalled ‘New Farmer’s Movements’, were very prominent in the 1980s. How­ ever, these were led predominantly by large peasants (upper peasantry), already engaged in high expenditure commercialized agriculture in the wake of the Green Revolution and were at the upper end of an increasingly strati­ fied agrarian structure (Posani 2009). Rather than mobilizing over access to land, the focus of peasant action was over the poor terms of trade for agri­ culture, and demands included subsidies and price controls – gains which had questionable benefits for the smallest landowners and labourers (Posani 2009). These movements, which rejected class politics, were overlain by ideology of agrarian populism (and conservativism) (Brass 2000). This helped garner support among marginal farmers, who may have lost land due to differentia­ tion, and who, as net buyers of food, would not necessarily gain economically from the demands. The farmers’ movements themselves lost their influence with the rise of communal politics, and the growing division of the peasantry along caste or religious lines in recent decades. As a result, there was more limited collective mobilization among the peasantry in these parts of India after the 1990s, even along reformist lines. This is in spite of the middle and large peasantries’ deteriorating financial position in wealthier Green Revolu­ tion states after economic liberalization and a surge in farmer suicides (Posani 2009; Brass 2000). It is in the more agriculturally weak and feudal heartlands of Eastern India, as well as Nepal, that more radical peasant activism from the landless and marginal farmers has emerged in response to the exploitative agrarian structure and persisted throughout the latter half of the twentieth century and

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Developing our Theoretical Approach

well into the neoliberal era. By contrast to the previous example, these are regions with negligible development of capitalism or proletarianization (Shah 2013; Sugden 2017; Sugden et al. 2018; Blaikie et al. 2001). Nevertheless, as noted above, radical action has been driven by the exploitation of marginal and tenant farmers via landlordism and usury, combined with the distorted development of capitalism, and dwindling opportunities for well-paid employment off the farm which fail to meet the reproductive needs of the peasantry outside of agriculture. Their critical consciousness, however, is shaped by the Maoist ideology of revolutionary parties in both India and Nepal, which sets a clear alternative vision beyond simply struggles for land, improved terms of trade, or control of rents (Kunnath 2017). Most of the authors cited above have pointed to a salient feature of peasant rebellions as being predicated on profound moral outrage arising from some sudden increase in levels of exploitation or insecurity. Scott emphasized the suddenness of the shock that these changes create because they are likely to be seen as a ‘sharp moral departure from existing norms of reciprocity’ (Scott 1976: 194). For Latin America, Eckstein (2001) has noted that peasants will risk direct confrontation only when the injustice against them is perceived as intolerable, and when local and national institutions and cultural conditions, such as strong kinship, ethnic and cultural bonds, lead peasants to struggle collectively. The fact of peasant revolt does not entail, of course, the impli­ cation that the objective is necessarily revolutionary – particularly in the absence of a revolutionary party or ‘vanguard’. Scott’s thesis was that peasant revolts were ‘best seen as defensive reactions’ (Scott 1976: 10). His argument is that the moral claim to subsistence is not revolutionary since it rests on the norm of reciprocity that, however asymmetrical, ties poor peasants to the ruling elite and obliges the latter to fulfil certain protection and welfare functions for the former. Migdal (1974), by contrast, did not view peasant rebellions as a priori conservative or even directed towards reform of the tra­ ditional order, but rather as revolutionary, envisaging, usually with the assis­ tance of ‘organic intellectuals’, the complete transformation of social relations towards non-feudal and non-capitalist collective control of the means of pro­ duction by the peasantry itself. As Vergara-Camus (2014) suggests, contemporary peasant struggles, espe­ cially in Latin America, are far removed from those of a ‘defensive’ character that Scott, in particular, has attributed to such revolts. This is because many of the struggles that have persisted beyond the 1990s now challenge some or all of the key institutions of capitalism, notably perhaps, the private owner­ ship or control of land, particularly by export-oriented national oligarchies and/or by transnational capital, undergirded by the state (Vergara-Camus 2014; Tilzey 2019a). Such claims to the right to land for subsistence purposes, a right that includes both ‘democratic’ (political) and ‘economic’ dimensions, no longer have as their focus traditional landlords or village elites as proposed by Scott, where peasant demands enjoined these elites to respect their traditional moral obligations to their subordinates (Scott 1976). Rather, contemporary struggles in

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Latin America, such as those of the MST, the Zapatistas, and radical movements in Bolivia, Colombia, and Ecuador, as well as to some extent among revolu­ tionary movements in Nepal and India, seek fundamentally to transform or transcend capitalist and quasi-feudal class relations by empowering their mem­ berships through ‘autonomous rural communities’ (Vergara-Camus 2014; Barkin and Sanchez 2019; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). These autonomous rural communities, practising self-governance and abjuring both traditional and capi­ talist forms of subordination, permit their members to secure access to land, and consequently to resist the full commodification of land and the monetarization of relations of production. In Latin America at least, contemporary peasant rebellions do not, therefore, have any sort of ‘conservative’ motivation in terms of re-establishing a social order ex ante in terms of landlord-internal peasant relations (although ‘conservative’ motivations surrounding ‘defence of territory’ actions by indigenous peasants seeking to strengthen or ‘reinvent’ community landholdings and farming practices, is increasingly prevalent in Latin America, in states such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala). Anti-neoliberal peasant uprisings and movements in Latin America arise primarily from the reduction and growing precarity of temporary wage work experiences in the countryside and in the city and, therefore, for a renewed demand for land unfulfilled by previous episodes of reformist (national-popular) land reform (Kay 2010; Vergara-Camus 2014; Tilzey 2019a). In areas dominated by indigenous peasantry such as the central Indian highlands and parts of Nepal (Ismail and Shah 2015), southern Mexico, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Ecuador, this impulse is exacerbated by additional ethnically based discrimination and exclusion. This has reinforced indigenous identity in opposition to capitalist ‘creole’ society in the context of Latin America (where ‘defence of territory’ discourse is now important; see above), or upper-caste, Hindu capitalist or feudal society in the case of South Asia. Experiences of alienation and marginalization are, thus, more important under neoliberalism than during the period when Moore, Wolf, Paige, Migdal, and Scott were writing about peasants (Vergara-Camus 2014). These express, at least in Latin America, a key difference between ‘first round’ pea­ sant unrest attendant upon the initial agrarian transition to capitalism, and its ‘second round’ manifestation under the deepened conditions of marketdependency under neoliberalism. For land poor and landless peasants today, gaining or protecting access to land represents a means to regain some autonomy from the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ under conditions of disarticulated accumulation, or ‘peripheral neoliberalism’. Access to land not only allows families to produce food for self-consumption, it also represents a means to regain control of their lives from ‘impersonal forces’ (although fre­ quently the ‘visible boot’ and not merely the ‘invisible hand’) in order to practise collectively an active form of citizenship. In the case of the ‘doubly’ exploited indigenous peasantry, this also entails a re-validation of their cul­ tural distinctiveness and the reversal of their colonial subordination through ‘defence of territory’ discourse. These movements, in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador,

64 Developing our Theoretical Approach Mexico, and elsewhere in Latin America, and to a lesser extent in parts of India, build rural communities organized around popular and participatory political structures and egalitarian, collective land holding (Fabricant 2012; Vergara-Camus 2014; Barkin and Sanchez 2019). They have secured sig­ nificant levels of autonomy from the state, although they recognize that wider capitalist social-property relations upheld by the state need to be challenged if further progress is to be secured (see Tilzey 2019a). As such, these struggles should be conceived as new forms of peasant rebellions in several respects: �

� �

�

� �

They are no longer focused on ‘personal’ relations with traditional landlords or village elites, but rather on wider, and often ‘impersonal’, relations of exploitation enforced through the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’, or peripheral capitalist social-property relations upheld by the state. It is the wider (extra-local) experience of exploitation and precarity, often between countryside and city and, indeed, between countries, that engenders radicalization. Such radicalization does not need to be articulated in discourse by ‘external’ ‘organic intellectuals’ as in the ‘first round’ of peasant wars described by Wolf, but is rather articulated by the subaltern precariat itself through wider experience and greater access to education. The alterity sought by this precariat is not the productivist agriculture and industrialization envisaged by the more ‘orthodox’ Marxist vanguard of the first round of peasant wars, but is, rather, an imaginary of autonomous, collective agrarianism focused on the production of noncommodified essential use values, especially food, and often having an indigenous inflection. Peasant activists tend to employ non-armed, non-violent repertory of resistance, focusing on land invasions, road blocks, marches to major centres of political decision-making, and mass protest. In these respects, these new forms of peasant rebellion tend to differ both from Wolf ’s peasant wars and those arising from the semi-feudal and other non-capitalist relations that may still be operative in South Asia and Africa. While the latter, such as the Maoist movements in Nepal and India, may indeed seek to create an alternative form of social and political organization, this imaginary needs often to be articulated by an ‘external’ vanguard of ‘organic intellectuals’.

Forms of Protest (Conservative, Reformist, and Radical) and their Relationship to the Typology of Transition Types Building on the foregoing discussion, we suggest that there are three principal forms of protest: (1) conservative/reactionary; (2) reformist; (3) radical. It should be recalled that the following types rarely exist in ‘pure’ form when carried forward as political praxis, a stricture that always, by definition, applies to (national developmentalist) reformism, a hybrid between capitalism

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and socialist radicalism. This is because political praxis in class-divided societies within the context of a state usually entails compromise and co­ optation (as hegemony) between different classes and class fractions through a process of Gramscian trasformismo (see Tilzey 2019a) and passive revolution (Morton 2013). Thus, the conservative/reactionary form commonly comprises a ‘right populist’ alliance between ‘hegemonic’ classes (export-oriented oli­ garchy and comprador bourgeoisie) and certain peasant class fractions. Such an alliance, however, tends to be of limited extent due to its inherent exclu­ siveness, leaving the majority of subalterns as non-beneficiaries of this poli­ tical configuration. Typically, this configuration rests on what may be termed minimal hegemony; reformism represents, commonly, a ‘left populist’ alliance of ‘sub-hegemonic’ classes (national bourgeoisie, commercial farmers, upper peasantry) and ‘counter-hegemonic’ middle/lower peasant class fractions. This political configuration entails the expansion of an interventionist and redis­ tributive state to embrace a wide range of subalterns as citizen beneficiaries on the basis of what we term medial hegemony; only radicalism may be said to exist in ‘pure’ form, although in practice, it has most commonly been diluted and co­ opted into reformism through trasformismo and passive revolution. In this way, we may speak of conservative/reactionary political praxis as ‘hegemonic’, refor­ mism as ‘sub-hegemonic’, and radicalism as ‘counter-hegemonic’. Some political praxis may appear to be ‘radical’ in some respects, such as its invocation of eco­ logical sustainability or localism (anti-globalization), while being quite con­ servative in other aspects (as in the ‘re-invention of tradition’, ‘defence of territory’ discourse, etc.). Agrarian populism is one such form of praxis – we may term this form ‘alter-hegemonic’ (Tilzey 2018b). Conservative/Reactionary There is no guarantee that subaltern interests will be articulated as a ‘radical’ (that is, egalitarian or socialist) programme of change to the generalized class benefit of these groups, although this might be taken to be a basic pre­ supposition when talking about ‘peasant wars’. They may in fact be articu­ lated in a conservative way, seeking a return to an actual or imagined status quo ante, albeit with the proviso that ‘traditional’ rights are better respected or guaranteed. Because ‘rights’ and a ‘master frame’ for protest are com­ monly articulated by ‘organic intellectuals’ from another class, there may be an immanent possibility that the impulse underlying grievance and protest will be co-opted into an agenda that seeks as much to fulfil the class interests of the ‘articulators’ as those of the subalterns. This indeed is a common fea­ ture of right-wing populism, where subaltern grievances may be deployed to gain support for certain national fractions of capital which may have suffered competitive disadvantages under a more internationalized regime, for exam­ ple. Such conservative/populist articulations tend to be exclusionary in some sense, suggesting that ‘traditional’ privileges and rights (‘sovereignty’) have been appropriated or compromised by others (other states, other peoples,

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Developing our Theoretical Approach

other ethnic groups, globalization, etc.), such that the master frame is one of restoring the supposed status quo ante (such as ‘taking back control’ in the UK phenomenon of Brexit, an example that, while having no ‘peasant’ dimension, is nonetheless relevant to this discussion). Right-wing nationalism, proto-Nazism, ethnic, racial, religious, and even environmental fundamentalism are all manifestations of this trend. They have at their heart the myth of the contented society or nation, where, despite class differences, everyone knows their place and has a functional role to play so long as ‘disruptive’ and ‘degenerate’ external elements can be kept at bay. Certain elements of the peasantry may be clientelistic beneficiaries of such regimes where they bolster the right-wing cause on ethnic, racial, or religious grounds, and/or where they are seen to represent the age-old agrarian essence of the nation. This elision of class in favour of other identities has some commonalities with the ‘agrarian myth’ of the ‘peasantist’ populists where there is a ‘call to arms’ of all small farmers (‘peasants’), the supposed custo­ dians of time-honoured indigenous and ecological knowledge, against the onslaught of corporate capital (see, for example, Brass 2015). This is char­ acteristic of the ‘progressive’ faction of La Via Campesina as opposed to its ‘radical’ wing (see Tilzey 2018a), while there were also elements of agrarian populism in India’s New Farmer Movements in the 1990s (Brass 2000). Such conservative/reactionary tendencies seem condemned to remain either within more nationalistic or authoritarian varieties of capitalism, or to be associated with moves to re-assert more traditional, extra-economic, and non-capitalistic modes of social control and exploitation. It is worth noting that some right-wing populist movements may maintain symbolic gestures of anti-imperialism in order to capitalize on existing grie­ vances of the peasantry brought about by neoliberal globalization. However, these are often articulated in cultural or religious terms, rather than economic ones. Such movements may also involve the courting of rival imperialist powers, for example, support for Chinese expansionism as part of a loose ‘anti-Western’ rhetoric by ultra-nationalist regimes in countries such as Myanmar, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. There are parallels here to Trumpism in the USA and its ‘anti-globalization’ claims, or, again, the Brexit fraction in the UK and its anti-European Unionism, which serve to obfuscate the extreme right-wing ideology of this form of conservatism. This category has strong links to Transition Type 6 in social formations dominated by feudal social relations, although also under Transition Type 2 (Junker road) where the landed oligarchy feels threatened by the left and by international environ­ mental and social regulations – the populist right in Brazil is a good example. Within this conservative/reactionary scenario, peasant subaltern discontent is, therefore, typically channelled into areas of political praxis that pose little threat to the hegemonic status quo, characteristically comprising the classes of the Junker agro-exporting oligarchy, feudal and semi-feudal landlords, and the comprador bourgeoisie. This, typically, entails the fostering of political identity along ethnic, racial, or religious, rather than class, lines, the granting

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of certain and selective levels of cultural and territorial autonomy to those ethnic groups willing to clientelistically support the incumbent regime in return for favours, and the disbursement of monies for social welfare/poverty alleviation to selected groups or areas to dampen protest, or to ‘buy’ political support (see especially discussion of Guatemala below). During the neoliberal era, NGOs have been especially active and useful to such regimes in fostering a non-class and more ‘post-modern’ (ethnic/racial/gender-based) representa­ tion of marginalization and poverty. Strongly conservative and neoliberal regimes, while in power in Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, and in other states, have all made use of these techniques of dampening down and divert­ ing peasant and indigenous protest into relatively harmless channels. Along­ side such selective ‘neutralization’ of protest, these regimes have elsewhere, of course, employed the full force of the state to suppress, violently, all resistance to their policies and the continuation of prevailing social-property relations. Such protest within this conservative/reactionary category entails, then, essentially no change in the hegemonic political regime. Violence, undertaken by the state on behalf of superordinate classes, thus never lies far beneath the surface, such that these conservative political configurations are premised on minimal hegemony, or, more extremely, domination without hegemony. Reformism This represents the accommodation of protest within prevailing social-prop­ erty relations by making concessions to subaltern classes but without sub­ verting the capitalist mode of production. Counter-hegemony is neutralized through trasformismo and co-opted into the national bourgeois (develop­ mental) state in a process of passive revolution. It does entail, therefore, political change at the level of the state from a conservative regime (the hegemonic classes of the Junker oligarchy, feudal and semi-feudal landlords, and comprador bourgeoisie) to a reformist (national-popular) alliance of subhegemonic classes comprising the nationally oriented bourgeoisie and com­ mercial, medium sized farmers, frequently supported by the lower fractions of the peasantry in overturning the ‘ancien regime’. Social democracy, devel­ opmentalism, neo-developmentalism, ‘left national-populism’, and ‘green new deal’ represent various forms of reformism, which are characteristically inclusive nationally, and forward looking (‘progressive’). Nonetheless, the incorporation of subaltern classes as citizens and consumers requires the powers of capital to be selectively curtailed, a strategy which requires the fiscal and regulatory capacity of the state to be expanded commensurately. Reformism has been most characteristic of the ‘core’ states for the very good reason that the absorption of the subaltern classes, and the expanded capacity of the state, have been built on the imperial role of the state in the world system – appropriating wealth from, and externalizing costs onto, the per­ iphery as observed by Lenin (1964) with regard to the global ‘split’ in the working class. Reformism under such circumstances may be termed integral

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hegemony. By the same token, however, instituting reformism in the periphery encounters severe challenges and is under constant threat by national oligar­ chies, transnational capital, and the imperial powers. The result under such circumstances we choose to term medial hegemony. Thus, the reformism of the ‘pink tide’ states in Latin America has been feasible only because US power has been constrained by the new presence of China, and the latter has expanded the fiscal capacity of the state through loans in exchange for access to primary resources. ‘Radical’ peasant and indigenous movements played an important role in the rise of these Latin American reformist states, only to have their goals of land redistribution and food sovereignty subverted by that very reformism. While small farmers and the upper peasantry have benefitted from these regimes, other peasant fractions have suffered continued margin­ alization, while the landed oligarchies have retained ‘economic’, if not so much ‘political’, power and have benefitted from the policies of neo-extractivism which underpin the reformism of the state (see Tilzey 2019a for detail concerning Bolivia and Ecuador). Indeed, and more specifically in relation to the land reform measures pro­ mised or instituted by reformist regimes, it should be recalled that the primary rationale and role of the ‘reform sector’ is political – more precisely, the political stabilization of the peasantry. By granting (some) land to (some) peasants, the reform sector creates a ‘conservative’ (that is, non-radical) petty bourgeoisie and, thereby, reduces the threat of social instability in the countryside. The objective of political stabilization involves a dual strategy: co-optation and patronage of reform beneficiaries, and the repression of the uprisings of peasants excluded from the reform. Perhaps the most successful implementation of this strategy in Latin America occurred in Mexico, where political stability and democratic representation, as passive revolution, were maintained for a long period follow­ ing the Cárdenas reforms, despite growing rural poverty and highly unequal patterns of development. Neoliberal (neo-conservative) reforms have since done much to unravel this, of which the Zapatista uprising is symptomatic, although strong traditions of clientelism in agrarian reformism remain. The strategy of political stabilization through land reform is highly contradictory, however, since land reform may generate ‘radical’ aspirations and expectations (see below) which, when thwarted and unmet, only encourage increased instability. Such unrest may then be met with counter-reform, authoritarianism, and violence, as in Chile and Colombia, and the co-optation of some counter-hegemonic ele­ ments into conservative/reactionary movements (see above). This shift from reformism back to conservatism represents a reverse transition from medial to minimal hegemony. Those reforms which attempt to establish the farmer road, or our Transi­ tion Type 1, are potentially the most destabilizing because of the political reaction of expropriated landed oligarchy and the frustrations of the large mass of peasants excluded from the reform. The preservation of the bulk of the land in the non-reform sector limits access to land to a small fraction of the peasantry. The frustrations of those excluded can be a destabilizing force

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that encourages an acceleration, amplification, and radicalization of the land reform, manifested in strikes and land seizures. Such pressure is particularly acute in reforms that attempt to establish the farmer road, since the bour­ geoisie requires allies to successfully implement a land reform against the landed oligarchy. This was manifest in Latin America in Chile between 1965 and 1970, although even towards the end of the reform still only a minority of the peasantry had gained access to land. More recent examples are those of Bolivia and Ecuador under the respective regimes of Morales and Correa/ Moreno (Tilzey 2019a). In these contexts, peasant militancy against the oli­ garchy and in support of the national bourgeoisie has still not eventuated in significant pro-peasant land reform. The severe social contradictions of neo­ liberalism, combined with the rise of China, had served to challenge the alli­ ance between the oligarchy and the comprador bourgeoisie in these ‘pink tide’ states, and it is in these states that we have witnessed, since the 1990s under a ‘post-neoliberal’ conjuncture, a resurgence of calls for redistributive land reform. Rather than benefitting the peasantry and the landless to any appre­ ciable degree, however, they have generally tended to take the form of a moderate shift from Junker to farmer road and/or to petty commodity pro­ ducer road. Reformism has strong links to Transition Types 1 and 3. Smaller commer­ cial farms and the upper peasantry are beneficiaries, receiving land, credit, protection, and support from the state. This may include an environmental component, with niche commercial producers supplying organic produce to discerning middle class consumers. The ‘progressive’ fraction of La Via Campesina often includes such agroecologically based commercial farmers. Differential treatment of the peasantry under reformism leads to resentment and thwarted aspirations on the part of the middle and lower peasantry, generating the potential for further unrest by these class fractions. Such dis­ affection may be allayed temporarily by welfarist measures, as in the ‘pink tide’ states of Latin America, but state spending is predicated in these instances on policies of neo-extractivism which serves simply to further exacerbate the precarity of subaltern classes. Under capitalism, and social-property relations premised on the inviol­ ability of absolute property rights, as in Latin America, future land reforms (entailing redistributive measures under capitalism and shift to the farmer road) are unlikely because they are directed necessarily at capitalist enter­ prises. Consequently, they are unlikely to occur under the hegemonic dom­ ination of the capitalist mode of production except under the most severe social pressures (and the cases of the ‘pink tide’ states are examples of this, facilitated by the rise of a strong competitor to the USA). Not only do redistributive reforms imply a challenge to the sanctity of absolute property rights by taking land away from some capitalists to distribute to peasants and landless workers, they also generate a conflict between the accumulation and legitimation concerns of the capitalist state. Thus, since large farms in the commercial sector tend to be highly efficient according to capitalistic criteria,

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the family or cooperative farms created by expropriations of these lands will not be able generally to ensure delivery of an equivalent net surplus onto the market to the benefit of state revenues. Additionally, the strongly entrenched position of capitalist landed oligarchy as part of a social class alliance that supports the model of disarticulated accumulation (generally supported by the USA) tends to eliminate the possibility of further redistributive reforms. This has proven to be the case in Bolivia and Ecuador, where ‘left nationalpopulist’ regimes appear to be currently unravelling, or, at least, facing severe contradictions arising from these dilemmas. Even in regions dominated by pre-capitalist relations of production such as Nepal and Eastern India, entrenched interests of feudal landed classes within the bureaucracy, alongside a comprador bourgeoisie, have long hindered land redistribution. This is one reason why countries such as Nepal have failed to implement a land redis­ tribution process, even after the former Maoist party adopted mainstream reformist politics and won an electoral victory in 2008. It seems clear that a resolution to peasant demands for land, and for the transcendence of market dependence and the dominance of absolute property rights, lies again in radical and counter-hegemonic revolutionary change in the social relations of production towards post-capitalist social property relations, something far beyond the scope of land reform and passive revolution. Radicalism This may be said to occur where subaltern classes, invoking the subversion and termination of the key social relations underpinning capitalism or feud­ alism, and the end of class-society itself, seek to implant these new social relations both in civil society and at the level of the state. This entails a desire to overthrow exploiting classes and the state–capital nexus, and to avoid co­ optation in the process. This may emerge in multiple contexts, and we have previously identified the salient preconditions for this to arise: continuing and increased precarity of existence for subalterns; the lack of ‘exit options’, for example, into adequate proletarian employment; continuing links to land and the prospect of adequate access to land as the imaginary of escape from pre­ carity; the articulation of discontent into a ‘master frame’ of emancipatory pol­ itics, either through facilitation by ‘organic intellectuals’, or through wider exposure to the ‘hopelessness’ offered by peripheral capitalist ‘development’; the ability to achieve a ‘critical mass’ of oppositional force to engage in ‘revolu­ tionary’ activity through, for example, mass protest; the adoption of a coherent strategy for challenging and overthrowing the incumbent upholders of exploita­ tive social relations both in the state and in ‘civil society’; and a favourable ‘external’ environment whereby the imperium is weakened, preoccupied with other crises, or challenged by a competitor (such as China) less concerned to uphold the sanctity of private property, the ‘free play’ of the market, or con­ servative class interests more generally. The Junker road/semi-proletarianization (Transition Types 2 and 3) and feudal/semi-feudal (Transition Type 6) are likely,

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being the most exploitative and inegalitarian of those discussed, to generate con­ ditions propitious to radical or ‘revolutionary’ action by the peasantry; however, moves towards reformism, such as along the farmer road (Transition Type 1), where reform beneficiaries are limited in number, may generate radical pressure for further land redistribution. However, so long as disarticulated development remains the norm, on the one hand, and options for ‘alternative development’ remain constrained, on the other, the conditions predisposing peasants to ‘radical’ action within all our transition types will remain immanent. In summary then, conditions for radical peasant action are rooted in the role of ‘organic intellectuals’, the widened experience of subalterns them­ selves, the structure of the state and class alliances, and the nature of the mode of production and its ‘articulation’ with imperial capital. Most com­ monly, as noted, peasant activists need to forge ‘progressive’ alliances with non-peasant classes if they are to ‘lay hold of the state’, as Wolf put it in PWTC. This then opens up an unpalatable dilemma for peasant radicals, one that invites co-optation into reformism. Only where the ‘hegemonic’ and ‘sub­ hegemonic’ classes remain unremittingly conservative and subordinate to the imperium are the peasantry and wider subaltern classes likely to abjure such alliances and avoid co-optation. For example, under the Maoist movements in China, and later in South Asia, reformist movements to regulate rents or redistribute landlord assets were deemed insufficient to alleviate the suffering of the peasantry, when landlordism was intricately tied to a semi-colonial comprador bureaucracy, and there was a negligible urban bourgeoisie with whom a ‘progressive’ alliance could be forged. Seth (2002) suggests that the absence of the latter as ‘allies’ in the initial stages of revolution in part shaped the violent trajectory of the movement in South Asia, which envisaged an antagonistic contradiction between the peasants and workers against the entire ruling class. Institutions such as parliament could not be used to advance the interests of the peasants and workers through reformism, given that the state itself upheld feudal and comprador interests. Addressing the current conjuncture, there is growing recognition that social egalitarianism must be conjoined to ecological sustainability, a marriage whose offspring is some form of eco-socialism. No social movement has yet secured this eco-socialist goal at the national level, although it is possible to point to local success stories, such as the MST in Brazil and Bolivia. The egalitarian, social justice elements of this goal succeeded in varying degrees in the ‘peasant wars’ in Russia, China, Vietnam, and Cuba, but all succumbed, or were forcibly subordinated, to statism and productivism. Subsequently all have surrendered themselves, in varying degrees, to capitalism, even if of a more state-centric kind (it may be argued that Cuba represents the only state to have secured, through its enforced agroecological transition, something akin to eco-socialism, although strong elements of statism and productivism remain, perhaps prolonged by continuous provocation by the USA). Radic­ alism may succeed, as noted, at the sub-national level – for example, in securing autonomous zones under the control of the movement, which may

72 Developing our Theoretical Approach deploy armed or peaceful protest. The MST is an example of the latter, the Zapatistas in Mexico and FARC in Colombia examples of the former. The degree of success of radicalism depends, in the final analysis, upon the balance of class forces in the state, together with the degree of support for dominant classes in the state from imperial or sub-imperial powers. Thus, the dominant classes in Mexico, and particularly in Colombia2 and Guatemala, have received very considerable support from the USA in their aim of sup­ pressing these radical movements. Such support, particularly in the case of Colombia and Guatemala, has generated considerable institutional ‘inflexibility’ (minimal hegemony or worse) and the use of extremely repressive and violent policies in relation to FARC and other groups calling for land redistribution, for example. Institutional ‘flexibility’ (medial hegemony) under similar circum­ stances, by contrast, (where the dominant classes appreciate that conciliation with radicalism may be the best course of action and where the imperial power shifts attitude, or where the peripheral state in question transfers allegiance to another power, for example from the USA to China) typically leads to refor­ mism (see above). Such institutional ‘flexibility’ is built to a significant degree on the ability to direct material rewards to subaltern classes, thereby acting as a safety valve, releasing pressure for radical change, and securing the survival of capitalism (albeit of a more inclusive variety). The ‘pink tide’ states in Latin America are exemplary in this regard. Contemporary radical or broadly leftist movements with a significant pea­ sant component are protean in character. Thus, a range of peasant mobiliza­ tions in the twenty-first century has still taken on a broadly left-wing character, grounded in the interest of the rural working class or peasantry, although the agendas are complex, and the type of mobilization is in part connected with the divergent paths of contested transition to capitalism, or with dynamics within capitalism, in diverse social formations. These protean movements range from single issue mobilization to more integrated political movements, for example, Maoism. They include the following foci: �

Anti-imperialism: More than a century of Western political dominance through imperialism and its distinctive forms of colonialism has gener­ ated lasting anger and resentment which formal political independence has not fully dissipated. A number of grassroots peasant movements fit within a loose anti-globalization/anti-imperialist stance, although there may be limited mobilization along class lines. ‘Progressive’ food sover­ eignty movements tend to be anti-globalist, but not anti-imperialist since, under the influence of ‘autonomist’ thinkers such as Hardt and Negri (2000), and Holloway (2002), imperialism is no longer recognized as an issue. This contrasts with ‘radical’ food sovereignty which does recognize the profound relevance of imperialism, and sees food sovereignty as being bound up with national sovereignty (see also under Land Rights move­ ments). These movements may often invoke armed struggle as a necessity, rather than through any preferred strategy, and often invoke land rights,

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as below. The FARC in Colombia is a very good example, with mobili­ zation along clear class lines. Anti-imperialism appears most relevant to Transition Types 1, 2, and 3. Land rights movements: A large number of political movements has been mobilized around land rights, particularly in the context of capitalist process of land grabs, or so called ‘accumulation by dispossession’, or persisting inequalities in the context of plantation economies. Examples include Landless Workers Movements (MST) in Latin America (Brazil in particular). These are particularly prevalent in states dominated by agro­ exporting oligarchies, in which there is large-scale monopolization of land. These movements also frequently have a strong environmental and ‘alternative developmental’ ethos, which may also be ‘over-determined’ by re-affirmation of indigenous identity, as in Bolivia, Ecuador, and southern Mexico, for example. These movements do not commonly invoke armed struggle, although the Zapatistas represent a ‘hybrid’ form between anti-imperialism and land rights movements. The ‘radical’ wing of La Via Campesina is representative of this form of resistance (see also above under anti-imperialism). These movements are particularly relevant to our Transition Type 2. Maoism: Maoism typically receives strong support in regions dominated by so called semi-feudal, semi-colonial regimes. It has proven popular in regions characterized by labour surplus, with limited direct capitalist production yet persisting peasant (or feudal) farming, which serves as a source of migrant labour, reproduced by the peasant economy. The pat­ terns of deindustrialization or limited growth which occur in these con­ texts are important with regard to the Maoist insurgencies in Nepal and the Adivasi belt of India – and these patterns were conceptually linked by party ideologues, or ‘organic intellectuals’, directly to the presence of semi-feudal, semi-colonial relations. In such cases the antagonisms are against global capitalism, but also against the locally specific political alliances which perpetuate this scenario – namely the comprador bour­ geoisie, landed classes, the rentier state – much like early twentieth cen­ tury China. This can help explain their violent path, and differentiates them from some of the peasant social movements which are more global in scope and are more focused on food sovereignty, movement against TNCs, market dependency, etc., than against a specific political adver­ sary, as with Maoism. Maoism is strongly over-determined by pre-capi­ talist class relations associated with ‘archaic’ ideology (casteism, ethnic hierarchy) since the oppression of subaltern classes is undertaken through ‘extra-economic’ means by powerful political alliances between landed and comprador elites. Thus, class antagonism assumes a strongly ‘inter­ personal’ form and this accounts for Maoism’s often violent forms of rebellion (see Seth 2002). Sendero Luminoso in Peru is somewhat anom­ alous in this regard – despite being explicitly Maoist, Sendero responded to social relations which did not really conform to the ‘semi-feudal’

74

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Developing our Theoretical Approach structures characteristic of Asian Maoist movements (see Chapter 9 for further detail). Maoism is particularly relevant to Transition Type 6, but also to Transition Type 5 (indigenous movements). Alternative/anarchist movements: Examples here include Kurdish demo­ cratic confederalism and the Zapatista movement in Mexico. This form of protest overlaps strongly with the land rights movement above, often seeking autonomy or secession from the encompassing state, and invok­ ing an alternative developmental ethos based in strong devolution, com­ munitarianism, and ecological production. The Zapatistas encapsulate the latter, combined with demand for land and indigenous rights (see below). Such movements tend to be characterized, or over-determined, by strong ethnic or sub-national identity (for example, Kurdish nation­ alism, and Mayan ethnicity in the case of the Zapatistas) in the face of an oppressive and culturally homogenizing state (for example, Turkey), and they are located typically in geographically marginal or relatively inaccessible zones, thereby facilitating autonomist tendencies (this recalls Wolf ’s comments in PWTC concerning the room for ‘tactical manoeuvre’ granted to peasants by geographical remoteness from the centres of power). The ‘economic’ basis of protest may derive from land appropriation by large (and often non-local) estate holders, along the Junker road. This form of protest thus has links to Transition Type 2 especially. Indigeneity movements: Identity based movements are increasingly mobi­ lized around issues such as indigenous land rights (‘defence of territory’), aside from broader claims of self-determination. Possibly of relevance to lineage based or tribal modes of production under capitalism, with the loss of indigenous forms of tenure to private property, land grabs, articulation of modes of production through migration. Often in opposi­ tion to conservative majoritarian movements, although they may take on reactionary element (e.g. Naga movement, and links to evangelical chur­ ches). In Latin America, indigeneity often strongly ‘over-determines’ land rights and anti-imperialist struggles by indigenous peasants, particularly where these comprise the majority population as in Bolivia and Ecuador. This is so because class relations, traditionally, have been strongly over­ determined along racial and ethnic lines, with the privileged and exploit­ ing classes being typically European, creole, or mestizo in character, and marginalized and exploited classes, comprising in the main the peasantry, being indigenous Native Americans. Exploitation and discrimination have thus been experienced by the latter in ethnic and cultural terms, functioning as a justification for ‘economic’ and ‘political’ subordination of ‘inferior’ native inhabitants by ‘superior’ outsiders (see Chapter 5 for further detail). Indigeneity movements have strong links to Transition Type 5 (subjugation of indigenous or lineage modes of production) and, in Latin America, to Transition Type 2. Indigeneity movements, as noted above, can also be directed down more ‘conservative’ channels, however,

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where ethnic/racial identities are divorced from class concerns, as may occur under heavy influence of NGOs and under repressive oligarchic regimes (such as Guatemala). Environmental movements: Not only has the world order changed, but the human impact of centuries of exploitation of the world’s resources and the transformation of those resources into commodities for mass con­ sumption, has generated changes in the biophysical environment that include climate change and widespread pollution which threaten not only the lives and livelihoods of millions of people but the very survival of life on this planet. Indeed, as we move further into a century of deepening political and ecological contradictions, there seems to be a renewed imperative for all those involved in the management of rural resources (farming, fisheries and forestry) to wrest control of global agriculture, land, and other natural resources from capitalism, and its state backers, for the purposes of autonomous, egalitarian, and ecologically sustainable development. It has been argued that many of the conflicts that have developed in the rural areas of Africa, Asia and Latin America have their roots in ‘environmental’ change and changing forms of control over and exploitation of ‘natural’ resources. This requires systematic exploration, and critique of the global Northern concepts which underlie this for­ mulation. Rather, a political ecological conceptualization seems more accurate and helpful (see Tilzey 2018a). Thus, it may be argued that ‘peasants’ (like all those whose livelihoods depend directly on the use value of these ‘natural’ resources – including hunters and gatherers, pas­ toralists and others) retain crucial elements of what might be termed a ‘pre-capitalist’ cosmology and world view, in which ‘culture’ and ‘nature’ are not separated, and ‘conservation’ is an integral part of the way in which production is undertaken, rather than a distinct and ‘additional’ activity as in global Northern conceptions (Tilzey 2002) (although it is important here to avoid the common error that assumes that in such situations ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are somehow ontologically indivisible. In such pre-capitalist and pre-class societies ‘nature’ is still mediated for human beings through ‘culture’ and historically specific social relations). It is therefore misleading and difficult to talk of a distinct ‘environmental’ movement among subalterns in the global South. Rather, ‘environmental’ concerns are intrinsically related to traditional production of use values from the land, and so are inherently related to land rights issues, auton­ omous production, and indigenous identity – there is, therefore, strong overlap with these categories above, and so the links to agrarian transi­ tion types are similar.

‘Political’ and ‘Social’ Revolutions Here it is perhaps useful to distinguish between what Davidson (2017) terms ‘political’ and ‘social’ revolutions. According to Davidson:

76

Developing our Theoretical Approach Political revolutions are struggles within society for control of the state, involving factions of the existing ruling class, which leave fundamental social and economic structures intact … Political revolutions may involve more or less popular participation, may result in more or less improve­ ment in the condition of the majority, can introduce democracy where it has previously been absent; but ultimately the ruling class that was in control of the means of production at the beginning will remain so at the end (although individuals and political organizations may have been replaced on the way), and the classes that were exploited within the pro­ ductive process at the beginning will also remain so at the end (although concessions may have been made by the winning faction to secure their acquiescence or participation) … Social revolutions, however, are not merely struggles for control of the state, but struggles to transform it, either in response to changes that have already taken place in the mode of production, or in order to bring such changes about. (Davidson 2017: 9)

According to these definitions, then, we can describe protest within our ‘conservative/reactionary’ and ‘reformist’ categories as intending to secure ‘political’ revolution, or, in other words, passive revolution (subsuming integral, medial, and minimal forms of hegemony), while only protest in our ‘radical’ category, with its objective of overthrowing the feudal or capitalist modes of production and eliminating class society, can be described as a ‘social’ revolution.

‘Peasants Wars’ versus ‘Rural Movements’: Fundamental Differentiation in Class Position and Positionality between Core and Periphery Here we define what we mean by ‘peasant wars’ and ‘rural movements’, concepts that are fundamental to this book and its companion. The relation­ ship of ‘combined and uneven development’ between core and periphery implies ‘social articulation’ in the first, and ‘social disarticulation’ in the second. This underlies the key difference between the proclivity to peasant ‘war and rebellion’ in the periphery and ‘rural movements’ in the core. By peasant ‘war and rebellion’ we mean protest, involving either armed insur­ rection or peaceful mass uprising, commonly designed to secure ‘social’ revo­ lution according to the above definition, that is, a transformation from one mode of production to another with the aim of securing ‘livelihood sover­ eignty’ for the majority of the peasantry (typically involving a transition from feudalism/capitalism towards some form of socialism). Typically, such trans­ formation through ‘war and rebellion’ will involve the use extra-institutional means of protest and resistance defined as illegal by the state. By ‘rural movements’ we mean protest designed to secure merely ‘political’ revolution according to the above definition, typically entailing reforms within the

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prevailing mode of production. Typically, such protest involves the use of legal institutional channels as defined by the ‘state–capital nexus’, or ‘passive’ resistance, by resort to ‘autonomy’, within the interstices of a private property regime upheld by the ‘state–capital nexus’. Thus, the latter – rural movements – following ‘social articulation’ and the transformation of the peasantry into commercial family farms or a ‘worker aristocracy’, involve the creation of institutional channels within liberal democracy through which farmer interest groups can make their grievances known and through which varying degrees of conciliation can emerge. This is characteristic of the integral hegemony of the imperial state–capital nexus. The ‘farmer road’ has been characteristic of the core states, and, in the post­ war period, these have been characterized as ‘agricultural welfare states’ (Sheingate 2001; Tilzey 2006). The advent of neoliberalism has, since the 1990s, seen some degree of dismantling of these ‘agricultural welfare states’, and accompanying discontent, particularly from smaller family farms, in relation to the pressures of agrarian restructuring and the bias of continuing subsidies towards larger farm enterprises. Such discontent, however, is still directed in the main through institutional channels undertaken by well-orga­ nized farmer interest groups, and subsidies remain relatively generous although disbursed on a somewhat different basis (including a small environ­ mental component) from earlier funding regimes (see Potter and Tilzey 2005; Tilzey 2006; Tilzey and Potter 2008 for details). Unease with the ecologically malign impacts of productivism has been channelled largely through envir­ onmental NGOs and through government agencies tasked with selectively mitigating (but not resolving) such impacts. Environmental mitigation is largely divorced from issues of rural livelihood and farm survival, in marked contrast to the global South. All this implies that, in the global North, there is little by way of ‘radical’ resistance qua ‘peasant wars’. Rather, social articulation and liberal democracy, through the process of ‘combined and uneven development’, has been a powerful means of co-opting non-capitalist classes, creating an agrarian petty bourgeoisie, and deflecting attention away from the globally exploitative and class-based nature of capitalism. This ability to co-opt and deflect resistance has been differentially located in the global North, therefore, since it based in integral hegemony (as domination through consensus) founded in turn on material rewards (consumerism), welfarism, nation-building, and the bestowal of politico-legal rights that follow from citizenship (Tilzey 2019c). This means that there is far less unrest than in the global South, and that such unrest as does occur tends to be directed through institutional and ‘democratic’ channels for conciliation, and has no intention of subverting capitalist relations of produc­ tion. In short, the institutions of the state and capital in the global North (the ‘capitalist type of state’ according to Jessop 2016), although now under tension through neoliberal austerity and right populism, have far greater legitimacy than is generally the case in the global South. Supposedly ‘radical’ proposals for change under such circumstances (such as ‘food as commons’ discourse; see Vivero-Pol 2019) tend to assume that

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discursive, deliberative democracy alone will engender a transformation towards more socially and ecologically sustainable forms of food production, with the principal political agent here being the global Northern ‘eater’ or food citizen (Hassanein 2008; Holt-Gimenez and van Lammeren 2019). Symptomatically, it is democratic force of argument alone, disassociated from questions of the ownership of, and access to, the means of production or the necessary redistribution of these means, which is identified as the means to secure transformational change (Tilzey 2019c). This assertion is in itself an inherently liberal and ‘post-modern’ conception, drawing on the favoured ‘post-Marxian’ thinking of Polanyi (1957) and Hardt and Negri (2000). It is no accident, however, that this particular imaginary of change should be associated most with the global North, where affluence, increasingly depen­ dent on the ‘new imperialism’ in relation the global South (Biel 2000), per­ mits the educational, employment, welfare, and wider citizenship benefits which permit positionality to be (relatively) divorced from class position and from the wider material predicates that enable such ‘reflexive citizenship’ (Tilzey 2019c). In other words, affluence may afford the insulation from the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ which enables agents to (relatively) divorce their views as ‘citizens’ (positionality) from their immediate interests in the capitalist mode of production from which that very affluence derives (class position) (ibid.). By dissociating discursive democratic change from the need to address social-property relations upheld by the state–capital nexus, ‘formal’ food democracy effectively leaves much of capital’s power intact (Holt-Gime­ nez and van Lammeren 2019). By the same token, this elevation of citizen positionality at the expense of class position, as in the notion of the ‘multi­ tude’ (Hardt and Negri 2000), obscures difference and embedded asymme­ tries, serving only to reproduce them. This is particularly true of the profound asymmetries between North and South, which asserted commonalities of ‘citizen interest’ serve to disguise and therefore perpetuate (Tilzey 2019c). In the global South, by contrast, there is a far greater legitimacy deficit which, together with the ‘formal’ rather than ‘real’ subsumption within capital of the semi-proletarian majority, carries with it the increased likelihood of challenge to the state–capital nexus by counter-hegemonic forces deploying extra-institutional means, in other words, demands for ‘social’ revolution. Attempted re-appropriations of the state, subversion of capitalism, and/or anti-state autonomy are implied, comprising re-assertions of national, and possibly post-national forms of sovereignty, including ‘peasant wars’ and mobilizations such as ‘radical’ food sovereignty (Tilzey, 2018a). Such ‘radical’ counter-hegemonic forces potentially challenge, then, the essential founda­ tions of capitalism, propounding a more Marxian (reversal of primitive accu­ mulation) than Polanyian (‘embedding’ of capitalism) imaginary of social change (Tilzey, 2017). Thus, peripheral forms of capital accumulation, upon which the affluence and ‘reified’ discursive democracy of the North are premised, are generating more fundamental resistances to the state–capital nexus by ‘radi­ cal’ and counter-hegemonic peasant and semi-proletarian mobilizations in the

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global South. These are potentially most disruptive to the neoliberal food regime because it is in the global South, as a periphery for the Northern core, that the contradictions of capital accumulation are greatest and the legitimacy of the state is lowest. Here the state, as a ‘state in capitalist society’ (Jessop 2016), is at best founded on medial hegemony and, most commonly, upon minimal hege­ mony. Consequently, it is in the South that the potential for transformations towards ‘radical’ livelihood sovereignty, as a form of eco-socialism, appears greatest. One of the notable features of the neoliberal era, one which, superficially, might appear to transcend the above structural differences between core and periphery, is the emergence of ‘new social movements’ and, more specifically, what has been termed the ‘new peasantry’ (Petras 1997; van der Ploeg 2008). Petras (1997) has argued that there has been a ‘third’ wave of left politics in Latin America, specifically, that has been filling the neoliberal ‘political vacuum’ of the 1990s and one that has been differentially located in the countryside – this is what he has termed the ‘new peasantry’. Among its key features are: � �

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A social base comprising a rural-urban mix of small cultivators, semiproletarians, and proletarians, all being united in being a precariat. A leadership base composed of ‘peasant intellectuals’ rather than uni­ versity intellectuals (‘organic intellectuals’), eschewing personality cults, and operating on the principle of ‘every member an organizer’ rather than on the hierarchical footing of the ‘vanguardist’ past. A tactical base characterized by direct action, mainly on the land, but also in other private and public spaces. A strategic base that is ‘anti-political’, characterized by autonomy from political parties and state, but also by the pursuit of strategic alliances with political parties, trade unions, and other social movements. An ideological base tending to fuse Marxian and ethnic-racial political languages, increasingly gender and ecology-sensitive. This tends to over­ lap with a ‘post-developmental’ discourse that owes more to anarchism than to Marxism, and which substitutes identity and democracy for ‘class struggle’ (Escobar and Alvarez 1992 is perhaps a seminal text here). The latter underpins the ‘populist’ and ‘progressive’ fraction of international peasant movements such as La Via Campesina. Related strongly to the ‘post-developmental’ tendency, there is a strong cosmopolitan base, cultivating an internationalist vision and engaging in international debates and alliances independently of other organizations and the state. This tends to accord again with the ‘populist’ fraction which assumes the increasing redundancy of the state, the unity and trans-nationalization of corporate capital, and the commonality of inter­ est among small farmers (the ‘new peasantry’) in the core and periphery. Well-known agrarian scholars advocating such a view include Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael (see Tilzey 2019b for critique).

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In fact, the ‘anti-political’, post-Marxist, and cosmopolitan elements above, seem to have their foundation in the ‘new social movements’ of the global North, and include the ‘food democracy and food as commons’ movement described earlier (see Tilzey 2019c). The particular context for this was the conjuncture of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end of the Cold War, and the resurgence of neoliberal globalization, reflected in the ‘anti-globalization’ movement of the 1990s. Dominant intellectual currents in the anti-globaliza­ tion movement, located largely in the global North, are the ‘anti-state’ and ‘anti-politics’ strategy, codified famously by Hardt and Negri (2000) in Empire and by John Holloway (2002) in Change the World without Taking Power (sometimes described as ‘autonomist Marxism’). It is possible to iden­ tify three features, deriving from the new social movements and anti-globali­ zation movement, which have come to be axiomatic for the ‘progressive’ or ‘populist’ fraction of the global peasant movement. Although unac­ knowledged, these features tend to be characteristic of a global Northern view of the world and, we suggest, fail to reflect the reality of an imperial-periph­ eral world system and the precarity of the great majority in the global South. The first feature is the proposal that we now live in a ‘post-national’ world, wherein the key and oppositional elements are corporate, transnational capi­ tal, on the one hand, and the ‘multitude’, or generalized citizenry of civil society, on the other. The state, which is never seriously theorized, is relegated to an ambiguous role between this binomial, randomly oscillating between irrelevance, support for the interests of capital (the assumed ‘corporate’ take­ over of the state), or the upholding of ‘citizens’’ interests against the corporate onslaught. What is denied, or never broached as an issue, is the fact that we live in an imperialist world in which the post-colonial promise of national self-determination, let alone socialism, has been actively thwarted by the core. For the anti-globalist populists, then, the ‘enemy’ is not the capitalist states of the imperium, on which the great bulk of multinational capital actually depends for its reproduction and survival, but rather ‘stateless’ corporate capital whose victims are the citizens, equally, of the core and the periphery (see Morton 2013; Tilzey 2019b for critique). Relatedly, the second feature is the absence, not merely of rigorous, but indeed of any class analysis. With the assumed emergence of the ‘multitude’ of common citizen interest, there is clearly no further need for the concept of class, other than the crude binomial between ‘corporate’ capital and the ‘people’. Generalized capital operates according to its abstract logic at the global level, while this logic can be opposed only by the agency of the ‘mul­ titude’ at ‘local level’. This is now the avowed position of agrarian populists such as McMichael (2016). This has further links to postcoloniality and post­ modernism, emphasizing gender and race/ethnicity rather than class, and divorcing the understanding of the former from the latter. ‘Western’ science, rationality, and modernity (whether capitalist or socialist) underlie current socio-ecological contradiction, and this can be remedied only by a (re)turn to ‘non-Western’ and ‘pre-modern’ ways of knowing founded on ‘indigenous’

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and ‘people’s’ knowledge, and by ‘community’ initiatives undertaken by ‘local people’ – an ‘alter-hegemonic’ positionality with strong overtones of populist conservatism, as suggested earlier (see Brass 2015; Tilzey 2019c for further detail). The third feature, again intimately related to the above, is the denial of the semi-proletarianized specificity of peripheral capitalism. There are two pre­ dictable tendencies, which are mirror images of one another. The first is to ‘urbanize’ social protest and to efface the agrarian question, a characteristic feature of much global Northern discourse on food democracy and ‘food as commons’, in which it assumed that the city is the ‘natural’ endpoint of civilization whether capitalist or socialist, and the inevitable destiny of the majority of the earth’s inhabitants (Tilzey 2019c, 2020). The second is to ‘ruralize’ protest, by subsuming semi-proletarians into a generalized ‘small farmer’ category that applies universally, whether to the global core or to the global periphery. This is the case with the ‘progressive’ and ‘populist’ wing of La Via Campesina (Des­ marais 2008; Friedmann 2016; McMichael 2016). The latter, again, has strong links to ‘localism’ and ‘community action’ in opposition to the bête noire of cor­ porate globalization. The notion of uniting organizations from core and periphery into a ‘Farmers’ International’ such as suggested by this wing of La Via Campe­ sina, with the objective of defending the ‘peasant way of life’, has clear limitations, as this chapter should have made obvious.

Notes 1 It is quite puzzling that McMichael, despite this important theoretical contribution, seems to have almost entirely neglected national social formational dynamics in favour of privileging one ‘side’ of the dialectic, that of corporate or transnational capital, such that states are seen simply to be ‘mediators’ of disciplinary pressures arising from ‘globalized’ capital (see, for example, McMichael 2016). 2 Making the recent election of a centre-left regime in Colombia all the more remarkable.

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Part II

Wolf’s Latin American Case Studies

3

Revisiting Wolf on Mexico

Wolf begins PWTC with an analysis of the Mexican Revolution, the first revolu­ tion in the periphery in which the peasantry was a major protagonist in a contested transition away from feudalism (or semi-feudalism) and towards what was even­ tually to emerge, despite strong attempts to foment ‘national developmentalism’, as ‘disarticulated’ capitalism under neoliberalism. The dissolution of feudal (or semifeudal) social property relations in the Mexican social formation was the outcome of contestation between three major class forces: counter-hegemonic peasant forces led by the iconic figure of Emilio Zapata (and allied to the less radical, and more nationalist/proletarianist forces of Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa); the sub-hegemonic class interests of national capitalism, led by Alvaro Obregón; and the liberal, or hegemonic, class interests led by Venustiano Carranza, the latter two groups representing different fractions of capital and forming an alliance during the revolution in the shape of the Constitutionalist Armies.1 The Constitutionalist Armies, following the defeat of federal pro-Porfirian forces, were arrayed against the combined, and largely subaltern, forces of Zapata and Villa. This contested transition from colonial feudalism, through the semi-feudalism of the Porfiriato (1876–1911), to what emerged as capitalism, albeit ultimately of a peripheral ‘disarticulated’ kind within the wider constraints defined by ‘combined and uneven development’, has justifiably been described as a form of ‘passive revolution’ by Morton (2013). Passive revolution may proceed in two main ways: first, with reference to a ‘revolution’ without mass participation, or a ‘revolution from above’, involving elite-engineered politico-economic reform, drawing on foreign capital, and per­ petuating dependency upon the imperium, while lacking a national popular base. This form of passive revolution may be described as ‘conservative’ (as per our typology of resistances in Chapter 2), involves what we term ‘minimal hegemony’ (Femia 1981; Morton 2013), and, typically, takes the ‘Junker road’ to agrarian capitalism. The policies of Porfirio Díaz, during the so-called Porfiriato, have certain features in common with this ‘conservative’ form of passive revolu­ tion, although it should be emphasized that Mexico at this time still retained many features of extra-economic, non-capitalistic exploitation, and so should, more accurately, be described as ‘semi-feudal’ in terms of its social property relations (see below). DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-6

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It is passive revolution in its second sense that is more applicable to the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath. This comprises a revolution which derives essential elements of its dynamic from insurrectionary mass mobili­ zation from below, involving, typically, the peasantry in what Wolf termed ‘peasant wars’. Here, however, subaltern (counter-hegemonic) class demands are constrained by, or co-opted into, essentially bourgeois, or national-popu­ lar (sub-hegemonic), class demands, commonly associated with ‘national developmentalism’ and (attempted) ‘farmer road’ agrarian reforms. This form of passive revolution conforms to the ‘reformist’ category in our typology of resistances (social transformation), which we have chosen to term ‘medial hegemony’. The forces involved in the Mexican Revolution also included, as we have noted, more ‘conservative’, liberal class interests (as opposed to the semi-feudal, pro-church interests of the traditional latifundistas), seeking fully capitalist social relations, full separation of state and church, ‘free trade’, and minimal state intervention other than to secure absolute private property rights and the ‘free movement’ of labour. This class interest position we describe as ‘hegemonic’ (as a convenient, if not always accurate, descriptor for liberal and neoliberal class interests), and as entailing ‘minimal hegemony’. The aftermath of the Mexican Revolution was characterized by a retrench­ ment to ‘minimal hegemony’, only then to see a gradual shift to ‘medial hegemony’ as the national bourgeoisie, ‘farmer road’ agrarian reform, and ISI gained ground from the 1930s, only then to suffer another reversal with the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s. Thus, we witness an oscillation between ‘medial hegemony’, as nationalpopular reformism, and ‘minimal hegemony’ as export-oriented liberalism and neoliberalism. We consider this differentiation between ‘medial’ and ‘minimal hegemony’ to be important, a differentiation that is unhelpfully subsumed within a generalized post-revolutionary epoch of putative minimal hegemony by Morton [2013] across both reformist and neoliberal eras. In this second sense, then, passive revolution becomes a technique of state-craft that an emergent (sub-hegemonic) national bourgeois class may deploy by sub­ suming and co-opting (counter-hegemonic) subaltern classes, while establish­ ing a new state on the basis of the constitution of capitalism. It is in this second sense that the outcome of the Mexican Revolution can, perhaps archetypically, be referred to as a period of passive revolution (Morton 2013).

Pre-Revolutionary Mexico Wolf, in PWTC, suggests that we can now see that many of the causes of the revolution had their ori­ gins not in the period of the Díaz dictatorship, but in an earlier period when Mexico was still New Spain and a colony of the Spanish mother country. When Mexico had declared her independence in 1821, she had also inherited a set of characteristic problems which Spain had been

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unable and unwilling to solve and which were bequeathed integrally to the new republic. (Wolf 1973: 3) He suggests that these problems derived ultimately from the (racialized) exploitation of indigenous labour by means of the colonial establishment of latifundia, or haciendas. Haciendas came to be worked by indigenous popu­ lations, drawn principally from two sources: a supply of resident labourers (peones) tied to the hacienda through debt servitude; and non-resident Native Americans who continued to live in indigenous communities (repúblicas de indios) surrounding the haciendas, but who increasingly gained their liveli­ hoods on the estates, not least because of progressive encroachment of the latter onto the lands of the former (Wolf 1982). While pastoral haciendas dominated the northern parts of Mexico, agricultural haciendas were pre­ valent in the central heartland where Native American populations were dense. Haciendas were, during the colonial period, obliged to share the land­ scape with indigenous communities, these receiving special protection from the Crown in the form of legal status as corporations. Each community was allowed to retain a stipulated amount of land under its own communal man­ agement, in addition to its own autonomous administration. In actuality, however, many communities lost their land to haciendas, and many commu­ nity authorities were overturned by colonial power holders exercising their domain in the vicinity (Wolf 1973: 4). Indeed, it was such hacienda encroach­ ment, exacerbated by the abolition of the legal status of indigenous communities as corporations in 1856, that was ultimately to impel the counter-hegemonic, peasant/indigenous Zapatista fraction to rise up as key protagonists of the Revolution. While Wolf (1973: 4) makes it clear that the ‘aim of the hacienda was commercial, to produce for profit agricultural produce or livestock products which could be sold to neighbouring mining compounds and towns’, he also indicates unambiguously that these institutions were founded on unfree labour, tied to the hacienda by extra-economic means. Social property rela­ tions were thus pre-capitalist and feudal during the colonial period, and not capitalist contra the assertions of Dependency and World Systems Theories, and their latter-day epigones (see, for example, de Janvry 1981; Morton 2013; Tilzey 2018 for critique). Colonial social property relations were thus founded on: (1) the hacienda, characterized by various forms of labour exploitation, most particularly the delivery of labour services on the lord’s demesne in return for a subsistence plot; (2) the delivery of rent-in-kind by tenants to landlords via sharecropping arrangements; and (3) indigenous communities based on subsistence production, but traditionally obliged to yield up dues to the colonial state. Such social property relations were, therefore, the ‘feudal’ product of a feudal Spain (Knight 2002a). As Wolf (1973: 5) indicates: ‘Thus Mexico emerged into its period of independence with its rural landscape polarized between large estates on the one hand and Indian communities on

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the other’. While national independence was set in motion in 1810, and initi­ ally espoused enlightenment values of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ for all ‘Amer­ icans’, it soon assumed the form of a conservative transformation, leaving the old socio-economic order essentially intact. As Wolf (ibid.: 9) notes: ‘The movement for independence which had begun with demands for social reform ended in the maintenance of elite power’. While Liberal reforms of 1856 did entail further expropriation of church properties and the privatization of indigenous communal lands (leading to further land acquisition by hacenda­ dos and the beginnings of primitive accumulation), post-colonial Mexico, overall, was bequeathed a centralized state that reflected the essential hall­ marks of feudal social property relations in which agrarian surplus was extracted from direct producers by landlords primarily through extra-eco­ nomic means, the majority of direct producers supplied their own subsistence, while mobility of the ‘factors of production’ was very limited (Knight 2002b; Morton 2013). Elements of these social property relations, and the tendency towards state centralization, persisted during the Porfiriato. Thus, agrarian social property relations in Porfirian Mexico continued to be founded on hacienda production arising from direct extra-economic coercion through continued forms of debtpeonage and labour-rent, whereby peones received plots of land in return for labour service on the latifundial demesne, made additional payments in kind, while relying on subsistence for staple food production, all of which severely constricted the ‘free’ mobility of labour characteristic of capitalist social relations (Morton 2013). Porfirian Mexico thus continued to display strong characteristics of the social relations we have identified with Transition Type 5 in our typology (see Chapter 1). Nonetheless, the Porfiriato saw a marked shift towards capitalism, largely as the continued outcome of the Reform Laws of 1856–1857 (enacted under Díaz’s predecessor Benito Juárez). This entailed, first, the transfer of Church holdings into private hands, amounting perhaps to some $100,000,000 worth of ‘real estate’ (Wolf 1973). While the stated intention had been to create thereby a viable rural middle class in Mexico (a class of commercial family farms), the reality was that Church estates passed in large, unbroken tracts into the hands of existing hacendados (ibid.: 15). Thus, rather than initiating a ‘farmer road’ to capitalism, the Porfiriato fomented a ‘Junker road’. A similar fate befell indigenous communal lands rendered illegal under the reforms and forcing their division into individual holdings. As Wolf notes: land was thus turned into a marketable commodity, capable of being sold or mortgaged in payment of debts. Many Indians quickly forfeited their land to third parties, often to finance socially required ceremonial expenses. Practically all such land went into the hands of haciendas and land companies. It is estimated that more than two million acres of communal land were alienated in the Díaz period. (Wolf 1973: 16)

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Wolf, in PWTC, also indicates how the reforms undermined indigenous communal solidarity through the creation, ‘from above’, of individualized market dependency. The Spanish Crown had reinforced the cohesion of indi­ genous communities by granting them a measure of land and demanding that they make themselves responsible collectively for payments of dues and for maintenance of the (pre-capitalist) social order. The communities had responded by developing, within the framework of such corporate organization, their own internal system of governance, tied strongly to ‘religious worship’ (a syncretic form of Christian and non-Christian placation and supplication of the godly forces seen to underlie the agrarian productive fortunes of the community, and mediated by power incumbents upholding the social order). Thus, the ability to become a decision-maker (power-holder) in indigenous communities depended on sponsorship of a sequence of religious festivities – in other words, the distribution of largesse to the community, such that power depen­ ded upon serving the needs, real or imagined, of the community rather than the individual. Not only did the haciendas seize much Indian land, but Indians them­ selves began to pawn land, to which they were now entitled individually, in order to meet the ordinary expenses of living and extraordinary expenses of religious sponsorship. The very mechanism which at one time had guaranteed the continued solidarity of the community now turned into the means of destroying it. Thus, Indian communities of the old type survived, but only in the more inaccessible regions of the centre and south, while the vast mass of Indians faced the prospect of relating themselves individually to the power holders of the outside world … (Wolf 1973: 17) In this way, the majority of rural subalterns became dependent upon the hacienda for access to the means of production. However, Wolf notes, impor­ tantly, that in the eight states surrounding the core region of the Valley of Mexico (together with the states of the south), the independent settlement cluster (of indigenous communities) continued to predominate. ‘It was against these persisting independent villages that the Porfirian regime unleashed its power. Hard-pressed, these villages, however, countered with a revolutionary response’ (Wolf 1973: 18), rather than be reduced to the same condition as indigenous people in other parts of Mexico. Such resistance was to form the basis of support for the counter-hegemonic peasant/indigenous forces under Zapata during the Revolution. Industrial development, due largely to foreign investment from the imper­ ium (the USA, France, Britain, and Germany), did accelerate during the Porfiriato, especially in mining, railway construction, and textiles. Such development assumed an enclave form, however, serving imperial markets, and with skilled positions occupied by foreigners. Industry was capital-inten­ sive and therefore absorbed relatively few workers, and, with labour supply

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outstripping demand, workers were simply a ‘cost’ for capital, wages were low, and working conditions bad. ‘This new industrial workforce recruited its members among former peasants displaced from the land by the predatory expansion of the latifundia; among the numerous artisans unable to withstand the onslaught of mechanized competition; and among escaped peones who had fled from debt bondage into the relative freedom of industrial wage labour’ (Wolf 1973: 21). With poor pay and conditions, strikes became increasingly common, but were suppressed by the Díaz regime with exemplary violence, with some two hundred workers killed at the Río Blanco textile factory in Veracruz in 1907, for example. While small in number (only some 600,000 by 1910; Wolf 1973), this proletariat nonetheless had little stake in the Díaz regime, was strongly anti-imperial in its sentiments, and was to lend its support to counter-hegemonic and sub-hegemonic forces during the Revolution. ‘Development, however, had a differential impact on the northern and southern peripheries of the republic. In the south, the growing market for tropical crops and foodstuffs for industrial centres led to an expansion of estate agriculture, coupled with intensified exploitation of Indian labour… While each local hacienda had its own apparatus of coercion, its own police and whipping post, the entire structure of coercion depended ultimately on the apparatus of coercion maintained by the government. Thus, the southern hacienda owners tended to support Díaz for internal reasons, just as their dependence on foreign markets and firms led them to support the symbiosis of the regime with foreign interests’ (Wolf 1973: 22). Opposition to the Díaz regime in the centre/south, therefore, took on a largely peasant/indigenous counter-hegemonic complexion due to the progressive loss of autonomous production systems, the substitution of such autonomy by oppres­ sive and coercive hacienda systems, and the lack of alternative ‘safety valves’ in the form of secure and reasonably paid proletarian employment. Under such conditions, the aspiration of the indigenous peasantry was to reclaim land from expansionary latifundia for the purpose of autonomous production. Opposition in the north, however, took on a very different complexion, and, while involving subaltern classes, also embraced a nationally oriented, subhegemonic bourgeoisie. Scarcity of labour meant that the proletariat could more effectively challenge the structures of debt peonage, while sharecropping arrangements were replacing indebted labour, especially on estates growing cotton. The commercially oriented upper peasantry was also a growing class fraction. These were often colonists, holding more land and livestock than non-peon peasants in other areas (Otero 1999). Although not comprising a large percentage of the rural population in the north, they had received land from the state both to resist repeated raids by acephalous indigenous groups collectively known as ‘Apaches’, and as a reward from President Juárez in 1864 for fighting against French imperialism (the ill-conceived attempt by Napoleon III to re-found the French colonial empire in Mexico). Subse­ quently, however, these colonists had progressively lost land to encroachments by hacendados, which the Díaz regime did nothing to arrest. By 1910, they

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had been deprived of much of their land and the former privileges that they had enjoyed as absolute property owners. Consequently, they were readily recruited into the armies of the north (Otero 1999). Owners of large estates, for their part, were not only able to sell cereals and meat to the growing cities of the north, and across the border to the USA, but were also beginning to invest in local industry producing mainly for a domestic market. But such a market was structurally constrained by the policies of Díaz. He also favoured imperial, and especially US, business firms at the expense of Mexican-owned enterprises, particularly so in mining where most national firms were obliged to sell their ores to the American Smelting and Refining Company (Wolf 1973: 23). This northern bourgeoisie came increasingly to realize that imperial control of raw materials and processing curtailed its ability to enter heavy industry, while the expansion of light industry was constrained by the shallowness of Mexican domestic demand due to the continuing dominance of export-oriented and semi-feudal latifundia. As Wolf notes (ibid.: 23), ‘all their interests thus lay in opposing the foreign influence and the decision makers in the capital who abetted it’. These, primarily sub-hegemonic, oppositional forces in the north were complemented by a growing class of educated, middle-class bureaucrats located primarily in the main urban centres. This class, whose young members were ‘proud of their diplomas and education, could find no employment at all’ (Wolf 1973: 24), since potential government posts were occupied by the ossified incumbents of the old order. This new educated class did not possess a fully articulated ideology of its own, but in the first decade of the twentieth century certain of its members began to respond to new and more radical themes. Initially demands focused on free elections and the abolition of peonage and the inhuman conditions of life on the haciendas of the tropical zone. With growing repression from the Díaz regime, however, many of these ‘liberals’ began to move to the ‘left’ and, from 1906, they were increasingly urging armed insurrection against the government (ibid.).

The Revolution These growing discontents boiled over in 1910, ushering in the Mexican Revolution. Rural unrest centred on two areas, Morelos in the south, and Chihuahua in the north, conforming respectively to the class configurations delineated above. In the former, indigenous peasant populations remained substantial, and survived on hillier land surrounding commercial sugar cane plantations, owned by powerful private hacendados or by religious orders. With the abo­ lition of religious and indigenous ‘corporations’, however, the private hacien­ das started to encroach on both church and ‘Indian’ lands, with a view not merely to securing additional land for production through ‘primitive accu­ mulation’, but also to oblige the indigenous communities to sell their labour power on the estates. Such labour was required only on a seasonal basis,

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however, so it was in the interests of hacendados to permit indigenous groups to retain some land so as to enable them to supply their own needs when not required by the estate, but insufficient in area to enable them to be entirely autonomous from the haciendas. They were thus constrained to sell their labour power to the hacienda for a period of two or three months per year (Wolf 1973: 27). These indigenous communities thus came to be dominated by a semi-proletariat existing in a functionally dualistic relationship with large estates (de Janvry 1981). Nonetheless, the communities, because of strictly seasonal labour requirements and concerted resistance to further encroach­ ment, remained relatively intact and retained strong bonds of social solidarity (Wolf 1973: 28). As such, their aspiration, much like the semi-proletariat of today, was not further proletarianization, but rather greater access to land to secure full autonomy from the haciendas. Accordingly, in 1909, ‘an assembly of all members of the community [of San Miguel Anenecuilco], under the leadership of the council [of elders], elected a committee of defence. The head of the committee was a local ranchero by the name of Emiliano Zapata’ (Wolf 1973: 28). The final spark which lit the revolution in Morelos was the appro­ priation, in 1910, by an adjoining hacienda of community lands that had already been prepared for corn planting. In response, and in defiance of the hacienda, Zapata organized some eighty men to complete the planting. This resistance then ramified outwards, with Zapata re-appropriating communal lands taken by the haciendas, destroying fences enclosing hacienda-occupied land, and re-distributing these lands to members of the indigenous commu­ nities. Guerrilla bands were soon formed, with Zapata assuming a leading role in the formation of the Ejército Libertador del Sur (the Liberation Army of the South). Zapata himself was of a ranchero family, essentially middle peasants. This conferred on Zapata the essential ‘tactical mobility’ that Wolf identifies as a crucial ingredient in ‘more than everyday’ peasant resistance. Additionally, Zapata had been exposed to the anarchist thought of Ricardo Flores Magón (and Peter Kropotkin) through a radical schoolteacher in the Morelos city of Ayala, Otilio Montaño. With the help of Montaño, Zapata prepared and, in November 1911, promulgated the Plan de Ayala, essentially a manifesto for the restitution to the peasantry and indigenous communities of land taken by the haciendas. This was in direct opposition to Francisco Madero, who, in his Declaration of San Luis Potosí of 1910, had formally started the Revolution by proposing, among other things, a programme of land reform. Initially siding with Madero against Díaz, Zapata was subsequently outlawed by Madero for failing to lay down his arms upon the overthrow of Díaz and the assumption by Madero of the presidency in 1911. The failure by Madero to follow through on commitments to land reform led Zapata to retain his arms and to propose his own Plan de Ayala. The key elements underpinning this peasant and indigenous uprising in the south of Mexico were, then, a deep sense of injustice and an increasing pre­ cariousness of existence wrought by expanding encroachments by haciendas

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onto the lands of these pueblos – this injustice and precarity needed to be redressed by the restitution to the indigenous and peasant communities of land so lost; the articulation of these demands by a ‘middle’ peasant leader­ ship with sufficient ‘tactical mobility’ to be able to raise its head above the quotidian preoccupations of the bulk of the peasantry; and the influence on this leadership of radical ideas (in this instance, principally of anarchism) conveyed and articulated by ‘organic intellectuals’ such as Magón and Mon­ taño. As Wolf (1973: 31) notes, ‘important as these ideological ingredients of the Zapatista movement were, however, the movement itself was primarily based on the peasantry, and fought for peasant ends. This was both its advantage and its limitation’. Thus, the peasant indigenous army essentially sought land, and once this ambition was attained, ‘all other issues seemed paltry in comparison’ (ibid.: 32). This constrained ambition, although crucial for the peasantry, meant this agrarian focus had limited appeal to other Mexican classes and class fractions which might have constituted allies in the cause. This was reflected in Zapata’s own lack of understanding of other classes, such as the industrial proletariat, and their needs and positionalities. Such a limited purview was compounded by the unwillingness of the Zapatistas to carry the insurrection beyond the bounds of their home state of Morelos. Furthermore, the agrarian struggle in Morelos was fought not primarily against foreigners, but rather against Mexican hacendados, such that it did not have an anti-imperialist complexion. There was, in this way, little common cause between the Zapatistas and Mexican ‘nationalists’, typically the nationally oriented bourgeois ‘sub-hegemonic’ class. When Zapata belatedly came to the realization, in 1917, that an alliance might have been forged with these anti-imperialist interests, ‘it came too late to prevent defeat at the hands of men of wider horizons and greater capability in building viable political coalitions’ (ibid.). We have seen that the other main centre of ‘counter-hegemonic’ activity during the Revolution was in the northern state of Chihuahua, the heartland of Pancho Villa’s rebellion. While Villa himself became sympathetic to the demands of the Zapatista Plan de Ayala, this orientation was not widely shared among his forces and allies, however. Wolf (1973: 36) notes that Villa ‘never carried on any wider land reform in areas under his control’. The decisive factor in this disinclination to undertake land reform Wolf attributes to the growing ‘bourgeois’ element within the ‘army of the north’ (División del Norte) itself, whereby seized hacien­ das, rather than being redistributed to peones, simply passed into the hands of Villa’s generals, who themselves then became hacendados and subsequently opposed any notion of reform: Thus Villa’s movement never undertook a viable land reform, in marked contrast to the Zapatistas. By March 27, 1915, the Villa delegates to the Revolutionary Convention of Aguascalientes even defended the tradi­ tional nineteenth-century rights of private property and the individual against the radical Zapatistas. (Wolf 1973: 36)

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Zapata and Villa’s forces did succeed in overturning the power of, first, the Díaz regime, and, subsequently, its ‘epigonous’ successor Victoriano Huerta. Nonetheless, they were themselves incapable of ‘capturing the state’ and insti­ tuting a new, counter-hegemonic order in Mexico. ‘Zapata, because he was unable to transcend the demand of his revolutionary peasantry, concentrated upon a narrow area of Mexico’ (Wolf 1973: 37), while Villa, as indicated, was already deeply compromised by ‘sub-hegemonic’ bourgeois interests. ‘Symbolic of this tragic ineptitude of both parties is their historic meeting in Mexico City at the end of 1914 when they celebrated their fraternal union but could not create a political machine that could govern the country’ (ibid.). Gilly (1983) comes to a similar conclusion. This ‘tragic ineptitude’ permitted the other contributors to the overthrow of the Díaz/Huerta regime, the Constitutionalist forces of the liberal ‘hegemonic’ Carranza and the ‘sub-hegemonic’ nationalist Obregón, to step into the breach. Carranza ‘hoped to fashion a state which would neither return to the despotic centralism of Díaz, nor go forward to the unsettling social reforms proposed by the radicals’ (Wolf 1973: 38), notably Zapata. Obregón, for his part, and like many of his peers from the north-western states of Sinaloa and Sonora, was strongly anti-imperial and, more specifically, anti-US due to the huge appropria­ tion of irrigable land by companies from north of the border following the con­ struction of railways in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This generated considerable antagonism among smaller Mexican commercial rural producers, who saw their own production and markets compromised by large-scale foreign ownership and export-dependency. As Wolf notes of Obregón: he was by no means a socialist, but favoured nationalist legislation and agrarian and labour reforms which would at one and the same time cur­ tail United States encroachment, break the power of the great landed families, and widen opportunities in the market for both labour and his kind of middle class. (Wolf 1973: 39) While the ‘hegemonic’ interests of Carranza were concerned only to overturn the ‘semi-feudal’ and autocratic elements of the Díaz/Huerta regime and introduce fully blown ‘free market’ capitalism, thereby resisting any further reform towards ‘counter-hegemony’ as demanded by Zapata, Obregón not only wished for nationalist measures in favour of ‘sub-hegemonic’ national bourgeois interests, but also appreciated that the hold of Villa and Zapata could be broken only by ‘promising viable reforms’ (Wolf 1973: 40). While the forces of Villa and Zapata remained strong until 1915, the Constitutionalists undertook a number of limited, albeit popular, reforms such as the abolition of debt peonage, actions which served to strengthen the hand of the latter while simultaneously detracting from the Villista and Zapatista causes. Addi­ tionally, and despite great reluctance on the part of the Carrancistas, an agreement was concluded between the Constitutionalist Army and the

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proletarianist workers of the Casa del Obrero Mundial headquartered in Mexico City, serving further to separate the proletariat from the peasantry (Morton 2013). Obregón also proved to be a superior military strategist vis-à­ vis Villa and Zapata once conflict had broken out between the Con­ stitutionalists and ‘counter-hegemonic’ forces. This culminated in the Battle of Celaya in 1915, at which the forces of Villa were ‘cut to shreds’ by the modern military equipment of Obregón’s army (Wolf 1973: 42). While the revolutionary war continued thereafter, ‘Villa never recovered from the blow suffered at Celaya, and Zapata found himself increasingly isolated in his mountain redoubt’ (ibid.: 43). From 1915, therefore, the Constitutionalist Army progressively gained the upper hand, with Obregón, in turn, pushing the Carrancistas onto the back foot. A constitutional assembly was convened at Querétaro in 1917, from which Villistas and Zapatistas (and Porfirianists) were barred. The resulting Constitution bore the clear imprint of Obregón’s ‘sub-hegemonic’ class inter­ ests, while also, in the mode of the ‘medial hegemony’ of passive revolution, making clear concessions to both the peasantry and proletariat. ‘Secular education, separation of Church and state, liquidation of the latifundium and land reform, wide-ranging labour legislation, and an assertion of eminent domain of the nation over resources within the country were all written into constitutional provisions that became the law of the land’ (Wolf 1973: 43). Among the concessions to subaltern classes were Articles 27 and 123 of the Constitution, the first recognizing the collective social and political rights of peasants and workers, the second relating to workers’ legal and social protection (Morton 2013). Zapata was assassinated in 1919 on the orders of Carranza, while Carranza himself then lost power and was assassinated in 1920. The Revolution, through the coalescence of anti-Porfirian forces in political struggle, achieved a transition to full capitalism, albeit of a peripheral variety in which the peasantry still retained widespread access to land, however inadequate such access might have been. ‘Sub-hegemony’ co-opted ‘counter-hegemony’ into a programme of reformist, nationally directed capitalist development. As Morton (2013: 47) notes, the Mexican Revolution, ‘in its contradictions, [was] the first passive revolution of the twentieth century in Latin America’.

The Post-Revolutionary Period and the Institutionalization of ‘SubHegemonic’ Interests Obregón then assumed the presidency, and proceeded to implement his ‘sub­ hegemonic’, national-popular programme of reform. In its ‘reformism’, this programme failed to fulfil the full demands of ‘counter-hegemony’ while, at the same time, remaining constrained by Carrancista interests. Thus, the abolition of peonage created the legal condition for free labour mobility, a central tenet of a full capitalist transition, ‘but there was no general redis­ tribution of land’ (Wolf 1973: 44), a key counter-hegemonic demand. Indi­ genous communities which had managed to re-appropriate their land from

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haciendas during the Revolution, as happened in Morelos, for example, were permitted to retain them. Moreover, communities which possessed clear legal title to land were also permitted to reclaim their holdings. A more generalized redistributive land reform was, however, too radical a step at this stage, and had to await the more congenial international conjuncture of the 1930s, under Cárdenas, for a ‘sub-hegemonic’ regime to break free of liberal (‘hegemonic’) interests and accommodate more ‘counter-hegemonic’ concerns. Under Obregón, labour legislation placed a degree of political leverage in the hands of an enlarged trade union movement, but only in exchange for clientelistic and subordinate relations with the government. Cautious reform and political consolidation under Obregón ‘made the government more able and willing to challenge the predatory American and British oil companies who operated on Mexican soil, and through the challenge to the foreign-owned companies also to call into question foreign influence in Mexico in general’ (ibid.: 45). Such a challenge to the imperial presence is very characteristic of ‘sub-hegemonic’ national-popular regimes. Yet this challenge at this time proved insufficient to overcome imperial counter-pressure, and Calles, who succeeded Obregón as President in 1928, was obliged to reverse the trend towards reform and nationalism – foreign capital was once again given preference to Mexican capital, and Mexico co-operated closely with the USA. This reversal proved to be short-lived, however. The policy of imperial preference stimulated strong nationalist reaction, and this took place in a rapidly changing global economic climate characterized by worldwide depression from 1929. The preoccupation of the imperial powers with their own internal problems, and the new trend towards nationally centred devel­ opment articulated by Keynesian thinking, enabled the new (sub-hegemonic) regime of Lázaro Cárdenas in 1934, to open ‘the sluice gates to initiate land reform and labour organization on a massive scale’ (Wolf 1973: 45). He dis­ mantled the power of the hacendados (at least ostensibly), redistributing their lands among the peasantry to an unprecedented extent. Before the Cárdenas regime, less than seven million hectares of land had been redistributed. Between 1934 and 1940, Cárdenas’s term of office, this more than doubled to some eighteen million hectares, with the majority of this area being granted to village communities under communal forms of tenure, known as ejidos. This served to fulfil both certain ‘counter-hegemonic’ demands for greater land access for self-subsistence, and the creation of a larger class of commercially oriented upper peasantry, the latter fomenting a ‘farmer-road’ to capitalism characteristic of national-popular ‘sub-hegemony’. At the same time, how­ ever, land reform was not so comprehensive as to grant to all the lower pea­ santry sufficient land for autonomous subsistence – a substantial percentage of the peasantry remained, therefore, a semi-proletariat, among other things migrating seasonally to urban centres and affording a low-cost labour force for industrial capital. Concurrently, that capital was increasingly Mexican, as the state began to encourage sectorally and socially ‘articulated’ development that was to culminate in a programme of import substituting industrialization

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during the 1940s and 50s. This later phase of national-populism began to deemphasize the counter-hegemonic elements of agrarian reform, however, starving the ejidos of funding while favouring privately owned commercial farms. At the same time, increasing importation of ‘cheap’ food from the USA as a subsidy to the urban proletariat, tended to undercut smaller com­ mercial Mexican food producers and to compromise the additional income that the middle peasantry might generate through the sale of surplus. In concluding his chapter on the Mexican Revolution in PWTC, Wolf nicely captures the nature of passive revolution as ‘medial hegemony’, or the emergence of capitalist reformism through the co-optation of ‘counter-hege­ mony’, and the neutralization of right-wing ‘hegemony’, to form ‘sub-hege­ mony’ (he did not, of course, employ this terminology, but his text clearly captures the meaning that these terms intend to convey). Initial success went to the peasant guerrillas of Morelos and the cowboy armies of the north, but final victory rewarded an elite which had created a viable army, demonstrated bureaucratic competence, and consolidated its control over the vital export sector of the economy. This elite also proved flexible enough to initiate agrarian and labour reforms demanded by the revolutionary generals within a larger policy of national economic progress, congruent with the interests of an expanding middle class of entrepreneurs and professionals. The result has been the formation of a strong central executive which fosters capitalist development, but is in a position to balance the claims of peasants and industrial workers against those of the entrepreneurs and the middle-class groups. (Wolf 1973: 47–48)

Cardenismo The absence of significant land reform following the Revolution and prior to the Cárdenas regime stimulated the rise of a radical agrarian movement in the state of Veracruz, led by the state Governor Adalberto Tejeda, who had also been a revolutionary general. This threat from the ‘counter-hegemonic’ left, exacerbated by the right-wing and pro-clerical Cristero rebellion in centralwest Mexico, encouraged the congress of the incumbent PNR (National Revolutionary Party, precursor to the Party of the Mexican Revolution, pre­ cursor in turn to Institutional Revolutionary Party) to select Cárdenas as its presidential candidate in 1933. Calles, the President, believed that Cárdenas’s record as an agrarianist (agrarian populist) during his period as governor of the state of Michoacán would neutralize the threat of radical Tejedismo in Veracruz (Otero 1999). Once elected to power, Cárdenas set about incorporating the mass organi­ zations of the peasantry and workers into the party of government, which now became the PRM or Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, partly to counter-balance the continuing power ‘behind the thrown’ of Calles. The

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incorporation of these organizations and their concomitant loss of indepen­ dence required, however, concessions by the new regime, the most significant being an agrarian reform on an unprecedented scale. In return, the peasant and worker organizations were enjoined to engage in ‘class conciliation’ in which the state was the ‘impartial mediator’ (Hamilton 1982; Otero 1999). Such absorption of ‘radicalism’ into ‘reformism’, or ‘counter-hegemony’ into ‘sub-hegemony’, represents a prime example, contra Morton (2013), of what we choose here to term ‘medial hegemony’. The bulk of land in prior land reform had been awarded to ejidatarios as plots to individual ejido members. Given Cárdenas’s commitment to redis­ tribute, inter alia, land of highly productive and irrigated haciendas to appease agrarian unrest, he felt obliged to retain the economies of scale of these economic entities in order not to disrupt the supply of agricultural raw materials and wage-foods to industry and the industrial proletariat. The result was the formation of collective ejidos in these circumstances, these having a similar status to producer cooperatives. (Such collectivization had a similar rationale to the comparable process under the Peruvian land reform [see below].) Eventually, some twelve per cent of ejidos took the form of collec­ tives (Otero 1999). While Cárdenas’s land reform ostensibly put an end to latifundismo, substantively this was not actually the case. Expropriation of haciendas came with the caveat that the hacendado could retain 150 hectares of his/her former (irrigable) land, selected by the owner him/herself. Pre­ dictably, this was invariably the most fertile and productive hectarage of the hacienda, but was termed, euphemistically, a ‘small property’ (pequeña pro­ priedad). Significant numbers of hacendados circumvented the land reform by selling the best parts of the hacienda in lots of 150 hectares to family members or former employees (termed prestanombres or name-lenders), thereby retaining effective control of much of the former domain (Otero 1999). In this way, Cardenismo symptomatically failed to eliminate the agrarian bourgeoi­ sie; rather, it served to create a more purely capitalist class of increasingly mechanized agro-exporters on the irrigated lands of the northwest and north of Mexico, whose principal market was (and continues to be) the USA. The great majority of redistributed land in the form of ejido, however, was awarded to individuals rather than collectives, these individuals (and their family members) having usufruct (and inheritance) rights to land which remained, however, the inalienable domain of the state. The vast bulk of land so awarded lay in the centre-south of Mexico, and was granted to the indi­ genous peasantry often in the form of plots that barely permitted families to meet their subsistence requirements, let alone produce a surplus for sale. The rationale for such redistribution was largely one of political legitimation in response to agrarian radicalism, but one which failed to address adequately the question of indigenous/peasant access to land for the purposes of sus­ tainable reproduction of families and community, or the long-term supply of the non-agricultural population with basic food staples. Its secondary pur­ pose, indeed, was to sustain or create a large class of semi-proletarians as a

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subsidy to Mexico’s growing industrial sector, which it achieved by this failure to redistribute sufficient land to the majority to enable production to support peasant families throughout the year. Ejidal land reform communities of individuals (as opposed to ejidal collec­ tives) were created in three ways: by restitución, by dotación, and by amplifica­ ción. The first method restored property to groups of campesinos whose land had been expropriated by others, usually hacendados, although the petitioning peasant communities were expected themselves to prove that they had once owned the disputed area. While the government had originally anticipated that restitución would comprise the most important means of redistributing land to ejidos, the widespread loss of ownership records during the revolution meant that this aspiration was to prove an impossibility (Thiesenhusen 1995). In the event, the principal mechanism by which ejidos were awarded was dotación, the outright endowment of land to a peasant community. This method accounted for some eighty per cent of Mexican land reform. Such communities, defined by a legal minimum of twenty campesinos, could peti­ tion for hacienda land where this was located within a seven-kilometre radius from their village. Peasant communities could request that the government expropriate parts of any holding over the legal limit of one hundred hectares of irrigated land to yield a total of twenty rain-fed hectares (or ten irrigated hectares) for every family in the petitioning community. In cases where more public land became available, or if more expropriable hacienda land were identified within the seven-kilometre radius, such land could be added to either dotación or restitución ejidal grants through a pro­ cess of amplificación (Thiesenhusen 1995). Where no claimable land was available, campesino communities could, at the discretion of the government, be awarded land in a centro de población, frequently on the forested frontier (entailing the need to clear land for farming). In the absence of available land either within the seven-kilometre radius or within a centro de población, campesinos were placed on a waiting list. This list was so long, however, that, once enrolled, the chances of ever securing land were quite remote. Petitions for land went first to the state government, thereby giving local power holders (caciques) inordinate power of patronage, since it was they who made the initial decisions concerning which haciendas should be expropriated and which peasants should benefit. Following the protracted process of expropriation claim assessment and land award by the government, the ejido in question was then expected to elect a governing council and individual ejidatarios could then begin farming legally. In the not uncommon event that insufficient land was available to supply each beneficiary family with the stipulated minimum of twenty rain-fed hectares, campesino recipients divided their land according to rules established by the ejido council. Unfortunately, this informal procedure meant that legal title to the resulting land parcels (título parcelario) could not be established. Thus, although such unofficial parcel holders were legally members of the ejido, their claims to land did not have legal status (Thiesenhusen 1995).

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In summary, the Cárdenas reforms eventuated in three main forms of land tenure: private land, including the hacienda remnants, or so-called pequeñas propriedades, ejidos (collective and individual), and a third, indigenous reser­ vations, or comunidades indígenas. The latter persisted in more remote areas and represented something of a continuity from the repúblicas de indios of the colonial period, with land being held legally on a collective basis.

Agrarian Structure and Change between Cardenismo and Neoliberalism The end of peasant-oriented agrarian reform occurred even before the end of Cárdenas’s term of office, however. In 1938 the emphasis shifted away from agrarian reform and towards an industrialization strategy through importsubstituting industrialization (ISI). Since industrialization required the importation of equipment and machinery from the imperium, large quantities of foreign exchange were required (Otero 1999). These could be generated only through a re-emphasis on capital-intensive export agriculture, undertaken almost wholly by the former haciendas, now the ‘small properties’ of capitalist farms located mainly in the north and northwest. The growth of capitalism, as ‘national developmentalism’, in Mexican agriculture following Cardenismo and up to the turn to neoliberalism from the 1980s and, especially, 1990s, was based on a small minority of producers operating capital-intensive, ‘modern’ farms and contributing the largest percentage of total agricultural production, albeit des­ tined primarily for export. The majority of producers, however, using traditional peasant and indigenous farming techniques on very small plots of land, pro­ duced the majority of nationally consumed food staples, while also functioning as a reservoir of cheap, semi-proletarian labour. Four principal categories of agricultural producers emerged from the era of Cardenismo: capitalist farmers, producing the bulk of food, but destined primarily for export; the ejidos, occu­ pying a greater area of land, but often of poor quality, and producing less food than capitalist farmers but comprising food staples for self-consumption and the domestic market; smallholding peasants in the non-ejidal private sector, usually occupying small parcels of land insufficient to support the family year-round and requiring family members to sell their labour power off-farm (comprising, therefore, a semi-proletariat); and the landless wage labourers (a proletariat or, more accurately, a precariat due to intermittent employment), often retaining an aspiration for access to land. Even before the advent of neoliberalism, which exacerbated precarity still further, this category comprised more than sixty per cent of the agricultural labour force. Together, the ejidatarios and the privatesector smallholding peasants comprise the Mexican peasantry (de Janvry 1981). Usefully, this peasantry can be further categorized in terms of: infra-subsistence; subsistence; stationary; surplus-producing; transitional (to entrepreneurial); and entrepreneurial (in effect, small commercial farms comprising categories of small, medium, and large) (CEPAL 1992; Otero 1999). The large-scale redistribution of land under Cárdenas and the breakup of semi-feudal haciendas definitively eliminated remnants of pre-capitalist class

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relations in Mexican agriculture (although, of course, non-capitalist relations of simple reproduction still prevailed among the majority of the peasantry and indigenous comunidades). Land redistribution increased the amount of cultivated land controlled by ejidos to forty-seven per cent, although much of this was of quite poor quality (de Janvry 1981; de Janvry et al. 1997). Despite such redistribution of land in favour of the peasantry, large capitalist farms emerged in the post-Cárdenas period as the economically dominant sector due principally to its strategic role in ISI. This might be construed to be a ‘farmer road’ to capitalism, albeit engineered by the state ‘from above’ rather than as a process of ‘organic’ differentiation. However, as we have seen, ‘broken up’ haciendas were often permitted to reconstitute themselves as agglomerations of ‘small properties’, so that to describe this sector as following a ‘farmer road’ (our Transition Type 1), at least in terms of outcome rather than perhaps in terms of differentiation process, seems somewhat inaccurate. Rather, we seem to have here the reconstitution of ‘Junker estates’ (our Transition Type 2), although operating on a very capital-intensive basis and employing relatively little labour. As noted, this sector was favoured by the state in its pursuit of ISI. The increased imports of capital and intermediate goods required for ISI had the potential to generate large balance of payments deficits in the absence of a focus on foreign exchange revenue through agricultural exports. Thus, agricultural exports, principally from the capitalist farms of the north and northwest, were the primary source of foreign exchange for the Mexican ISI programme throughout the 1950s and 1960s (de Janvry 1981). In this way, the large capitalist farms became the principal producers of exports, raw materials for industry, and luxury foods, such as coffee, fresh fruit, vegetables, cotton, and wheat, for the domestic market. By contrast, the peasant sector continued its traditional role as the primary producer of basic wage foods, typically corn, beans, and rice, the principal staples of the Mex­ ican diet. Due to state controls on the prices of these wage foods during the period of ISI as a subsidy to the proletariat and hence to industrial capital, the production of these crops was unattractive to capitalist farmers due to low profitability (Hewitt de Alcántara 1994). Due to the lack of state funding for the peasant sector, despite its role as principal supplier of these age foods, and exacerbated by the lure of export markets, the production of these staple commodities first stagnated and then declined during the 1960s. As a con­ sequence of this domestic neglect of wage food production, imports, especially of corn, began to increase rapidly during the 1970s and to assume an influx of tidal wave proportions with the advent of neoliberal policies. The bulk of such imports derived, and continues to derive, from the USA on the basis of gen­ erous subsidies to its own capitalist producers (Otero 2018), assuming the form, consequently, of commodity ‘dumping’. Beginning with low domestic prices for food staples under ISI and no compensatory support for peasant producers, and subsequently compounded by the influx of cheap imports, peasant production of wage foods has, at best, been taken for granted, and, at worst, been deliberately side-lined and undercut by the assumed ‘comparative

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advantage’ of the USA. The increased import of basic food staples has been accompanied by a commensurate increase in the export, by capitalist farms, of coffee, seasonal fruits and vegetables, and meat products, principally to the US market. In this way, Mexico, since the 1960s, and accelerating rapidly during the neoliberal era, has lost self-sufficiency in basic foodstuffs. Since two out of three of these basic foods were first domesticated in Mexico, and constitute the quintessence of Mexican cuisine and identity, this phenomenon has been not merely an economic, but also a nutritional and cultural, disaster for the country (see Galvez 2018; Otero 2018). This increasing reliance on Mexican capitalist producers for foreign exchange earnings and on imports to meet demand for basic food staples, mirrors the crisis of the Mexican peasantry, both in the ejido and private sectors. In fact, the ejidal sector could be said to have ‘flourished’ only during the Cárdenas regime. With the adoption of ISI and the emergence of large capitalist farms to finance it, the ejido almost immediately began to decline in importance (we have delineated elsewhere the almost impossible task for a peripheral state to build socially and sectorally articulated capitalism without the advantage, that accrued to the imperial powers, of drawing on the surplus derived from ‘super-exploited’ labour and resources in the periphery – this impossibility pivoting on the contradictory need to ‘deepen the market’ domestically while simultaneously needing to sell abroad cheaply, on the basis of ‘super-exploited’ labour and nature, to generate foreign exchange for industrialization). Between 1940 and 1950, the ejidal share of cultivated land declined from forty-seven to forty-four per cent, while its share of total agri­ cultural production fell from fifty-one to thirty-seven per cent (Hewitt de Alcántara 1994). While these figures improved somewhat between 1960 and 1970, they serve only to disguise the real crisis of the peasantry deriving from the poor quality of land distributed to the majority of peasants, and exacer­ bated by the limited areas to which most were entitled. Thus, according to 1960 census data, only sixty-six per cent of ejidatarios were able to secure, at most, half of their income from ejidal production – the vast majority was obliged to work as wage labourers outside the ejido. Moreover, thirty-four per cent were unable to cover half of their expenses by means of income from ejido production, with the bulk of income arising from non-ejidal wage labour (de Janvry 1981). Additionally, and despite the prohibition on the alienation and rental of ejido lands until the constitutional changes of 1992, there was a rising incidence of rental transactions between ejidatarios and capitalist farmers, with the most fertile part of the holding subject to rental. More marginal areas were simply abandoned (Hewitt de Alcántara 1976, 1994). These data indicate a very strong trend towards the semi-proletarianization of the ejidal peasantry during the post- Cárdenas era of ISI, one which has accelerated still further under neoliberalism (see below). This conforms over­ whelmingly to our Transition Type 3 (supply of labour by the subsistenceoriented family farm), while also comprising elements of Transition Type 2 (Junker Road and semi-proletarianization), and, more rarely, Transition Type

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4 (petty commodity production under capitalism) in respect of larger (‘tran­ sitional’ and ‘entrepreneurial’ according to CEPAL 1992) peasant units (see below). Turning to the non-ejidal, private sector peasantry, this has fallen into ever deeper crisis over the course of the post- Cárdenas era. The absolute number of these farms declined by thirty-nine per cent between 1950 and 1970, while the peasantry’s share of the total number of private-sector farms (including capitalist farms) fell from seventy-four to sixty-one per cent. Despite their continued numerical importance, these private-sector peasants occupied only three per cent of cultivable land and contributed a mere four per cent to national agricultural production in 1970 (de Janvry 1981; Hewitt de Alcán­ tara 1976, 1994). Due to the rapid decrease in the number of peasant hold­ ings, the average area of plot increased from 0.6 to 1.0 hectare, still nonetheless a tiny area and insufficient to meet the subsistence needs of the peasant family. This represents a process of differentiation among peasants (strictly speaking our Transition Type 1), but one that cannot lead to the emergence of significantly larger units because of the prior domination by capitalist farms. Thus, while freeholding peasants retained control of the lar­ gest number of landholdings in the non-ejidal sector, the actual area of land covered by these holdings was scarcely one per cent in 1970. By contrast, capitalist agriculture occupied nearly ninety-nine per cent of private sector agricultural land at that time. The food crisis in Mexico, emerging increasingly since the 1960s, was, and remains, simultaneously a crisis of peasant agriculture. Due to the neglect of the peasant sector and depressed prices under ISI, the area planted in corn, Mexico’s most important food staple, has declined since 1966. This has, in turn, necessitated the importation of this vital crop, principally from the USA, further depressing domestic production, deterring peasantry from pro­ ducing for the home market, and deeply compromising national food security. Since the objective of peasant producers is, as a priority, to grow corn (and other staples) for their own consumption, they are very reluctant to switch to other crops which might potentially be more remunerative, but at the same time risk greater market dependency. The artificially low price of corn, initi­ ally under ISI and later due to cheap imports, has devalued home production and compromised the possibility of gaining income through sales of surplus. This has generated an increased need to generate income from alternative sources, principally through the sale of family labour power (de Janvry 1981; Hewitt de Alcántara 1976, 1994). This general neglect of peasant production, and consequent food crisis, has been mirrored by the apparently inexorable rise of a precariat comprising, in the main, landless labourers. By 1970, some sixty-three per cent of the agri­ cultural labour force had no direct access to land and derived its subsistence primarily from the sale of labour power, a figure that has continued to grow since that time. As de Janvry (1981: 131) has noted, ‘despite some fifty years of agrarian reform, the largest percentage of the Mexican agricultural labour

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force is comprised of landless workers who are dependent on wage labour’. The most significant feature of this work force, however, is its precarity due to the lack of consistent and reasonably paid employment opportunities either in the agriculture sector or in the industrial and urban sectors, in stark contrast to the ‘secure’ proletarianization characteristic of the global North. The capitalist agricultural sector has continued to mechanize and therefore reduce employment opportunities, while ISI stalled from the 1960s and ceased to afford any prospect of large-scale or secure employment in industry. Thus, between 1950 and 1970, the average length of employment declined con­ sistently, while average real income for landless workers fell by forty-one per cent (Hewitt de Alcántara 1976, 1994). The great bulk of landless workers derived at this time (and continues to derive) from the peasant heartlands of central and southern Mexico, where ejidal and private-sector smallholdings are concentrated. Only a small per­ centage is able to find employment on the capital-intensive farms of the north and northwest, while in urban areas and industry demand for employment massively outstrips supply. Many landless labourers resort to the ‘informal’ sector, hawking wares alongside, and in competition with, large numbers of their peers. It is surely ironic that ‘the single largest source of employment for these labourers is perhaps the market for undocumented workers that exists in the United States’ (de Janvry 1981: 131), since it is the USA (in combination with the failed rural policies of successive Mexican administrations since Cárdenas) that bears principal responsibility, through its policy of food com­ modity ‘dumping’ from the 1970s, for the dire condition of Mexico’s peasant precariat (Galvez 2018; Otero 2018).

Neoliberalism: Semi-Proletarianization, Precarity, and Resistance From 1982, Mexican administrations began to abandon any lingering aspirations to ‘national developmentalism’, striving thereafter to eliminate direct state intervention in the economy, subsidies, and protectionism, and to promote ‘market forces’ (that is, the freer play of capital, dominated by transnational, imperial, corporations), international competition, and foreign investment (Otero 1999). While in part imposed by the imperially dominated international financial organizations, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, the balance of interest preference among Mexico’s capitalists had clearly also shifted towards greater export-orientation on the basis of ‘comparative advantage’, a ‘hegemonic’ rather than ‘sub­ hegemonic’ class orientation. A key element of neoliberalism (the ‘new imperialism’), and a requirement of one of its principal embodiments, the North American Free Trade Agree­ ment (NAFTA), was the Mexican agrarian reform of 1992, or the so-called ‘second agrarian reform’ (de Janvry et al. 1997). The three principal elements of this reform were: (1) ejido land could now be legally sold or rented; (2) responsibility for land redistribution no longer lay with the state but would be

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based on market determined principles; and (3) while the limit for individual landholding was retained (as noted, a hitherto formally rather than sub­ stantively observed requirement), corporations could now legally own up to 2,500 hectares, on condition that at least twenty-five individuals were legal associates and none held more than one hundred hectares (Otero 1999). These changes were encapsulated in the revision of Article 27 of the Mexican Con­ stitution, formally declaring an end to agrarian reform after some seventy years. This constitutional revision now permitted the privatization of ejido land, its rental and use as collateral for loans from private banks (thereby risking forfeiture), and promoted the formation of associations between eji­ datarios and private enterprises (Otero 1999). In their assessment of these profound changes, de Janvry et al. (1997) indicate a number of likely outcomes: a process of enhanced land concentra­ tion in fewer hands, as some peasants sell up; a continuation of peasant pro­ duction on the basis of greater self-exploitation and increased environmental cost; an obligation for additional family members, especially womenfolk, to seek out waged employment to make ends meet; an increase in the number of unemployed workers, enabling ‘market forces’ to replace ‘political mechan­ isms’ (that is, overt action by the state) as the principal means through which to exert downward pressure on wages (the ‘full’ implantation of capitalism as discussed earlier, and, in its peripheral form, marking a shift back to ‘mini­ mal’ from ‘medial’ hegemony); in turn, the attraction of new foreign direct investment on the basis of the super-exploitation of cheap labour power; in consequence, however, an excess of unemployed workers beyond the func­ tional needs of an ‘industrial reserve army’ for capital accumulation, likely compounding existing social tensions; and a decline in opportunities for offfarm employment, leading many peasants to take refuge in subsistence agri­ culture, even where this might entail greater monetary impoverishment. The analysis of the ‘second agrarian reform’ by de Janvry et al. (1997) also suggests that it is the ‘better-off’ fractions of the peasantry (the ‘entrepre­ neurial’ and ‘transitional’ types of CEPAL 1992) that are expanding by pur­ chasing land from the ‘worse-off’, many of whom are simply abandoning agriculture. There appears here, however, to be something of an historical paradox: neoliberal reforms are creating conditions for the modest emergence of an entrepreneurial peasantry, while also eliminating the ‘middle’ peasantry (CEPAL’s ‘surplus-producing’, ‘stationary’, and ‘subsistence’ categories), and confining large masses of rural dwellers to marginal conditions as ‘infra-sub­ sistence’ (semi-proletarian) producers (Otero 1999). The principal outcome of neoliberalism for peasants, therefore, is the intensification of semi-proletar­ ianization. De Janvry et al.’s study also indicates a huge dependence on non­ farm income, with 81.9 per cent of total income in the smallest farms coming from off-farm activities, including 46.7 per cent from wages and micro-enter­ prises, the remainder from migration (that is, also wages). Again, the primary trend is that of our Transition Type 3 (supply of labour through semi-prole­ tarianization), a modest process of peasant differentiation (Transition Type 1),

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and a consequent, but very limited, emergence of ‘entrepreneurial’ peasants (Transition Type 4) (see also Barros Nock 2000 for discussion of these trends). Otero summarizes well the impacts of neoliberalism on the Mexican peasantry: The result has been a decimated peasant economy, marked by increasing semi-proletarianization and a fragile capitalist sector incapable of providing full employment for agricultural workers. Thus, the most dynamically growing position in the rural social structure is that of semi-proletarian households. New agrarian struggles and the character of class organizations that emerge will depend on which political direction this semi-proletariat takes. (Otero 1999: 72) One of the most renowned manifestations of peasant and indigenous resis­ tance to neoliberalism is, of course, that of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) in the southern state of Chiapas, representing not simply an eponymous tribute to its revolutionary forebear, but a substantive response to issues of subaltern marginalization that remain, in significant respects, similar to those that Zapata himself confronted some eighty years earlier. It would be a mistake, however, to assume a direct continuity between the rise of resistance (qua EZLN) and putatively ‘intact’ indigenous/peasant commu­ nities such as were characteristic of Morelos in the years preceding the Revolution. The link in Chiapas is rather more indirect, even if the normative objectives of the EZLN, in essence land and territory for autonomous and collective ‘livelihood sovereignty’ (Tilzey 2018), strongly echo those of the original Zapatistas (see Barkin 2002 and Bartra and Otero 2005 for wider discussion). Thus, Chiapas, during the period of ISI, was the focus of a range of stateled development projects, which had the effect of attracting many indigenous/ peasant people into off-farm employment often connected with the energy industry (the state was an important source of petroleum and hydroelectric power). These new relations of production tended to undermine the ‘politics of rank-based forms of organization, based on community hierarchies’ char­ acteristic of the Mayan indigenous people prevalent in Chiapas, and put in their stead ‘the politics of class-based forms of organization’ (Collier 1994; Morton 2013). Nonetheless, this transformation spelled neither the complete demise of the peasantry ‘as a social class’ nor of indigenous (Mayan) identity as the basis for political agency (Nash 2001). Rather, the dominant form of livelihood strategy, as elsewhere in the southern and central states of Mexico, was the semi-proletarian one of mixing subsistence agriculture and waged employment. The collapse of Mexico’s oil-based ISI strategy in 1982, how­ ever, led to the increasing contraction of relatively secure off-farm work, meaning that a greater number of indigenous/peasant people had to spend longer periods of time on often inadequate plots of land, while still being

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obliged to seek wages off-farm from far less remunerative sources than their previous employment. ‘As peasants became further excluded from processes of capital accumulation and detrimentally affected by rapidly changing social relations of production, they began to embrace new forms of political orga­ nization’ (Morton 2013: 208). Drawing on the still important residues of communal peasant/indigenous and Mayan solidarity (Nash 2001), these forms of political organization emerged increasingly outside the ‘medial’ hegemony of the PRI, which was now relapsing into the ‘minimal’ hegemony of the neoliberalizing state (there are similarities here with the emergence of peasant/indigenous resistance in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Guatemala as a partial outcome of the continuing importance of indigenous institutions [see below]). As emphasized elsewhere in this book, it is important to ‘avoid the exclusion of class solidarities from other forms of collective agency, commonly asso­ ciated with ethnic, gendered, or racial identities… Hence the importance of recognizing how class content “subsists” in the mobilization of social move­ ments along with other identities’ (Morton 2013: 202; Foweraker 1995; Hellman 1995). This demonstrates the importance of Otero’s (1999) observation that it is wider relations of reproduction, embodied in solidarities such as indigenous communal identity, that are crucial to the process of political class formation. The increased precarity of peasant/indigenous people in Chiapas was brought to a head with the reform of Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution in 1992, paving the way for the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, and entailing, as noted, the privatization of the ejido sector. A significant result of the neoliberalization of the agrarian sector was the transformation of the way in which the institutional and social bases of peasant representation were articulated with the ejido (de Janvry et al. 1997; Morton 2013). With the pri­ vatization of ejido landholdings, the state made some attempt to compensate for its loss of direct political control, through ‘medial’ hegemony, by con­ structing alternative institutional organizations to re-establish capitalist class rule. This had to be in a more neoliberal mould, however, and, with increased reliance on the ‘dull compulsion of the economic’ as ‘minimal’ hegemony, could never comprise the consistent political interventionism of the PRI of the ISI era. Thus, attempts at political neutralization and co-optation of potentially insurgent peasantries were much more targeted and ‘projectized’ than before, but proved increasingly incapable of preventing the formation of autonomous forms of peasant/indigenous mobilization outside the ever-more senescent organizational structures of the PRI (Morton 2013). The formation of such autonomous forms of mobilization was assisted, again, by the collec­ tive solidarities arising from Mayan identity and tradition (and not excluding the ‘re-invention’ of such tradition) (Nash 2001). It seems no accident that it was the return to peripheral ‘minimal’ or ‘fractured hegemony’ of neoliberal­ ism, instantiated in the introduction of NAFTA in 1994, that caused the EZLN to come to prominence, the combined product of regional conjuncture,

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the failure of national development, and the subordination of Mexico inter­ nationally to the ‘new imperialism’. The sequence of events following the public emergence of the EZLN on 1 January 1994 (the first day of NAFTA) is probably too well known to bear repetition here (see, for example, Harvey 1998 for detailed account). It is perhaps more important to point to the substantive achievements of the EZLN in terms of alternative economic organization, including agroecologi­ cal production, self-sufficient educational projects, and healthcare provision, embodying a counter-hegemonic programme of meeting fundamental human needs on the basis of participative democracy, social equity, and ecological sus­ tainability. Thus, the EZLN have created, since 2003, five caracoles, or spirals, in a number of communities in Chiapas, based on five Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Committees of Good Governance) in an attempt to further redefine and assert autonomy on the basis of ‘alternative’ development. These caracoles are respon­ sible for undertaking legal, judicial, and economic policies across the spectrum of education, healthcare, justice, and development. ‘These non-market alter­ natives to the neoliberal model were an effort to create material conditions for the support-base communities to hold out, while inspiring a broader movement capable of changing state policies’ (Stahler-Sholk 2008: 123) (see also Morton 2013; Vergara-Camus 2014 for further detail). We have elsewhere (Chapter 2) delineated the key features of what might be termed the ‘new peasantries’ (differing significantly, however, from the sense employed by van der Ploeg 2008) – that is, their focus on ‘bottom up’ parti­ cipative democracy, the abrogation of ‘vanguardism’, the valuation of place, ethnic identity, and ecological sustainability, need to meet fundamental human needs by non-productivist means, and the denial of state centricity. There is a recognition, however, in contrast to agrarian populists and autonomist localists, that the successes that the EZLN have achieved are fra­ gile and that their wider implantation requires fundamental change to capi­ talist social property relations upheld by the state. This is indicated by the EZLN campaign launched on 1 January 2006, known as La Otra Campaña (the Other Campaign), in which a Zapatista delegation visited all of Mexico’s thirty-two states with the objective of constructing a programme of ‘struggle capable of constructing democracy from below along with national and international organizations resisting neoliberalism’ (Morton 2013: 229). Thus, it seems accurate to suggest that the EZLN strategy is one that lies between, or perhaps makes use of both, ‘horizontalism’, or changing the world through ‘anti-power’ (Holloway 2002) and ‘verticalism’, or ‘capturing’ the state as a means of political transformation through changing wider social property relations (Petras 2008) (see Morton 2013: 230; also Barkin 2002, Bartra and Otero 2005, and Vergara-Camus 2014 for wider discussion on the peasantry and autonomy). In other words, the EZLN seize opportunities to build and demonstrate counter-hegemonic alternative livelihood and governance struc­ tures in the spaces available to them at local level, while appreciating that this strategy is necessarily constrained by encompassing capitalist social property

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relations that themselves require subversion. Thus, local level caracoles are emblematic of the local level strategy, while La Otra Campaña is indicative of a national horizon of struggle (Morton 2013). This is equivalent to the ‘dual strategy’ of struggle undertaken by the likes of the MST in Bolivia, and alli­ ances of peasant/indigenous organizations in Ecuador (see below and Tilzey 2018). As Morton (2013: 203) suggests ‘what emerges, in conclusion, is an appreciation of the peasantry as a subaltern class that in the case of the EZLN also focuses on … processes of agency in contesting spaces of neoli­ beralism, and therefore the role that the peasantry still plays as a social class in the modern world’. Sadly, the condition of the peasantry, and the wider semi-proletarian precariat, has continued to deteriorate, despite the election to the Mexican Presidency, in 2018, of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, a centre-left candidate who may be seen to be part of the ‘neo-developmentalist’ pink tide trend in Latin America. Indeed, his emphasis, despite leftist rhetoric, appears to be still further economic ‘integra­ tion’ with the USA and Canada via existing trade agreements, in which large scale extractivism is seen to be the basis for ‘national development’. Again, this appears to be an increasingly desperate attempt to engage in primitive accumulation and ‘accumulation by dispossession’ as the basis for capital accumulation, with enhanced precarity and social discontent appeased by increased welfare disburse­ ments. As Barkin and Betancourt (2022) ask, however, ‘is extractivism in all its forms (mining, monocultural agriculture, intensive animal raising, aquifer drai­ nage, etc.) a necessary ill for national progress?’ They answer in the negative. The building of social equity and environmental sustainability ‘requires an unravelling of the ties of subordination and dependency being created by today’s model of primitive accumulation. In its place, a new model of an ecological economy – that puts the quality of life at its centre – is needed at every scale: local, national, and regional’ (Barkin and Betancourt 2022). Here, significantly, they point to the model pioneered by the Zapatistas (old and new) as the way forward, ‘a moment for the construction of Abya Yala, an indigenous term used by millions in the Americas to refer to their territories – a deep Latin America based on a model of endogenous, multicultural, and sustainable development’.

Note 1 This particular definition of class interest groupings is developed in Tilzey (2018, 2019).

References Barkin, D. 2002. The Reconstruction of a Modern Mexican Peasantry. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 30, 73–90. Barkin, D. and Betancourt, A. 2022. Integration with the United States or Latin American Independence?13 April. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/integration-uni ted-states-or-latin-american-independence.

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Barros Nock, M. 2000. The Mexican Peasantry and the Ejido in the Neoliberal Period. In: Bryceson, D., Kay, C., and Mooij, J. (eds.) Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Bourton-on-Dunsmore: Intermediate Technology Publications. Bartra, A. and Otero, G. 2005. The Indian Peasant Movement in Mexico: The Strug­ gle for Land, Autonomy, and Democracy. In: Moyo, S. and Yeros, P. (eds.) Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. London: Zed Press. CEPAL. 1992. Economía Campesina y Agricultura Empresarial: Tipología de Pro­ ductores del Agro Mexicano. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores. Collier, G.A. 1994. The New Politics of Exclusion: Antecedents of the Rebellion in Mexico. Dialectical Anthropology, 19, 1–44. de Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Balti­ more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. de Janvry, A., Gordillo, G., and Sadoulet, E. 1997. Mexico’s Second Agrarian Reform: Household and Community Responses. Transformation of Rural Mexico Series, No. 1. La Jolla, CA: Center for US-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. Femia, J.V. 1981. Gramsci’s Political Thought: Hegemony, Consciousness, and the Revolutionary Process. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Foweraker, J. 1995. Theorizing Social Movements. London: Pluto Press. Galvez, A. 2018. Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Gilly, A. 1983. The Mexican Revolution. London: Verso. Hamilton, N. 1982. The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico. Prin­ ceton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Harvey, N. 1998. The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hellman, J.A. 1995. The Riddle of New Social Movements: Who They Are and What They Do. In: Halebsky, S. and Harris, R.L. (eds.) Capital, Power, and Inequality in Latin America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Hewitt de Alcántara, C. 1976. Modernizing Mexican Agriculture. Geneva: UNRISD. Hewitt de Alcántara, C. 1994. Introduction: Economic Restructuring and Rural Sub­ sistence in Mexico. In: Hewitt de Alcántara, C. (ed.) Economic Restructuring and Rural Subsistence in Mexico: Corn and the Crisis of the 1980s. Transformation of Rural Mexico, No. 7. La Jolla, CA: Center for US–Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego. Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power: The Meaning of Revo­ lution Today. London: Pluto Press. Knight, A. 2002a. Mexico, The Colonial Era. Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knight, A. 2002b. Subalterns, Signifiers, and Statistics: Perspectives on Mexican His­ toriography. Latin American Research Review, 37, 136–158. Morton, A.D. 2013. Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Nash, J. 2001. Mayan Visions: The Quest for Autonomy in an Age of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Otero, G. 1999. Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico. London: Routledge.

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Otero, G. 2018. The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Petras, J. 2008. Social Movements and Alliance-Building in Latin America. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 35, 476–528. Stahler-Sholk, R. 2008. Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Auton­ omy Movement. In: Stahler-Sholk, R., Vanden, H.E., and Kuecker, G.D. (eds.) Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century: Resistance, Power, and Democracy. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Thiesenhusen, W.C. 1995. Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilzey, M. 2019. Authoritarian Populism and Neo-extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: The Unresolved Agrarian Question and the Prospects for Food Sovereignty as Coun­ ter-hegemony. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46, 626–652. van der Ploeg, J.D. 2008. The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization. London: Routledge. Vergara-Camus, L. 2014. Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism. London: Zed Press. Wolf, E.R. 1973. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. London: Faber & Faber. Wolf, E.R. 1982. Europe and the People Without History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

4

Revisiting Wolf on Cuba

Wolf, in PWTC, did not pursue his analysis of the Cuban ‘peasant war’ beyond the Revolution of 1959. Consequently, this period will be the main focus of our case study. The case study of Cuba is highly significant for our analysis for two primary reasons. First, the 1959 Revolution was the only example in the Americas where ‘peasant’ counter-hegemonic forces succeeded in overthrowing, in the sense of ‘social’ revolution defined earlier, capitalist social-property relations and in avoiding either subsequent co-optation into social democratic reformism (national developmentalism) or counter-revolution by capitalist and imperialist interests. We will reiterate Wolf’s own analysis as to the reasons for this revolutionary success, delineate to what extent this analysis conforms to our own, and identify through this synthesis what we consider to be the key factors underpinning successful ‘social’ revolution, at least as relevant to the era of ‘developmentalism’. Second, developments since the Revolution, most notably the huge strides in the elimination of poverty and social inequality, and, since the ‘Special Period’, the (tendential) transition to agroecology and food sovereignty on the basis of endogenous resources, hold vitally important lessons globally for the high relevance of the ‘peasant way’ vis-à-vis the imperative shift to ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ sustainability. We will explore these lessons further in the final chapter of this book.

Pre-1959 Cuba: Identifying the Conditions Underlying the Revolution Wolf, in PWTC, firstly identifies strong national and anti-imperialist senti­ ment as a key factor underlying the Revolution. He suggests that, prior to 1792 (the outbreak of slave wars in neighbouring Haiti and Santo Domingo), slavery in Cuba was small scale and ‘mild’. Between 1792 and 1821, however, the number of slaves on the island increased dramatically such that the intensification of slave labour following the period of ‘relative mildness’ ‘intensified the sentiment of opposition to the institution’ (Wolf 1973: 253). There also remained a large group of black people in Cuba who provided important leaders in the slave rebellions of 1810, 1812, and 1844. Addition­ ally, the relative autonomy of slave groups during the preceding centuries served to combine with the recency of massive slave imports to preserve DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-7

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significant African cultural independence in Cuba, as a precursor to the con­ solidation of national sentiment and solidarity. ‘The increased sentiment of national solidarity, sustained by a continuing sense of “Creole” heritage, and of opposition to slavery crested in the wars against Spain. The wars, in turn, reinforced them when early plots led to the Cuban war of independence in 1868’ (Wolf 1973: 254). After a negotiated peace in 1878, full-scale warfare broke out again in 1895. Despite suffering an estimated 400,000 casualties, in 1898 the Cuban rebels succeeded in depriving the Spaniards of control in most of the rural areas. At this point, however, the USA entered the war, effectively breaking the Spanish hold on the remaining cities. The US, however, refused to recognize the Cuban revolutionary assembly, an action which served ‘effectively to turn Cuban nationalism – with all the momentum gained during the prolonged struggle for independence – against the United States’ (ibid.: 255). As a result of subsequent US imperial and semi-colonial actions, sugar production came into complete domination of the Cuban economy, while Cuban domestic consumption was integrated into the larger market of the United States. It is no wonder that Cuban nationalists came to view the United States with bitterness and hatred … In this perspective, Cuban intellectuals long spoke of a ‘frustrated revolution’, frustrated by the United States. (Wolf 1973: 255) Second, and closely related to this subordinate, semi-colonial relation to the US between 1898 and 1959, Cuba suffered from an extreme form of sectorally and socially ‘disarticulated’ and distorted ‘development’, in which production, consumption, and land tenure patterns were highly skewed to the advantage of the US. The economy was dominated by sugarcane production, with sugar, the principal export, accounting for eighty-one per cent of the value of Cuba’s exports. High dependence on the US economy was entailed, with this accounting for two-thirds of Cuba’s international trade and seventy-five per cent of imports (Mesa-Lago 1994; Gonzalez 2003; Hanon 2020). Sugar pro­ duction occupied some twenty-five per cent of all agricultural land and sixty per cent of arable land (Raymond 2002), such that a high level of actual or potential food insecurity was entailed, representing the antithesis of food sovereignty. Moreover, some fifty-two per cent of sugar production was con­ trolled by US capital, and in the period immediately preceding the Revolu­ tion, US companies controlled not only the best agricultural land, but also the bulk of factories, banks and means of communication and transportation (Hanon 2020). US imperialism perpetuated and consolidated a highly unequal pattern of land distribution and land tenure. Thus, in terms of land distribution, 78.5 per cent of farms occupied less than two caballerías (27 hectares) and comprised fifteen per cent of agricultural land, while nearly three per cent of farms had

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more than thirty caballerías (402 hectares) and covered nearly fifty-eight per cent of agricultural land (Alvarez et al. 2006; Hanon 2020). Furthermore, in terms of land tenure, seventy per cent of farm units were occupied by people who did not own the land, such as tenants, sub-tenants, sharecroppers. Taking this into consideration, social inequality was greater than that indicated simply by land distribution – land tenure statistics suggest that just over nine per cent of landowners possessed 73.3 per cent of agricultural land, while 66.1 per cent of landowners had title to only 7.4 per cent (Chonchol 1963; Hanon 2020). With the majority of the rural population lacking title to land and suffering from precarious incomes, especially the proletariat or semi-proletar­ iat employed on the sugar plantations where wages were secure only during the four-month harvest period, seventy per cent of agricultural producers (including labourers) received only some twenty-seven per cent of income generated by the rural sector (Rodríguez 1987). Thus, for example, the max­ imum annual income of agricultural workers was less than 300 Cuban pesos (Alvarez et al. 2006). The majority suffered atrocious living conditions, with sixty per cent living in palm huts with dirt floors, lacking sanitary facilities such as simple latrines or running water. Electricity supply was extremely rare, with some eighty per cent using kerosene for light, with the remainder lacking any night-time illumination. Nutrition was poor, with only eleven per cent consuming milk, four per cent meat, and twenty per cent eggs, with pri­ mary staples being rice, beans, roots, and tubers. Education provision was also atrocious, with forty-three per cent being illiterate and forty-four per cent never attending school (Alvarez et al. 2006). Such high levels of poverty and inequality meant that, when the Revolution came, the incumbent government received very little support, while, at the same time, the majority of the rural population was willing to throw its weight behind the Castroist rebels. Lacking what Wolf termed ‘tactical mobility’, the impetus for revolution came not from this proletariat and semiproletariat, however, but, catalysed by ‘vanguardist’ intellectuals from outside, came rather from an ‘autonomous’ peasantry occupying the Sierra Maestra in the far east of Cuba. In order to understand this phenomenon, we need to have reference to regional variations in the structure of social-property relations in Cuba in the pre-revolutionary period. Thus, unlike the east, central and, particularly, western Cuba were characterized by a colono system of sugarcane production, whereby Spanish immigrants (heavy immigration from Spain was character­ istic between 1860 and 1890) were leased land by the centrales (company­ owned sugar estates), and paid a cash rent which was deducted from the colono’s sale of cane to the mill at harvest time. The mill owners often pro­ vided the colonos with the necessary credit for planting, cultivating, and har­ vesting the cane (Deere 2000). According to our typology of transitions presented in Chapter 1, this form of production could be described as petty commodity production under capitalism (Type 4), although colonos did not generally own their property. The average colonia (as sugarcane farms were

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called) in this part of the island was about forty hectares in size and was typically worked by family labour, relying on supplementary wage labour only during harvesting. Deere (2000) refers to these colonos, characteristic espe­ cially of western Cuba, as a ‘yeoman peasantry’. The eastern end of the island (not including the Sierra Maestra), by con­ trast, came to be dominated by US capital, with the construction between 1899 and 1916 of six large and modern centrales. These US sugar mills favoured not the ‘yeoman peasant’ land tenure structure of the west but, rather the renting of land to entrepreneurs of the professional classes (lawyers, engineers, for example) or to the rural petty bourgeoisie, who then employed wage labour to work their cane farms (this seems somewhat similar to the tripartite system of land tenure in Britain). The size of farms was here much larger than in the west, averaging 252 hectares in area (Deere 2000). These large colonia depended on wage labour (a proletariat) for most operations throughout the year. However, given the markedly variable demand for labour between harvest and non-harvest seasons, workers were usually under- or unemployed during the latter periods. Given lack of off-farm employment in this part of Cuba, workers were often given small plots of land for self-pro­ visioning purposes. Consequently, it could be argued, given this access to selfprovisioning land (however small and tenuous), that the labour force com­ prised semi-proletarians. As such, this land tenure system may be seen to conform to ‘Transition Type’ 2/3 in our typology. As Deere (2000) suggests, these regional differences in pre-revolutionary class structure and land tenure between a ‘yeoman peasantry’, on the one hand, and latifundia/proletariat, on the other, had a significant impact on the outcome of Cuba’s post-revolu­ tionary agrarian reform at the local level. Thus, in essence, peasant family farms came generally to comprise the private sector and co-operatives, while the latifundia, with their proletarian labour forces, came generally to comprise state farms. We will address these differences in the next section. The third main form of land tenure in pre-revolutionary Cuba was repre­ sented by the ‘autonomous’ peasantry of the far eastern Sierra Maestra. While technically conforming to Type 4 in our typology, this peasantry was quite distinct from the ‘yeoman peasantry’ of the west in that it was not market dependent. Its principal aim was to secure self-sufficiency in main food staple production, while selling any surplus or commodities produced for the market (for example, coffee) as a matter of opportunity not of compul­ sion. As such it conformed to Wolf ’s archetype of the ‘peasant’ as described in his Preface to PWTC. As Wolf notes, ‘the rural population surrounding the Sierra Maestra was quite different in character from the rural proletariat characteristic of most of Cuba’ (Wolf 1973: 270). Che Guevara commented on this different peasant profile in his discussion of ‘Cuban exceptionalism’: In fact, the Sierra Maestra, locale of the first revolutionary beehive, is a place where peasants struggling barehanded against latifundism took refuge. They went there seeking a new piece of land – on which to create

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Wolf’s Latin American Case Studies a modest fortune! … Concretely, the soldiers who belonged to our first peasant-type guerrilla armies came from the section of this social class which shows most strongly love for the land, and the possession of it; that is to say, which shows most perfectly what we can define as the petty bourgeois spirit. The peasant fought because he wanted land for himself, for his children, to manage it … (Guevara 1968: 29, quoted in Wolf 1973)

The ‘sierra peasants’, Guevara goes on to say (Guevara 1968: 203, quoted in Wolf 1973), did not have cattle and generally theirs was a subsistence diet. They depended on the sale of their coffee to buy indispensable processed items, such as salt. As an initial step we arranged with certain peasants that they should plant specific crops – beans, corn, rice, etc. – which we guaranteed to purchase. In summarizing the influence of severely disarticulated and distorted ‘devel­ opment’ on the conditions underlying the revolutionary impulse and its suc­ cess, we can, conforming to Wolf ’s analysis, point to the following salient factors related to social-property relations: �

�

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Severely disarticulated and distorted economy meant that no employment ‘safety valves’, or release from highly exploitative social relations, existed for the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat, especially away from the main urban centres. Rural areas were dominated by large, export-oriented latifundia using proletarian or semi-proletarian labour, so that the middle peasantry, except in the west (excluding the Sierra Maestra) was few in number. Thus, there was only a small peasant constituency of support for the status quo, but even this was very lukewarm since the ‘yeoman peasantry’ was highly market dependent (subordinate to centrales) and rarely pos­ sessed ownership of the land it farmed. However, this constituency was unlikely to engage in revolutionary activity unless directly threatened by, for example, loss of land. Moreover, the proletariat of the latifundia had itself little ‘tactical mobility’ and so could not foment revolution. Both constituencies were likely to lend support to revolutionary action only once that was set in train. It was the peasantry seeking ‘autonomy’ from latifundia in the Sierra Maestra which constituted a revolutionary agent and which lent active support to the ‘vanguardist’ Revolutionaries. This constituency was, or aspired to become, a middle peasantry, but was continually threatened since it comprised refugees from latifundia who continued to struggle against latifundism. In short, this peasantry was a threatened middle peasantry and, therefore, lent its ‘tactical mobility’ to Castro’s rebels. Because its autonomy was precarious, this peasantry lent support to the

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rebels since it appreciated that only a change in wider social relations of production, through capture of the state and the dismantling of depen­ dent capitalism and imperialism, would remove that precarity. The third factor underpinning the emergence of revolutionary action and its subsequent success, again identified by Wolf, was the absence of a sizeable, indigenous, Cuban capitalist class, the product again of imperial subordina­ tion and extreme disarticulated ‘development’. Wolf (1973: 260) notes that ‘the Cuban upper class, therefore, was incapable of developing an independent economic or political role’ outside the orbit of the USA, a class Castro described as a ‘lumpen bourgeoisie’. This weakness or absence of a nationally oriented bourgeoisie, while potentially reducing the strength of opposition to US imperialism (in contrast to national popular revolutions in Mexico, Boli­ via, and Peru, for example), also had the advantage that the radicalism of the Revolution, once secured, could remain undiluted by social democratic refor­ mism and liberal democracy (the general fate of national popular revolutions elsewhere in Latin America). The Cuban national bourgeoisie, to the extent that it existed at all, did seem, however, to lend its support to the rebels (ibid.: 272), but was insufficiently strong subsequently to prevent the dismantling of capitalist social-property relations. The fourth factor, encouraging generalized resistance against the status quo, and again an outcome of US imperialism and semi-colonialism, was the US support for the military ‘strongmen’ regimes of General Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) and General Fulgencio Batista (1934–1944, 1952–1958) and its opposition to the reformist regime (1933–1934) of Ramon Grau San Martín and the latter’s advocacy of agrarian reform and the nationalization of utilities. As Wolf notes, ‘the unwillingness of the United States to countenance any sub­ stantive change both within Cuba and in Cuba’s relation to US interests, created grave and realistic doubts regarding the capacity of any Cuban government to further the interests of the island as a whole’ (Wolf 1973: 264). The final factor in the success of the Revolution of 1959 was the absolute break with the USA after the overthrow of Batista – this undoubtedly, if perhaps counterintuitively, helped the Revolution to survive. As Wolf notes: If Cuba was to gain autonomous decision-making power over its own internal processes, it required an independent centre of power to effect these decisions. Such an independent centre of power could not persist if any of the contending interest groups within Cuba could form an effective alliance with power groups on the American mainland. The break with the United States may from this point of view have been indispensable to the victors if they hoped to reap the fruits of their victory. (Wolf 1973: 273) As we shall see in our other Latin American case studies, the Cuban Revolu­ tion inspired armed resistance with a strong peasant-base in many countries

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during the course of the 1960s particularly, including Guatemala, El Salva­ dor, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, fleetingly, Bolivia. Apart from Cuba, the greatest success, measured as ‘capture’ of the state by the armed resistance movement, was in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Con­ curring largely with Wolf’s analysis in PWTC, Wickham-Crowley (2001) identi­ fies the essential ingredients in the rise of these guerrilla movements, which in most cases assumed a ‘vanguardist’ form, with peasant unrest being fomented, articulated, and led by non-peasant ‘intellectuals’ and ‘outsiders’: first, an underlying condition of peasant anger and discontent associated with dislocation or precarity of the subsistence base associated with the transition to fully capi­ talist relations of production (threat of land loss, insufficient access to land, insecurity of tenure). Guerrilla movements gained little purchase in those areas where peasants had relatively secure tenure and adequate access to land, or in those situations where the peasantry had undergone a transition to a proletariat with relatively secure employment; second, the new presence of ‘mobilizers’ to articulate and foment this underlying anger and discontent – this seems in many cases to have been associated with the expansion in higher education and a severe shortage of appropriate employment opportunities for those newly quali­ fied – such individuals sought radical and often revolutionary transformation of a peripheral capitalist system still dominated by creole oligarchies. These peasant ‘mobilizers’ had to rely on ‘access to peasant resources’ to carry forward their radical programmes; third, the rise of guerrilla movements depended on the delegitimation of the incumbent government, commonly through the use of out­ right repression to suppress unrest and the absence of any mitigating measures, such as anti-poverty programmes, land titling, land reform, etc. Thus, govern­ ment repression used in isolation from any mitigation tended to favour the insurgents. It seems to be no accident that the two most successful revolutions occurred in states (Cuba and Nicaragua) with the two most repressive regimes in Latin America. The guerrillas in Cuba and Nicaragua could thus portray themselves in the eyes of the masses as the legitimate revolutionary alternative to outright repression, entailing a shift in mass loyalty away from the government and towards the insurgents. However, where direct competition of states and guerrillas for mass loyalties has occurred, the incumbent government has tended to be favoured – the longer-term tendency, therefore, has been for greater gov­ ernment use of strategic reforms (anti-poverty measures, land reform, etc.) in a targeted way (minimal hegemony) to undermine support for guerrilla move­ ments, or radicalism more generally. Thus, had the US been more conciliatory and lent its support to reformism, the Cuban Revolution might not have been successful.

Post-Revolutionary Agrarian Reforms of 1959 and 1963 The first agrarian reform law of May 1959 limited the size of all landholdings to 401 hectares, while guaranteeing all tenants (whether ‘yeoman peasants’

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[or arrendires], sharecroppers, or wage workers), the right to the land which they worked directly (Deere 2000). This included the distribution of land to producers who worked an area considered less than the minimum for family survival, determined at two caballerías (27 hectares) (Hanon 2020). (The October 1963 agrarian reform law further reduced the maximum size of landholding to 67 hectares.) The 1959 reform decree is estimated to have benefitted some 110,000 households nationally (MacEwan 1981; Deere 2000). The greatest number of beneficiaries from the agrarian reform in terms of private ownership of land were located among those who today comprise the peasantry, with nearly seventy per cent of these households having been granted title to land (not merely usufruct). This figure supports he contention that Cuba’s land-owning peasantry was (perhaps ironically given accusations of statism levelled against the country) largely created by the Revolution (Deere 2000). Path dependency, following from the regional variations in land tenure described above, meant that the independent, non-state sector pea­ santry was differentially located in the west of the country. By contrast, the latifundia, differentially located in the east, were not sub­ ject to radical parcelization but were, rather, converted into either co-opera­ tives (initially) or state farms (especially after the second land reform of 1963 [see below]), although workers were granted usufruct to plots for self-provi­ sioning and now had secure employment rights on those estates that became state farms. An intense debate ensued concerning the respective merits of co­ operatives versus state farms in these situations (with co-operatives, the state still owned the land and means of production while granting tillers full usu­ fruct rights; with state farms, the same applied, but tillers were employed by the state rather than being granted usufruct rights and independent decisionmaking capacity [state workers could still work their own small plots for selfprovisioning as a supplement to their employment]). Some, including inter­ national agronomic experts invited to provide advice, for example, Jacques Chonchol and René Dumont, invoked the merits of sense of ownership and participative decision-making characteristic of co-operative membership (Hanon 2020). The national leadership, however, including Castro, Guevara, and Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, favoured the promotion and consolidation of state farms, its principal concern being to obviate the emergence of inequality that might arise through the private distribution of income among the co­ operative membership to the disadvantage of the former proletarian work­ force. Indeed, this constituency was eager to secure the same working condi­ tions, salaries, and living standards as the new state farm employees (Vasconcelos 2015; Hanon 2020). While, initially, both state-run and co­ operative farms were established on the former latifundia either as state farms (Granjas del Pueblo) or as Cooperativas Cañeras (sugarcane co-operatives), in 1962 the latter were absorbed into the former (Mesa-Lago 1994; Hanon 2020). The first agrarian reform was intended to diversify Cuban agriculture away from heavy export dependency and mono-cropping, and towards food self­

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sufficiency and import substitution (Alvarez et al. 2006), in order to mitigate what was considered to be imperial dependency. It was also a response to the almost immediate cancellation by the USA, following the Revolution, of Cuba’s sugar quota. Unfortunately, the diversification policy soon began to encounter contradictions, perhaps most notably in relation to its imple­ mentation in tandem with a policy of income redistribution. In combination, these policies caused internal demand to exceed the domestic supply of food and other basic consumer goods, while reduced imports were the outcome of decreased sugar production that had previously funded them, together with the US economic blockade implemented from 1962 (Hanon 2020). These factors, together with the decision of the Soviet Union and other countries of Eastern Bloc to purchase Cuban sugar both in bulk and at long-term, pre­ ferential prices, led the country to reverse the agricultural diversification strategy, thus prolonging dependence on a monocultural farming system (Alvarez et al. 2006). Responding to these developments, a second agrarian reform was imple­ mented in October 1963 – this, as noted, reduced permitted private ownership of land to five caballerías (67 hectares) of land. This time, however, expro­ priated land was not redistributed to peasants and farm workers as before but, rather, to the state, so that state-farms now came to occupy some seventy per cent of agricultural land, with only thirty per cent privately owned (Deere 2000; Hanon 2020). This move to greater state control of land was in part a response to concerns that a fragmentation of land into privately owned mini­ fundios would lead to a decline in productivity (see below for parallel con­ cerns of the Peruvian military in its predilection for collectivized agriculture) and compromise egalitarian principles in deferring to the ‘anarchy’ of the market. Perhaps above all, this reflected the prevailing ideology of the time that the state sector represented a superior means of mobilizing the ‘forces of production’ and that agriculture should mimic industry, entailing the sub­ stitution of natural processes by agro-chemicals and fossil fuels. Here, the aim was to replicate the industrial agriculture of the global North, and especially the USA, while avoiding the problems of social inequality, through a statist productivism. In practice, this approach differed little from the drive to attain ‘articulated’ development espoused by the national popular regimes of, for example, Peru (see below). Here, questions of ecological sustainability and valuation of ‘traditional’ farming practices and ‘place-based’ knowledge were clearly either unheard of or of no consideration. In this way, the state assumed control of more than seventy per cent of agricultural land with a view to increasing both yield and productivity of cane production, especially. These objectives were, however, in accord with aspirations of the rural prole­ tariat who comprised the majority of the rural population (some 600,000 agricultural workers versus some 200,000 peasants), and whose primary demands were for improved wages and working conditions rather than access to land (Gonzalez 2003; Hanon 2020) (it is worth noting again that it is the uncertainty and precarity of waged employment that generates the principal

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desire for the security of land among a semi- or even landless proletariat). These aspirations of the rural proletariat were indeed met since, with natio­ nalization of latifundia, the state now guaranteed workers year-round employment, ending the pattern of seasonal unemployment that had caused so much misery before the Revolution (Deere 2000). With the signing, in 1964, of a long-term commercial agreement with the Soviet Union, Cuba was committed to specializing in the export of sugar in return for the import of machinery, oil, fertilizers, and agro-chemicals (Alvarez et al. 2006). The 1960s thus saw the consolidation of state enterprises into progressively larger units, with the state becoming increasingly focused on specialization of production based on plans compiled for each agricultural sector. ‘Integral’ plans were intended to encourage peasants in the private sector either to rent or to sell their lands to the state if located adjacent to state farms, while encouraging these peasants to become state wage workers. While peasants were occasionally pressured into leasing their land in this way, the integration of peasant lands into state enterprises was based primarily on material incentives, most particularly access to the modern facilities that the state was building on its farms. Thus, the state was constructing modern housing with electricity, water, and sewerage systems, primary schools, health posts, and day-care centres. Priority access to housing units, rent free, was given to pea­ sants who rented their land to the state. Between 1967 and 1971, at least 24,500 peasant farms were integrated into state farms, while additional pri­ vate land was acquired or purchased by the state as a result of deaths and lack of heirs (Deere 2000). It is evident that by the late 1960s, the Cuban leadership expected the pri­ vate sector to disappear, as peasants were predicted to abandon independent production for the security and modern production conditions of the state farms. Consequently, little effort was directed towards ‘modernizing’ private, peasant farming, which continued to rely (sustainably from an ecological perspective) on the ox plough, natural fertilizers, and family labour, while state farms (unsustainably from an ecological perspective) mechanized and increased use of fossil fuel and agro-chemicals. Despite this relative neglect (fortuitous for the future agroecological transition), private peasant producers nonetheless benefitted greatly from the wider rural development emphasis of revolutionary policy (Deere 2000). During the 1960s, thousands of rural schools and health posts were built, along with roads and rural electrification. Rural development of this kind sustained a certain level of trust in the state on the part of private peasant producers, even while it became increasingly apparent that most peasants had no intention of forsaking their independence and becoming integrated into state enterprises, let alone of becoming wage workers (Deere 2000). Growing awareness that most peasants would not voluntarily turn over their land to the state, and that the private sector needed ‘modernizing’, combined with the desire to control this sector more fully, finally led the Cuban leadership to reconsider the role of production co-operatives (Fidel

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Castro argued that there were two paths to socialist agriculture: state farms and collectivization – a statement of anti-ecological high modernism). Col­ lectivization, or the formation of production co-operatives, was to take place by peasants voluntarily pooling their private property in response to material incentives. At the First Congress of the Cuban Communist Party in 1975, the ‘Thesis on the Agrarian Question’ was adopted, stressing that the collectivi­ zation process was to be gradual and based on the voluntary decisions of peasants, adoption being dependent on the demonstration effect of successful production co-operatives (Deere 2000). The peasant association ANAP (National Association of Small Farmers) was given responsibility for pro­ moting the new production co-operatives, termed CPAs (Cooperativas de Producción Agropecuaria), and, at its 1977 national congress, it officially adopted collectivization as its goal (Deere 2000; Alvarez et al. 2006). From this point through to the mid-1980s was perhaps the highpoint of statist pro­ ductivism, when the aim remained the adoption of agro-industrial techniques, production and productivity increases, allied with income increases through a non-exploitative labour system. Towards the end of the 1980s, however, the ecological contradictions of this productivist model began to manifest themselves in the form of soil degrada­ tion, such as salinity, erosion, acidity, poor drainage, loss of organic matter, together with ground and surface water pollution, and biodiversity loss. These contradictions led to generalized decrease in yields, compounded by a dete­ rioration in other indicators of ‘efficiency’ (such as labour indiscipline, loss of work motivation, etc. as symptoms of top-down state bureaucracy and lack of participative commitment to production) in the main export crops within the state sector (Alvarez et al. 2006). Thus, while the Cuban leadership changed social-property relations such that ‘green revolution’ technologies were now deployed (in contrast to the capitalist world) to alleviate poverty and dis­ tribute wealth equitably in society, this model of productivist statism failed to anticipate the adverse ecological, social, and cultural impacts that would arise from agricultural intensification, specialization, export dependency, and rou­ tine the application of agro-chemicals and synthetic fertilizers (Gurcan 2014; Hanon 2020).

The ‘Special Period in Time of Peace’ and Subsequent Developments 1989 marked the beginning of a period of acute crisis in Cuba due to the collapse of the Soviet bloc, exacerbated by the decision of the USA, in 1992 and 1996, to tighten further its economic blockade of the island. Before this date, more than eighty-five per cent of Cuba’s trade was conducted with European ‘state socialist’ countries, with imports from the latter accounting for some sixty-six per cent of food stuffs, virtually all fuel, and eighty per cent of machinery and spare parts. With the onset of crisis, imports declined by seventy-five per cent between 1989 and 1993, affecting foodstuffs, spare parts, agro-chemicals, and industrial equipment (Alvarez et al. 2006; Clausen et al.

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2015; Palma et al. 2015). In particular, imports of synthetic fertilizers dropped by seventy-seven per cent, pesticides by sixty-six per cent, and petroleum, vital for both machinery and transportation, by fifty per cent (Gonzalez 2003; Koont 2008; Hanon 2020). Consequently, the agro-chemically dependent, and increasingly mechanized, agro-export sector, especially sugar, citrus, and tobacco, suffered a drastic decline in output, and, with this, a loss of foreign currency through which to fund imports. In particular, food imports declined by fifty per cent, cruelly exposing the ability of Cuba at the time to fulfil only some forty per cent of its population’s staple needs, a capacity that fell still further due to domestic food production’s largely ago-chemical configuration. In response, the Cuban state introduced a number of measures in agriculture and food production to reduce import and agro-chemical dependency including: the decentralization of the state farm sector through new organi­ zational forms and production structures; land distribution to foment pro­ duction of a diversity of crops in various regions of the country; the diversification of agricultural production; the production and use of biological pest controls and biofertilizers, and the adoption of agroecology; the sub­ stitution of animal traction for machinery; the promotion of urban, family, and community gardening movements (which often arose spontaneously without state stimulus); the opening of farmers’ markets under ‘supply and demand’ conditions (Alvarez et al. 2006; Palma et al. 2015). The government thus set about implementing a radical transformation of agricultural and food production in order to stimulate national food self-sufficiency on the basis of reduced, or eliminated, use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and hydrocarbon fuels, while protecting the achievements of the Revolution in terms of social equity, improved living standards, universal access to education and healthcare, etc. (Hanon 2020). From 1993, a ‘new agrarian reform’ was undertaken, entailing important changes to land tenure and management, the first since 1977. Many of the state farms were divided up into smaller, non-state Basic Units of Cooperative Production (UBPCs), a ‘mixed sector’ was introduced entailing, perhaps worryingly, joint ventures between the state and foreign capital, while unused state-lands were distributed in usufruct to new farmers (Alvarez et al. 2006). Overall, the state sector was reduced from some seventy per cent of cultivated land in the 1980s to only thirty-three per cent in the 1990s (Rodríguez 2011; Hanon 2020). Some ten discrete forms of agrarian organization, in three broad groupings, may be identified: the state sector; the non-state sector; and the mixed sector (Alvarez et al. 2006). In terms of the state-sector, we have seen that state ownership of arable land had shrunk to thirty-three per cent of area by 1996. The remaining workers in the state farm system became concentrated in strategic areas such as animal breeding, large-scale pig and poultry production, together with additional areas demanding heavy mechanization, specially qualified person­ nel, and new technologies. Such areas tended to remain productivist and sta­ tist. Included in the state sector are also farms owned by the Ministry of the

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Interior (MININT), the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FAR), and the Young Workers’ Army (EJT), a part of the FAR. These farms provision their respective organizations, while also selling surplus through state-owned wholesalers. Additionally, many factories, workplaces, and public institutions such as hospitals, schools, and office buildings were granted unused lands for provisioning their own cafeterias and selling to their employees at reduced prices, with such self-provisioning land considered part of the state sector (Alvarez et al. 2006). Perhaps the most significant development for state-sector land during the ‘Special Period’ was the creation of Granjas Estatales de Nuevo-Tipo (GENTs), or new-type state farms. While GENTs are owned completely by the state, worker cooperatives are founded on them and assume increasing financial and management responsibilities over time. Cooperative members undertake a contractual arrangement with the state, whereby both profit and risk are shared between the state and the worker cooperative. The state assumes ultimate responsibility for the farm, however, while workers are assured a minimum salary. These provide the wider parameters within which there is considerable flexibility for individual GENTs and, depending upon the degree of responsibility assumed by worker cooperatives, a GENT may successfully transition to a UBPC (Alvarez et al. 2006; Rodríguez 2011). With respect to the ‘non-state’ sector, two forms of production are char­ acteristic, the larger being collective production in which land is worked jointly by all cooperative members, with management decisions being taken on a democratic basis. The smaller comprises individual production, whereby each plot of land operates according to a ‘family farm’ model, although most farmers also have membership of cooperatives through which access to credit and services are secured, enabling the purchase of inputs in bulk and the sale of produce collectively. In such circumstances, it is only production itself that remains subject to individual decision making. Cutting across both forms of production are two principal types of land tenure – private and usufruct. The first ‘non-state’ form of production is represented by the Agricultural Production Cooperatives (Cooperativas de Producción Agropecuaria or CPAs; see above). As we have seen, these comprise the traditional revolutionary form of cooperative production constituted in 1977 by farmers voluntarily uniting their private lands and resources for enhanced production and mar­ keting purposes. Having suffered something of a decline during the 1980s, CPAs underwent a certain revival during the Special Period, as new members joined, attracted to farming by the benefits of this form of cooperative pro­ duction in terms of income, access to affordable food, and, to some extent, housing. While CPAs had existed since 1977, the 1990s saw the creation of a new type of cooperative, the UBPC, formed, not by the socialization of pri­ vate property as with CPAs, but, rather, through the bestowal by the state of usufruct rights over property and infrastructure. Here the state bestowed farm­ lands, free of charge and broken down into smaller units, to cooperatives in permanent usufruct. Additionally, the state sold other means of production,

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such as buildings, machinery, tools, etc. on favourable terms, so that these then became the private property of the cooperative. The bulk of production from UBPCs is subject to negotiated prices based on a state-determined quota system, while surplus is sold at farmers’ markets at prices established by supply and demand. Here we can see that the ‘market’ operates as opportunity, not as compulsion, with state management of quotas operating to serve food security purposes and insulating farmers from the anarchy of market dependency. By 1997, UBPC farmers comprised the most important and largest group of pro­ ducers in the agriculture sector, occupying forty-two per cent of farmland (Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas 1997; Alvarez et al. 2006). Finally, within the category of the ‘non-state’ sector, there are individual small farmers (peasants) operating on the ‘family farm’ model – these fall into three main types. First, there are farmers who have private ownership of their farms but who are members of Credit and Service Cooperatives (CCS), this comprising the largest group of individual producers. In 1997, there were 2,709 CCSs, comprising 159,223 individual farmers and occupying 11.8 per cent of agricultural land (Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas 1997). In CCSs, while farmers (peasants) work and own their land independently, they com­ bine in order to receive credit and services from state agencies. CCS members purchase inputs and sell products at fixed prices through state agencies in accordance with production plans and contracts agreed with state distribution systems. Surplus production additional to the contracted quantity may be sold in farmers’ markets at free-market prices. Thus, again, farmers (peasants) are given security through state guaranteed prices, state quotas and fixed prices ensure food security for the wider population, while farmers are given an incentive to produce more where feasible through the ability to sell onto markets as an opportunity (not as an imperative). Second, there are dispersed individual farmers (peasants) who are not members of cooperatives. Third, there are the individual farmers who do not have private ownership but who have received land in usufruct from the state. This third grouping was first established in 1993, when individual farm families were granted up to twenty-seven hectares of land in free and perma­ nent usufruct for the purpose of cultivating speciality crops such as coffee, cocoa, and tobacco. This form of land tenure has proved popular, with the number of these usufructuarios having increased from zero in 1993 to 43,015 in 1996 (Lage 1996; Alvarez et al. 2006). This trend has been complemented in urban areas by the granting of small plots of land (0.25 hectares) to indi­ viduals for the cultivation of food for self-consumption and for neighbours. The positive results of this latter initiative, taken up with enthusiasm by urban populations (seventy per cent of Cuba’s population is urban), led the govern­ ment in 1994 to turn this into a national strategy for food security with the creation of the Urban Agriculture Department within MINAG (Ministry of Agriculture). A national programme of urban agriculture was thereby initi­ ated, assuring access to land for urban populations, provision of advice to new producers, and support for research and development of organic and

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agroecological techniques (Hanon 2020; Romero-Vázquez 2021). By 2017, urban agriculture was able to produce fifty per cent of the vegetables and condiments grown in Cuba (Companioni et al. 2017; Hanon 2020). Finally, there is a ‘mixed sector’, comprising joint venture enterprises with foreign companies in, for example, the citrus export industry, while other export commodities have received some financing from overseas, such as rice, cotton, and tomatoes. It is important to emphasize, however, that only state enterprises can accept and use foreign capital, with a proscription on relations between private producers and foreign capital. The latter is designed to obvi­ ate the socio-economic differentiation that has the potential to arise were such relations to be permitted. Since the ‘Special Period’, a number of new measures has been introduced to enhance national food self-sufficiency. In 2008 and 2012, the government granted state-owned land in usufruct to more than 170,000 peasants and 2,600 cooperatives with the result that, by 2015, land in the ‘state-sector’ had been reduced to 25.1 per cent from 35.8 per cent in 2007 (Palma et al. 2015; Hanon 2020). There has thus been a progressive decentralization and ‘des­ statization’ of food production and decision-making (self-management) since the beginning of the ‘Special Period’, and continuing thereafter. The opera­ tion of the ‘market’ under such circumstances is contained both by the rela­ tively egalitarian (and state-regulated) distribution of land and income (preventing the development of tendencies towards monopoly and mono­ psony), and by the state regulation (‘socialization’) of the market itself through quotas, guaranteed minimum prices, guaranteed wages, while still encouraging initiative through the ability to sell surplus on an opportunistic basis onto farmers’ markets, for example. The state has, therefore, sought to find a delicate equilibrium between meeting the key social objectives of soci­ alism (fulfilling fundamental needs for all) and avoiding the anarchy of the market, while still promoting local initiative, responsibility, and self-manage­ ment to facilitate sustainable agricultural production increases. These trends appear to embody a different approach to socialism that helps to vitiate the centralism, bureaucracy, and statism of ‘actually existing socialism’ by privi­ leging communities’ and workers’ participation in production decisions and income generation, while retaining state regulatory capacity and control to secure fundamental social needs through strategic economic coordination. Indeed, these trends appear to represent important moves towards a ‘social and solidarity’ economy in which ‘self-managed’ agents (individuals, families, and cooperatives) pursue use-value creation and community well-being in collaboration with, and supported by, the state, while abrogating competitive relations premised on exchange-value creation and unlimited capital accu­ mulation (Coraggio 2011; Betancourt 2018; Hanon 2020). The state thus continues to play a central role in the distribution of resources, the creation of synergies between different actors, and the establishment of a general frame­ work through which communities and workers are able to actively participate in the production of use values to meet social need (Hanon 2020). The latter,

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while reliant on the creativity and self-motivation of these groups, depends for its full realization through continuing synergy with, and support from, the state in its establishment of conducive social-property relations, material and technical assistance to farmers and gardeners, and the funding of research and extension services. Thus, the state, rather than ‘withering away’, appears to be needed to play a continuing central role in, inter alia, obviating the emergence of inequality, such that the appropriation and redistribution of wealth within self-managed and decentralized organizations needs to be complemented by a redistribution policy undertaken by a central authority. In Cuba, it is recognized that the establishment of self-managed organizations, while helping greater participa­ tive democracy and economic decision-making at the local level, does not in itself guarantee extra-organizational social responsibility, use-value creation, and community well-being. Such self-managed organizations, such as coop­ eratives, could become parochial and self-interested at the expense of addres­ sing wider social needs. The state thus appears to remain vital in its strategic coordinating role between decentralized organizations, securing a low level of inequality, promoting inter-community reciprocity, generating the framework for the autonomy of self-managed organizations while ensuring their broader adherence to the socialist project of fundamental need satisfaction, social equity, and ecological sustainability – in other words, reciprocity, cooperation, solidarity (also with non-human nature), and collective responsibility (also for non-human nature) (Hanon 2020). While the peasantry, located differentially in the western part of Cuba, was a beneficiary of the Revolution as we have seen, it suffered relative margin­ alization until the 1990s by comparison to state farms. Nonetheless, peasant producers were respected and supported by the state by means of organiza­ tions such as ANAP, enabling them to continue living and producing as independent landowners. Their relative insulation from the productivism and statism that was characteristic of state farms enabled the continuation and reproduction of peasant knowledge and capabilities that became invaluable during the Special Period. This surviving knowledge, along with alternative agricultural techniques that the state had been supporting through research funding, enabled Cuba to undergo a transition towards (although one that is by no means yet complete) a more decentralized, food security oriented, and lower input agriculture encompassing a plurality of forms of production such as urban farming, agroecology, permaculture, cooperative production, and, of course, ‘peasant’ cultivation itself. This process succeeded in increasing national food security on the basis of reduced or eliminated agro-chemical inputs, envir­ onmental degradation, external dependency, and fossil energy consumption. Household income has improved, growth in economic inequality has largely been avoided, while decentralization towards ‘self-management’ has facilitated more participatory and less alienating production relations, with greater work­ ers’ control and empowered communities as structures for collective action (Clausen et al. 2015; Palma et al. 2015; Hanon 2020).

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Cuba represents what is probably the closest example of a transition from an agro-export model to one premised on national food self-sufficiency, rela­ tively equitable distribution of food, and (to a significant degree) ecological production (Alvarez et al. 2006). The key elements in this ‘successful’ (albeit enforced) transition were: 1

2

3

Access to land by the rural majority. Cuba’s second land reform, break­ ing up collectivized state farms into smaller, cooperative and individual production units, was possible because of the earlier expropriation in the 1960s of landlords and latifundia. The de facto protection from food ‘dumping’ from the imperium afforded by the US trade embargo, provided, perhaps ironically, conducive condi­ tions and incentives, through high prices determined by the state, for farming to survive the crisis. Coordinated and consistent state support for the transition to agroecology and national self-sufficiency through credit, research, extension, education, and a highly organized rural sector that made the rapid dissemination of change possible, together with the existence/provision of agroecological technology both from accumulated peasant knowledge and from scientific institutions, enabling the country to extricate itself from dependence on imported inputs and food (Alvarez et al. 2006).

Another part of the transition entailed, as we have seen, support for urban and suburban producers and the utilization of ‘idle’ land to both boost pro­ duction and engage more people in agriculture (Romero-Vásquez 2021). Pro­ duction and distribution are primarily managed by the state: agricultural inputs and machinery are only commercialized through the state, and food is distributed via a ration system, although surplus is now permitted to be pri­ vately commercialized as well. Recent research (Romero-Vásquez 2021) has cast some doubt as to how thoroughgoing this ‘transition’ has been, however, and whether it constitutes a real ‘paradigm shift’ to agroecology and food sovereignty. Romero-Vásquez points out that on the majority of land, priority is still given to sugarcane, cocoa, coffee and cattle since this generates ‘hard currency.’ This represents a divergence from the prioritization of use value to support agroecology and food sovereignty. In relation to production practices, Romero-Vásquez also highlights how Cuba’s support for ecological production methods sits along­ side an ongoing dedication to industrial production methods. In relation to the former, she states: ‘In Cuba, agroecology is officially adopted as an input substitution tool, rather than as a fundamental change in the paradigm of nature-human relations, a systemic transformation of food systems, or a political stance against the capitalist model of production’ (ibid.: 244). In other words, the Cuban state appears to remain, in important respects, wedded to productivism and developmentalism in which ‘agroecology’ is invoked essentially as a technocratic tool where large-scale production is

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construed as inapplicable or not cost-effective (e.g. where heavy labour input is required/available). She goes on to note: in this sense decentralization is only a reformist approach that does not touch the overall power of the State, which in socialist terms needs to cease to exist and transition to new forms of governance … The auton­ omy, or otherwise, of entities such as the cooperatives is a key factor, as they represent the possibility of having real self-governance and steps towards a new vision of socialism, in which the collective governance is built from below in a real sense, rather than being a confirmation of the leadership’s decisions as happens with the process of consultation on matters that have already been decided by the leader. (Romero-Vásquez 2021: 259) Romero-Vásquez makes the following very important observation about the need for fundamental change to wider social property relations as a pre­ requisite for a transition to agroecology and food sovereignty: This brings to the fore the key political fact about the development of Food Sovereignty-Agroecology in Cuba, that is, about having access to land, which has been secured not only because of the leadership’s will to redistribute some land at this time, but also because the Revolution, as a collective endeavour, took over political and economic power, so that the majority of the economy was nationalized and above all regained control over the majority of the land and put it towards the collective good. In this scenario, what [urban agroecological] producers call for was not necessarily land – or land titles – but for the next steps in the Revolutionary transformation … (Romero-Vásquez 2021: 262–263) Perhaps the key conclusion here is that the Revolution was vitally important in transforming social property relations towards more collective control, but was subverted by state centralization and developmentalism – ‘real’ socialism requires radical devolution and democratization of power, together with the radical ecologization of the means of production, although, as we have poin­ ted out, it appears necessary for the state to retain an overall regulatory and coordinating role between decentralized institutions. As such, the Cuban example does take us a significant way towards what we would consider to be necessary to secure agroecology and ‘radical’ food sovereignty, and it is an example of how it is possible to provision a nation with nutritious food on a more or less ecologically sustainable and equitable basis, while also fulfilling fundamental human needs according to the UN Human Development Index (see WWF 2006). The support for agroecology in Cuba, however, was forced rather than deliberate, and has not yet been embraced fully as a ‘paradigm shift’ by the state, while, additionally, the democratic element of food

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sovereignty remains to be fully realized. The legacy of heavy state centricity and ‘old-school’ vanguardism thus still weighs heavily on Cuba, although certain democratic deficits must be considered in the context of the historical and ongoing threat to the Revolution posed by the US imperium (see Campbell 2021). Additionally, this must be balanced against the considerable strides that have been made towards empowerment and ‘self-management’ on the part of decentralized organizations, cooperatives, and individual produ­ cers, affording important prerequisites for the ‘social and solidarity economy’ (Betancourt 2018).

References Alvarez, M., Bourque, M., Funes, F., Martin, L., Nova, A., and Rosset, P. 2006. Surviving Crisis in Cuba: The Second Agrarian Reform and Sustainable Agri­ culture. In: Rosset, P., Patel, R., and Courville, M. (eds.) Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform. Oakland: Food First Books. Betancourt, M. 2020. The Effect of Cuban Agroecology in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift: A Quantitative Approach to Latin American Food Production. Global Environmental Change, 63, 102075 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloevcha.2020.102075. Betancourt, R. 2018. Social and Solidarity Economy and the Transformation of the Cuban Economic Model. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 10, 209–229. Campbell, A. 2021. Imperialism and the Transition to Socialism in Cuba. In: Herrera, R. (ed.) Imperialism and Transitions to Socialism. Research in Political Economy, volume 36. Bingley: Emerald Publishing. Chonchol, J. 1963. Análisis Crítico de la Reforma Agraria Cubana. El Trimestre Económico, 30, 69–143. Clausen, R., Clark, B., and Longo, S.B. 2015. Metabolic Rifts and Restoration: Agri­ cultural Crises and the Potential of Cuba’s Organic, Socialist Approach to Food Production. World Review of Political Economy, 6, 4–32. Companioni, N., Rodríguez-Nodals, A., and Sardiñas, J. 2017. Avances de la Agri­ cultura Urbana, Suburbana, y Familiar. Agroecología, 12, 91–98. Coraggio, J.L. 2011. Economía Social y Solidaria: El Trabajo antes que el Capital. Quito: Abya Yala. Deere, C.D. 2000. Towards a Reconstruction of Cuba’s Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization, De-Peasantization, and Re-Peasantization. In: Bryceson, D., Kay, C., and Mooij, J. (eds.) Disappearing Peasantries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Bourton-on-Dunsmore: Intermediate Technology Publications. Gonzalez, C. 2003. Seasons of Resistance: Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in Cuba. Tulane Environmental Law Journal, 16, 685–732. Guevara, E. [‘Che’]. 1968. Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War. New York: Monthly Review Press. Gurcan, E.C. 2014. Cuban Agriculture and Food Sovereignty: Beyond Civil-Society Centric and Globalist Paradigms. Latin American Perspectives, 41, 129–146. Hanon, I. 2020. Cuba, Agriculture, and Socialist Renewal. International Journal of Cuban Studies, 12, 196–227. Koont, S. 2008. A Cuban Success Story: Urban Agriculture. Review of Radical Poli­ tical Economy, 40, 285–291. Lage, C. 1996. Informe al IV Pleno de Partido Comunista de Cuba. Granma, 26, 3.

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MacEwan, A. 1981. Revolution and Economic Development in Cuba. London: Macmillan. Mesa-Lago, C. 1994. Breve Historia Económica de Cuba Socialista: Políticas, Resul­ tados, y Perspectivas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Oficina Nacional de Estadícas. 1997. Estadícas Agropecuarias: Indicadores Sociales y Demográficos de Cuba. Havana: ONE. Palma, I.P., Nahed Toral, J., Parra Vázquez, M.R., Fonseca Fuentes, N., Guevara Hernández, F. 2015. Historical Changes in the Agricultura Development of Cuba. Journal of Cleaner Production, 96, 77–84. Raymond, P. 2002. Vers une Nouvelle Orientation pour l’Agriculture Cubaine? Tiers Monde, 43, 579–598. Rodríguez, J. 1987. Agricultural Policy and Development in Cuba. World Develop­ ment, 15, 23–39. Rodríguez, J. 2011. Notas Sobre la Economía Cubana. Havana: Instituto Cubano de Investigación Cultural Juan Marinello y Ruth Casa Editorial. Romero-Vásquez, G. 2021. Exploring Suburban Agroecological Agriculture and its Con­ tribution to Food Sovereignty in Socialist Cuba. PhD thesis, Coventry University, UK. Vasconcelos, J.S. 2015. Propiedad Colectiva en Debate: Caminos de Revolución Agrária en Cuba. Revista NERA, 18, 240–258. Wickham-Crowley, T. 2001. Winners, Losers, and Also-Rans: Towards a Comparative Sociology of Latin American Guerrilla Movements. In: Eckstein, S. (ed.) Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wolf, E.R. 1973. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. London: Faber. WWF. 2006. Living Planet Report 2006. Gland: WWF. Retrieved from https://wwfeu. awsassets.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report.pdf.

Part III

Other Case Studies of Peasant Resistance in the Periphery

5

Latin America

The Colonial Period Latin America was integrated into the world ‘economic’ system from the six­ teenth century, at a time when mercantilism (‘merchant capitalism’) was the dominant form of inter-state ‘economic’ relation (in reality as much ‘political’ as ‘economic’ as we have explained earlier). This was as an adjunct to feudal/ absolutist social-property relations in Europe, where, as Wolf points out in EPWH, industrial capitalism was yet to emerge (although agrarian capital­ ism, as we have seen, was emerging in England). Two distinct patterns of settlement emerged during the colonial period (sixteenth to early nineteenth centuries), their respective distributions depending largely upon labour avail­ ability and biophysical production conditions in relation to demand flowing from Europe (largely concerning luxury items for conspicuous consumption or minerals, notably gold and silver, that could directly enrich the coffers of the absolutist states). First, of relative insignificance in Latin America and thus in marked contrast to North America, agricultural colonies were foun­ ded in temperate areas such as the River Plate (Argentina and Uruguay), southern Brazil, and Chile, where production conditions were ecologically similar to those of Europe and where indigenous labour availability was minimal. The colonists in these areas were independent settlers seeking to escape adverse social and economic conditions in Europe, much like those who colonized New England in North America. The great majority of colonization was undertaken, however, for the pur­ pose of the exploitation of mineral wealth and/or the production of ‘exotic’, and initially luxury, tropical and sub-tropical agricultural goods, notably sugar, cotton, and cacao undertaken by wealthy or politically powerful gran­ tees of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns. Both mining and plantation sys­ tems required plentiful supplies of cheap labour, which could be supplied by the indigenous Native American populations only in those areas character­ ized by pre-Columbian hierarchical, ‘tributary mode’ societies (confined essentially to the Andes and to Mesoamerica). Elsewhere, ‘tribal’ or ‘kinordered’ societies were incapable of supplying the required quantities of labour after an initial period during which their populations were decimated DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-9

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and often exterminated (as in Cuba and Hispaniola for example), and, thereafter, workforces in these areas had to be heavily supplemented by enslaved people imported from Africa (Wolf 1982). However, direct enslave­ ment of Native American populations, the most direct method of securing cheap labour, was proscribed by the Spanish crown from 1528 and slavery was abolished outright in 1542 (except in frontier zones). Rather, a substitute mode of exploitation was found in the encomienda system, by which an elite group of settlers was initially awarded (‘commended’) temporary grants of trusteeship over native populations (Gibson 1966; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). An encomienda permitted the recipient to employ stipulated amounts of ‘Indian’ tribute and labour in his (the recipient was invariably male) own service, in return for Christianizing the indigenous people in question. A grant of encomienda did not, however, bestow on the encomendero rights over ‘Indian’ land or unlimited rights to ‘Indian’ services. Rather, the Spanish Crown sought to reserve for itself these rights, hoping to interpose its royal officials between encomenderos and native populations (Wolf 1982). After 1542, encomenderos were indeed required to petition a royal official if they wanted to have indigenous labourers assigned to them for specific tasks. This mode of labour allocation came to be known as repartimiento. In Mesoa­ merica, however, it continued to be referred to by the Mexica/Aztec (Nahuatl) word for obligatory labour on public works, cuatequitl (Gibson 1964), and in the Andes it continued to be called by the Quechua (Kichwa) term mita (Wolf 1982). However, over time encomienda came to imply full control over the indigenous population, the latter becoming enserfed to all intents and purposes (in effect, encomenderos simply replaced the upper echelons of the pre-Colum­ bian hierarchy of the Incan and Aztec empires). Under encomienda, and building on the pre-Columbian system of surplus extraction, the ‘lower orders’ of the indigenous population were legally obliged to pay tribute in labour services or in kind to the new European elite. Thus, from this early date, class came to be defined along lines of ethnicity, with elites defined almost exclusively as Eur­ opean, a class of intermediaries (functionaries, tradespeople, gang-masters, etc.) as mestizos (of ‘mixed-blood’), and the mass of the ‘classes of labour’ as indi­ genous ‘peasants’. While encomienda was in theory intended to protect Native Americans from slavery, the reality was rather different – many were brutally exploited in mines and plantations, and, combined with the impacts of European diseases, indigenous populations declined catastrophically. Plantation systems were established in those areas having potential for large-scale monoculture of high-value tropical products for export, with sugarcane representing the most important crop for the first three centuries of colonization (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). The production of this crop entailed usually the importation of African slaves, and given the ‘extra-eco­ nomic’ nature of labour control entailed in production, together with the precapitalist character of the social formations which the plantations supplied (the feudal/absolutist/mercantilist states of early modern Europe), these enterprises could not be described as capitalist, pace Frank and Wallerstein.

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In those areas inappropriate for plantation production (and outside areas still occupied by kin-ordered and less hierarchical societies), the hacienda system gradually replaced encomienda, as indigenous populations continued to decline. Gradually, the trusteeships of encomienda were thus superseded by haciendas, landed estates worked by indigenous labourers bound to the estate and dependent directly upon the estate owner, either a Spaniard or one of Spanish descent (Gibson 1966; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). As we have seen, a grant to an encomienda could not, legally, produce a hacienda (again, encomienda grants were royal donations that neither gave rights to land nor permitted the grantee to define the terms of indigenous labour services or tribute) since the hacienda, by contrast, was founded centrally on legal own­ ership of land and upon the ability of the owner to negotiate directly the terms of the labouring contract. However, a highly variable transition tran­ spired over time from encomienda to hacienda since the Spanish Crown pos­ sessed insufficient personnel and resources to thwart the latter’s growth, while predial landowners (hacendados) in full control of land and labour were better positioned than encomenderos, dependent on royal officialdom, to respond to the demands of town and mine for food (Wolf 1982). Thus, while encomienda had merely granted encomenderos the right, at the Crown’s discretion, to levy tribute from the indigenous population, essentially continuing on from pre-Columbian modes of surplus extraction (albeit more severely enforced and extended to mining activities), the hacienda system introduced more direct forms of labour control (Florescano 1984; Morner 1984). Thus, pre-capitalist systems of serfdom or bondage were established, designed to entrap servile indigenous populations on the holding under con­ ditions of increased labour scarcity. These became established throughout the Andes and the upland areas of Mesoamerica, nominated variously as huasi­ pungaje, inquilinaje, and yanaconaje in the areas, respectively, of present-day Ecuador, Chile, and Peru, for example. Production on the hacienda was directed towards a self-sufficient supply of food, fibre, and other agricultural goods, along with some commercial production for export to the colonial mining and administrative centres, and to the European market. These were essentially feudal relations of bondage between European hacendados and their indigenous serfs. Most of the hacienda workforce was, in this way, recruited from the indi­ genous population, to the extent that this had survived the severe depreda­ tions of disease. Typically, this workforce was granted access to a portion of hacienda land in return for stipulated labour services and deliveries in kind to the hacendado. Hacendados reserved for themselves the casco (or centre, not dissimilar to the demesne lands of mediaeval England and France) containing the most fertile land, the strategic supply of water, and processing machinery, leaving to the indigenous serf-tenants the poorer and more peripheral lands of the estate for subsistence farming (Wolf 1982). The hacienda thus came to be based on a dual structure of commercial crop farming in the casco and pre­ dial servitude by serf-tenants. These were essentially pre-capitalist social

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relations, whereby the labour force was obliged by extra-economic means to work on the hacendado’s casco at no cost to the latter, while the hacendado would appropriate the full proceeds of the resulting commodity sale (Flor­ escano 1984; Morner 1984). The potential growth of haciendas was limited by the size of effective demand and by the essentially extractive nature of the enterprise, in which increased output was secured, where feasible, by reinfor­ cing existing means of labour exploitation and not by investing in innovative productivity and yield boosting techniques and tenancy arrangements. Haciendas could function profitably only where they could sell in a secure but restricted local or regional market in which legal constraints and scarcity guaranteed price levels. Many haciendas incurred debts overtime, and were consequently sold on, increasingly to ecclesiastical bodies whose interests were not primarily focused on profit-making (Wolf 1982). Towns and mines became surrounded by haciendas, while these, in their turn, were encompassed by settlements of the surviving Native American populations. This spatial structure was organized by the pre-capitalist poli­ tical economy it embodied, in which each lower level yielded surplus to the level above it. Miners sold to merchants, who extracted high prices for Eur­ opean manufactured goods, thereby making a profit by buying cheap and selling dear. Mine owners then exerted downward pressure on hacendados or their managers (majordomos) to supply them with foodstuffs and raw materi­ als at low prices. Hacendados then exerted extra-economic pressure upon the indigenous communities, drawing their members either into dependent serftenancy on the estates or into seasonal employment at low wages. Within this hierarchy, the indigenous communities came to occupy the lowest rung of this racially structured class system (only slaves of African origin were considered to be inferior to Native Americans) (Wolf 1982; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). The Spanish referred to these indigenous communities as repúblicas de indios. Wolf notes that anthropologists have often treated these entities as if they were pristine repositories of a pre-Hispanic past (Wolf 1982: 145) – yet these communities were given organizational form by the colonial bureau­ cracy as integral components of the Spanish state and its system of feudal/ tributary relations, with mercantile exchange as an adjunct to these. In establishing the repúblicas de indios, the Spanish Crown was pursuing a dual purpose: to fragment the pre-Columbian apparatus of power; and to ensure the separation and fragmentation of the resulting jurisdictions. While the destruction of the overarching Inca (Tawantinsuyu), Mexica (Aztec), or Chibcha (Muisca) polities permitted the re-emergence of some older claims to rule and loyalty, the outcome, in general, was the replacement of preColumbian states by small tributary lordships and local communities. The upper echelons of the indigenous hierarchy were assimilated formally into the Spanish nobility and were confirmed in their claims to tribute, prop­ erty, and pensions – they were deprived, however, of any access to executive power functions within the structure of the colonial state. Their conversion to

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Christianity also ensured their ideological severance from their indigenous former ‘subjects’, together with their integration into the structures of the Catholic church. The lower orders of the indigenous nobility – principales in Mesoamerica, kurakas in the Andes, and caciques more generically – were charged with the supervision of the repúblicas de indios and acted as repre­ sentatives of the latter to the Spanish authorities. At the same time, these caciques strove to maintain their internal jurisdiction through the exercise of traditional claims and loyalties (Wolf 1982; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). Wolf (1982: 146) emphasizes that the communities supervised by these caci­ ques were not the same as those existing prior to the Spanish conquest. Many pre-Columbian communities had been virtually extirpated by the virulence of European-introduced diseases in the aftermath of the conquest. The repúb­ licas de indios, consequently, were established through the aggregation of population remnants ‘concentrated’ for closer administrative and ecclesias­ tical control. This Spanish policy of ‘concentration’ and resettlement reconfi­ gured the character of these local ‘communities’, with each awarded a legal identity, comprising its own administrative council, or cabildo, and local church dedicated to a patron saint. They were also redefined socio-econom­ ically, being accorded rights over village lands and resources while being obliged to yield up tribute in kind to the Crown, in goods and services to the Spanish trustee (encomendero) and to the indigenous lord (kuraka, cacique, or principal), and obligatory labour on government projects (Wolf 1982:146). Royal officials, or corregidores de indios, supervised the indigenous admin­ istrative sector comprising the repúblicas de indios. Special ‘Indian courts’, or cortes de indios, were established to process legal cases brought by repre­ sentatives of the indigenous communities. The Spanish Crown’s original intention in setting up this administrative structure was to segregate indigen­ ous and Spanish populations. The cortes de indios were soon inundated, however, with complaints by the communities against Spanish rulers who conspired to appropriate indigenous lands and water supplies as part of their haciendas. Moreover, the community indigenous elite of kurakas/principales responsible for managing the resources and obligations of the repúblicas de indios often sought to augment their own power by colluding with the Span­ ish power holders. The corregidores were, in turn, in a privileged position to benefit commercially from their administrative offices (Wolf 1982: 146). The repúblicas de indios, then, were not internally unitary and undifferentiated. While defined racially and ethnically by the Spanish as an ‘underclass’, they were themselves class-divided between the mass of ‘commoners’ and the kur­ akas/principales/caciques. A community might, at any one time, unite under its local indigenous lord in opposition to the attempted appropriation of land by hacendados, or, on another occasion, the kuraka/principal might insinuate himself into the Spanish hierarchy, thereby abetting the exploitation of other indigenous community members supposedly entrusted to him (indigenous lords were invariably male). In short, the repúblicas de indios were dependent parts of a larger structure of social-property relations. They constituted

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neither ‘tribal’ remnants of the pre-Columbian past, nor a static type of pea­ sant community characterized by a set of fixed attributes (ibid.: 148). The Hispanic state granted them rights to land and revenue, yet obliged them to yield up tribute and labour as part of their political obligations. Such rights were often demonstrated to be impotent in the face of predatory hacendados, corregidores, and ecclesiastics. Occasionally, and increasingly towards the eighteenth century, culminating in the Andes in the uprising of Tupac Amaru rebellion of 1781 (Tupac Amaru II himself being a kuraka), heavy exactions drove the indigenous communities to non-cooperation, rebellion, or flight (Gibson 1966). As we have seen, indigenous communities were permitted to govern themselves through their civil-religious hierarchies, with kurakas/prin­ cipales at the apex of the repúblicas de indios. The latter might defend the community against external authorities and competitors, or they might, equally, aggrandize themselves at the expense of their supposed dependants or betray their interests to outside power holders. Indigenous communities, through these multiple exactions, ‘paid with their poverty for the system of imperial extraction’ (Wolf 1982: 149), extraction undertaken, at this stage, on a pre-capitalistic basis through essentially ‘extra-economic’ means.

Political Secession from the Iberian Powers: From Feudalism to Peripheral Capitalism These systems of domination through slavery (plantations) and serfdom (haciendas) remained essentially intact until the nineteenth century. The absolutist/feudal colonial states of Portugal and Spain had been in long-term decline particularly vis-à-vis the rising capitalist powers of Britain and, during the nineteenth century, the USA. The continuing feudal exactions, and restrictions on the exploitation of indigenous land and people, and trade by the Iberian crowns proved in this new context to be a source of particular frustration for creole (that is, New World-born Europeans) merchants and landowners, who perceived new opportunities for wealth accumulation through increased trade with the Anglophone world, particularly. Political independence for the bulk of Spanish America (with the exception of Cuba and Puerto Rico) secured during the third decade of the nineteenth century coincided with the global hegemony of the industrial capitalist power of Britain (independence being in fact facilitated covertly by Britain in the form of military and financial assistance). We have suggested in our companion volume that Britain initiated the first international capitalist food and trade regime from the 1840s (Tilzey 2018), and this resulted in the division of the world into industrialized ‘core’ and primary-product-exporting periphery. This was true of Latin America, which became increasingly peripheralized as it focused down on the export of primary commodities during the ‘free trade’ (1840–1870) and ‘imperial’ (1870–1930) eras. As noted, this division was reinforced by the structural changes that occurred in the ‘core’, especially from the 1870s, entailing the concentration and centralization of capital, and

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resulting in imperialist attempts to capture high rates of profit through direct investment in the periphery (Lenin 1964; Marini 1974; de Janvry 1981). Thus, during much of the nineteenth century and for the first three decades of the twentieth, Latin America was integrated into the global process of accumulation principally as agro-exporter (but also as mineral-exporter) to the global Northern ‘core’. Exchange of its products was subject to asymme­ trical relations with Europe and North America, however, with ‘free trade’ with Britain implying the competitive elimination of incipient manufacturing on the part of national bourgeoisies, while imperial relations, especially with the USA in the Caribbean and Central America, implied direct political intervention by the North, in collaboration with domestic agrarian oligar­ chies, to impose draconian forms of labour control and exploitation, premised on absolute surplus value and/or the suppression of labour remuneration below its cost of reproduction (Marini 1974). European capital investments in Latin American agriculture were focused principally on the processing, mar­ keting and transportation of temperate products for export, while the USA concentrated its investments in the production of tropical commodities, notably sugar plantations in the Caribbean and banana enclaves in Central America (de Janvry 1981). The USA in fact expelled the Spanish from their remaining colo­ nies in Cuba and Puerto Rico in the closing years of the nineteenth century, and occupied those islands as part of its imperial expansion. In this way, the patrimonial and authoritarian peripheral state, ruled by combinations of creole conservatives (agrarian oligarchy) and liberals (mer­ chants and comprador bourgeoisies), and land tenure systems dominated by plantations and haciendas, facilitated the European (particularly British), and later US, accumulation process, generating in the nineteenth century indus­ trial capitalist development in the core as part of the ‘old imperialism’ invol­ ving the exchange of primary commodities (underpinned by cheap labour) for manufactured goods (Marini 1974; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). Given the abundance of land vis-à-vis people and the conditions of super-exploitation of the labour force, the only means by which the hacienda or plantation system could function and expand (under conditions of expanded market relations with non-Iberian Europe and the USA) was through the use of overwhelming force and total state control. The internal structure of the hacienda/plantation was founded on a closed social system in which all of the rural labour force interactions took place within the landholding and with the ‘patron’ (the landowner, almost invariably a creole) or his overseer or manager (often a mestizo), in this way isolating the commonly indigenous or mestizo subaltern labouring class from any outside interaction that might stimulate unrest, rebellion, or flight (Florescano 1984; Morner 1984). In order to retain sub­ altern classes involuntarily within this allegedly ‘paternalistic’ and closed social system, violent coercion was routinized, indiscipline was arbitrarily punished, and protest was savagely repressed with exemplary violence. At this time, these were, then, still pre-capitalistic and unfree relations of production/exploitation, although they had now become ‘articulated’ with

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fully capitalist productive relations in the ‘core’, rather than being subject, as formerly, to the feudal/absolutist social formations of Portugal and Spain. Within the context of these new market opportunities, hacendados and plan­ tation owners resorted to increased coercion and total control as a means of maximizing exports and trade, securing thereby a supply of labour under conditions of an unfavourable land/people ratio (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). Thus, the system of ‘feudal’, ‘paternal’ or ‘reciprocal’ relations identified by Scott (1976) and others was, in fact, little more than a façade disguising forced labour, a form of control impelled by the desire of most subalterns to secure their autonomy by acquiring their own plot of land sufficient for selfsubsistence (an enduring demand, as we shall see, on the part of the middle and lower peasantry). In the cases of both plantations and haciendas, the peripheral state, holding a virtual monopoly over the means of violence, was vital in enforcing the prevailing social-property relations and severely con­ straining the formation or reproduction of an independent peasantry, which would have required access to land sufficient for self-subsistence. The pea­ santry lived, in effect, in a ‘functionally dualistic’ relation to the plantation/ hacienda, constituting a huge reserve army of labour, subsisting on tiny plots of land adjacent to the large production units of the oligarchic landowner (under conditions of ‘feudal’/coerced labour such as dominated during this period prior to the 1930s, the peasantry were ‘internal’ to the estate; only subsequently, when peasant labour became ‘free’ with the introduction of capitalist social relations, did the peasantry become ‘external’ to the estate, now with legal title to their plots [inadequate as most were from the per­ spective of self-subsistence]). The peasantry was employed only during plant­ ing and harvesting, subsisting for the remainder of the year on their miniscule plots, enabling the landowner to reduce the cost of the social reproduction of labour to below its real value. The peripheral state at this time was very much an instrument of the oli­ garchy and imperial capital – in this sense and in this historical conjuncture thus conforming more to Miliband’s (1969) conceptualization of the ‘instru­ mental’ state rather than to Poulantzas’s (1978) notion of relative state autonomy, the latter conforming more to the archetypical liberal democratic state of the global North). It was, thus, a ‘comprador’ institution, with its activities directed towards facilitating the movement of capital and the export of commodities to the imperium, together with the repressive policing of the predominantly peasant workforce (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). State policing of the hacienda/plantation was essentially local, however, bolstered by the national military only in instances of threatened or actual uprising by the peasantry. The intention generally was to pre-empt any such rebellion by maintaining a ‘closed social system’ in which subaltern classes interacted only with the patron or his representatives, thus minimizing external and ‘politi­ cally contaminating’ contacts with the outside world. This situation is cap­ tured well in writings such as Icaza’s Huasipungo (first published in 1934) and represents the context described by Wolf in his Conclusion to PWTC, wherein

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‘traditional’ relations between landlord and peasant are progressively dis­ rupted by the ‘first round’ incursion of ‘North Atlantic’ capitalism. As imperial relations intensified during the latter part of the nineteenth century and during the first three decades of the twentieth, tropical produc­ tion sites for commodity export to the USA or Europe multiplied and com­ petition intensified. With this, working conditions deteriorated and rental exactions increased, and new lands were expropriated from untitled indigen­ ous producers through primitive accumulation. Such ‘market’ dynamics led to intensified class conflict between plantation owners/hacendados and peasants in which, once again, the state played a crucial role in suppressing unrest and preventing the latter from pursuing livelihoods autonomously from estate owners which, under conditions of land availability, they would normally be able to do. Thus, the state was crucial in evicting peasant ‘squatters’ (would­ be autonomous producers) from ‘untitled land’, land that could then be awarded to the oligarchy, thus maintaining the peasantry in a ‘functionally dualistic’, subservient relation to the latifundistas (Wolf 1973). The state also pushed such displaced peasants onto reserves ostensibly set aside for ‘tribal’ indigenous peoples (the former undertaking permanent cultivation, the latter usually shifting cultivation), in this way permanently clearing woody vegeta­ tion on land that could subsequently be appropriated by the oligarchy. This also served to generate antagonism (intra-class conflict) between indigenous or mestizo campesinos and ‘tribal’ indigenous peoples, compromising peasant and indigenous solidarity against the oligarchy. Contra Scott (1976), and tending to endorse the positions of Paige (1975) and Pearse (1975), this unrest and rebellion did not represent attempts to restore some prior mythical relation of paternal ‘reciprocity’ between the hacendado and his campesinos that capitalism was eroding. Rather, they represented quite ‘modern’ (anticipating the uprisings of the neoliberal era) demands for freedom from the burdens of tenurial labour-rent embodied in huasipungaje, inquilinaje, or yanaconaje and access to sufficient land to con­ struct peasant-based subsistence farming systems autonomous from the hacienda or plantation. Thus, the post-Independence era from the 1840s to around 1930 was characterized by the progressive incursion of imperial capi­ talist relations and accompanied by severe repression juxtaposed to ‘modern’ rebellion by the peasantry in the sense identified above. Repression accom­ panied the process of primitive accumulation undertaken by the agrarian oli­ garchy, entailing the appropriation of indigenous communal land and the abolition of any legislative protection against, and constraints on, the exploi­ tation of rural labour, especially in respect of indigenous people, such as had obtained in some degree in the pre-Independence era, as we have seen. In response, such repression and expropriation of land was countered, not so much through Scott’s ‘everyday forms of resistance’, but rather through rebellions that were, moreover, ‘modern’ in so far as they constituted collective assaults on the oligarchy’s monopoly of landownership, state power, trade, and credit. These rebellions sought social relational change (see Tilzey 2017),

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fundamentally problematizing the social-property basis of the hacienda system through reclaiming territory and defence of pre-existing indigenous property rights, generally community or cooperative in origin and function, with a view to the establishment self-subsistent farming systems. As suggested, these rebellions pre-figured the modernist claims made by the (primarily) indigenous peasantry during the neoliberal era, and continuing today, for selfdetermination, autonomy, and social justice – in effect, a ‘radical’ food sovereignty imaginary (Tilzey 2020a). The savage repression that accompanied the expropriation of land and control of ‘free’ labour was countered by mass resistance in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. The ‘modernist’ character of rural rebellions during this period is demonstrated by the Mexican peasant revolution of 1910. During the post-Independence period, Mexico had become more sub­ ject to market integration with ‘North Atlantic’ capitalism than elsewhere in Latin America (Knight 1986), with penetration of US and European capital, together with liberal ideology (free trade and ‘scientism’), encouraged by the Porfiriato (1876–1911) (see Chapter 3). By this time, forms of labour control, although ‘pre-capitalist’ in themselves in so far as they entailed ‘unfree’ forms of labour (Brass 1999), did not comprise elements of a ‘feudal’ mode of pro­ duction dispensing the ‘benign’ authority of the landlord over his ‘serfs’, but rather representing an emergent, peripheral means of maximizing surplus extraction to feed imperial capital from the USA and Europe. The Mexican Revolution represented an attempt, both by the incipient national bourgeoisie and by the peasantry, to repel such imperialist exploitation, although, as we have seen, their objectives were very different. National bourgeoisies tended to ally with the upper echelons of the peasantry in an attempt to foment a ‘farmer road’ to nationally articulated capitalism, entailing the disappearance, through proletarianization, of the mass of the peasantry (Tilzey 2020b). By contrast, the middle and lower peasantry, represented by the Zapatistas, sought not capitalism, nor even national capitalism, but rather autonomy from exploitation, and access to land free of exactions so that it could pursue self-subsistent production for the community (Wolf 1973). Perhaps ironically, but probably as an indication of the inherent tendency for more radical pea­ sant demands to be subverted by the anti-imperial but national capitalist objectives of the bourgeoisie, the trajectory of the Mexican Revolution brings into sharp relief the huge revolutionary potentialities of the peasantry, but also its strategic weakness in relation to the bourgeoisie and state power (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003) (and relatedly to the tendency to ‘populism’, elevating, for example, indigenous identity and peasant ‘essentialism’ above class interest; Brass 2000; Tilzey 2019a). Although the peasantry has formed the bedrock of the majority of revolu­ tionary uprisings and armies in Latin America (Brass 2003), its autonomous politico-economic interests (that is, those of the middle and lower peasantry) have found expression only in a very few regional armed forces, perhaps most notably at this time the Zapatistas of the Mexican Revolution. While peasant

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armies (and more latterly, uprisings) have been successful, in collaboration with the upper peasantry and national bourgeoisies, in overthrowing estab­ lished power of the conservative oligarchy, they have constantly resorted to placing ‘pressure’, or reliance, on the urban-based middle-classes to imple­ ment political pacts. Thus, during the Mexican Revolution, the armed Zapa­ tista peasantry had succeeded in taking control of Mexico City by December 1914. Six months later, however, this peasant army had abandoned it without having established a new governmental apparatus. As we have seen, Wolf (1973: 37), in his chapter on the Mexican Revolution in PWTC, refers to the ‘tragic ineptitude’ of both Pancho Villa and Emilio Zapata in their failure to ‘create a political machine that could govern the country’. Rather than per­ sonal shortcomings, it was rather the class character and incapacity of the peasant revolutionaries. Gilly (1983: 47) suggests, perhaps too strongly but nonetheless indicatively, why the peasant seizure of Mexico City did not eventuate in the capture of the state: ‘The exercise of power demands a pro­ gramme. The application of a programme requires a policy. A policy means a party. The peasants did not have, could not have, any of these things.’ In this way, the state became a point of ‘mediation’ between conflicting bourgeois/upper peasant (sub-hegemonic) and middle/lower peasant (counter­ hegemonic) demands, rather than a strategic resource to be reconfigured and transformed in the service of radically changed social relations of production, reflecting a new peasant-based political economy. We have described this as the ‘medial hegemony’ of passive revolution. Thus, at the peak of each revo­ lutionary mobilization, the bourgeois state responded with concessions and promises (in effect enacting measures that were more in favour of a ‘farmer road’ and, therefore, in the interests of the upper peasantry and national bourgeoisie), and even radical legislation in favour of the middle and lower peasantry. When the bourgeoisie and petty commodity producers gained the upper hand vis-à-vis their peasant allies of convenience against the con­ servative oligarchy, and peasant mobilization weakened (‘medial hegemony’), and radical legislation was either dropped or was never implemented; where the oligarchy itself regained the upper hand (‘minimal hegemony’), usually with the assistance of imperial powers (almost invariably the USA), ‘farmer road’ reforms were themselves often rolled back to be ‘re-routed’ along the ‘Junker road’. This phenomenon of mass collective action, involving mobili­ zation against the state, the removal of incumbent office holders, and the extraction of concessions from power holders by means of pressure on the state without changing its class configuration, has been a characteristic fea­ ture of peasant movements in Latin America (with the exception of Cuba) throughout the twentieth century (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003).

The Push for National Developmentalism The peripheral, ‘semi-feudal’ agro-export plantation system was thrown into crisis by the Great Depression that struck the capitalist core in the 1930s. This

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engendered the virtual disintegration of export markets, and fomented popu­ lar rebellions in the face of the resulting widespread hunger due to the inadequacy of peasant subsistence plots to support their occupants in the absence of additional income (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). In some instances, imperial capital sold its large rural properties to the national agrarian oli­ garchy, in others it sub-contracted these holdings to local farmers. In some cases, plantations were abandoned, then to be occupied by peasant ‘squat­ ters’. All plantation owners, whether imperial or national, now confronted varying degrees and forms of insurgency and rebellions by the peasantry. In response, owners often diverted investment into more secure urban real estate or, in a minority of cases, into the newly emerging, and protected, ‘import substituting’ industries. Where before, the full transition to capitalist relations of production (where this occurred, as in the Mexican Revolution) had been engendered ‘from below’, now this process was engineered ‘from above’ by the state as ‘passive revolution’. The state not only played a vital role in the sup­ pression of peasant uprisings across Latin America, it also, simultaneously and crucially, facilitated transition to new, and more fully capitalist, relations of production that took the form almost exclusively during the pre-Second World War period, with the exception of Mexico, of the Junker road (de Janvry 1981). As indicated, the 1930s crisis of the liberal/imperial agro-export system engendered the emergence of a new ‘import substitution’ model, which cou­ pled agro-exports to national industrial production without, at this stage, subverting the domination of the agrarian oligarchy over the peasantry and the rural labour force. In actuality, the new ascendancy of the national, urban bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie entailed a compromise in which the agrar­ ian oligarchy acquiesced in its political subordination at the level of the state in exchange for continued hegemony in the rural sector. Agrarian reform, supposedly a ‘democratic’ demand of the ‘progressive bourgeoisie’, had at this stage, other than in Mexico, no part in the social pact between the urban bourgeoisie and the agrarian oligarchy. The period from 1930 to 1960 saw the gradual decline of the agrarian oligarchy across Latin America as indus­ trialization advanced and more fully capitalist forms of production penetrated the countryside (replacing ‘semi-feudal’ relations) (de Janvry 1981). This pro­ cess converted important elements of the landed oligarchy into an agricultural bourgeoisie committed to a more complete capitalist transformation of agri­ culture. Again, however, other than in Mexico, this transition took the form of the Junker road to capitalism, with the majority of the peasantry now ‘external’ to the former ‘semi-feudal’ estates and re-defined as a semi-prole­ tariat, unable to subsist full-time on their small plots of land and obliged to sell their labour power to the newly capitalist hacendados (or elsewhere now that the peasantry was ‘free’ from ‘extra-economic’ coercion). The state was fundamental to this process, being committed, firstly, to industrialization through import substitution in which resources and investment capital were transferred from mining and agriculture into urban-centred industry; and

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secondly, to ensure the availability of cheap foodstuffs and other wage goods to supply the growing urban proletariat (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). It is in relation to this period, when fully capitalist social property relations emerged throughout much of Latin America, that the concept of ‘passive revolution’ is highly relevant (see Chapter 2). As noted earlier, the theory of passive revolution (Gramsci 1971) can be identified with various historical instances when key aspects of the social relations of capitalist development become constituted (Morton 2013). This can proceed in two ways: first, with reference to a ‘revolution’ without mass participation, or a ‘revolution from above’, involving elite-engineered politico-economic reform and drawing on foreign capital and associated ideology, while lacking a national-popular base (associated typically with ‘Junker road’ capitalism); second, with reference to a revolution linked to insurrectionary mass mobilization ‘from below’ (usually involving ‘peasant wars’) but where such subaltern class demands are restric­ ted by, or co-opted into, essentially bourgeois, or national-popular, class interests, usually associated with ‘national developmentalism’ and (attempted) ‘farmer road’ agrarian reforms. A passive revolution becomes in this second sense, therefore, a technique of state-craft that an emergent bourgeois class may deploy by drawing in subaltern classes, while establishing a new state on the basis of the constitution of capitalism (Riley and Desai 2007; Morton 2013). As we have seen, it is in this second sense that the outcome of the Mexican Revolution can, perhaps archetypically, be referred to as a period of passive revolution (Morton 2013). The implication is that all ‘peasant wars’ in Latin America that contributed to the emergence of fully capitalist relations of production and the ‘modern state’ (the two inextricably linked) comprised passive revolutions in this second sense – in Latin America, these include Bolivia (in part), Chile, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Ecuador (in part), Mexico of course, and Nicaragua. Passive revolutions in the first sense include Colombia and Brazil. Cuba remains the exception, of course, since insurrectionary activity was not co-opted by the bourgeoisie. The nature of passive revolution in these two main senses reflects the prevalence of parti­ cular class forces/interests at the level of the state – the prevalence of ‘hege­ monic’ or dominant agro-export oligarchic interests in the first sense, and of ‘sub-hegemonic’ (sub-dominant) national bourgeois and medium-scale com­ mercial farm interests (subsuming general ‘peasant’ interest) in the second, according to the terms employed by Tilzey (2018). Hegemony, in its more strictly Gramscian sense, represents an organic relation between state and civil society through development of an active consensus around the desirability of capitalism, in which moderately dissent­ ing views can be safely accommodated due to the tendentially broad spread of material affluence and/or the absence of any apparently realistic alternative to capitalist social property relations. Hegemony in this sense is thus character­ istic of the imperial states of the global North (Tilzey 2018) and emerged first during the ‘age of empire’ when super-exploitation of the periphery enabled national citizenship and affluence to be more widely diffused to the general

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populace within the imperium on the basis of the generation of relative sur­ plus value (Marini 1972). In contrast to this hegemony as negotiated con­ sensus, in a situation of passive revolution ‘the important thing is to analyse more profoundly…the fact that a state replaces the local social groups in leading a struggle of renewal’ (Gramsci 1971: 105–106). Here there is a ‘sta­ tization’ of civil society (Portelli 1973), a situation when the ruling class is unable to fully integrate the people through conditions of hegemony (usually due to peripherality and the inability to generate ‘articulated’ development), or, in other words, when ‘they [the ruling classes] were aiming to create a modern state…[but] in fact produced a bastard’ (Gramsci 1971: 90). The condition of passive revolution can be regarded, therefore, as the peripheral counterpart to a situation of hegemony in the imperium, although there is a continuum between the two poles, as expressed in the two senses of passive revolution identified above. As Portelli (1973: 30) suggests ‘there is no social system where consensus serves as the sole basis of hegemony, nor a state where the same social group can maintain its domination durably on the basis of pure coercion’. Femia (1981: 35–50) has distinguished three gradations of hegemony in Gramsci’s work: �

�

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Integral hegemony: based on an organic relationship between rulers and ruled, referring to how the ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony on the classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterized by the combination of consent and force, which balance each other reciprocally, without force predominating excessively over consent. Decadent hegemony: indicating the ideological decay of a ruling power bloc with fragile cultural and political integration. Between coercion and force stands corruption and fraud, characteristic of certain situations when it is difficult to exercise the hegemonic function and when the use of force is too risky. Minimal hegemony: based on ‘hegemonic activity’ but where state power becomes merely an aspect of domination, indicative of the condition of passive revolution. Here the state-coercion element superintends the hegemonic activity.

Reiterating points made earlier in this book, we can perhaps adapt these gradations to reflect more closely the previous discussion, recognizing the two categories of passive revolution in the periphery juxtaposed to the true hege­ mony of the imperium. Thus, ‘integral hegemony’ is characteristic of the lib­ eral democracies of the imperium; ‘minimal hegemony’ we can interpret as being equivalent to passive revolution in its first sense as above, associated with the ‘Junker road’ to capitalism and the dominance of the agro-exporting oligarchy, with the state being more an instrument of coercion for this class. What appears lacking from the above categorization, however, is an ‘inter­ mediate’ form of hegemony that is equivalent to passive revolution in its ‘second sense’ above, that is, one that attempts to foment national

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developmentalism commonly with ‘farmer road’ and import substituting industrialization. We propose to term this intermediate form ‘medial hegemony’. The period of import substitution ‘without agrarian reform’ (with Mexico the exception), engendered the first wave of rural to urban migration by the new proletariat or semi-proletariat (the latter temporary or seasonal migrants) that was initiated from the late 1930s and accelerated from the 1950s. While proletarianization and semi-proletarianization were the product of transitions to ‘full’ capitalism in the countryside (along the Junker road) during this period, this transition nonetheless proceeded slowly and unevenly given the contradictions of continuing peripheral disarticulated development, despite efforts to stimulate urban industry to absorb the proletarianized peasantry. These contradictions of peripherality were manifested in the persistence, into the 1960s, of varying degrees of ‘extra-economic’ coercion exercised by the oligarchy over the peasantry. Indeed, it was not until around 1970 (after the completion of ‘land reform’ programmes by the state; see below) that the large majority of the peasantry could be considered to be ‘free’ from residual ‘semi-feudal’ relations (de Janvry 1981). The resulting proletarianization and semi-proletarianization (the latter the product of failed land reform from the peasantry’s perspective; see below), gave rise to a new wave of peasant insur­ gency and protest which was very much alive at the time Wolf was writing PWTC. Key struggles in this episode of unrest reflected the respective interest of the peasant class fraction in question, as identified by Paige (1975): the upper peasantry (market-dependent petty commodity producers) demanded market support/protection and more access to credit and technology; the middle (non-market dependent, autonomous producers) and lower peasantry (semi-proletariat) demanded more land reform and access to sufficient land for self-subsistence; while the landless proletariat demanded better wages and working conditions (where employment was relatively secure – otherwise, demands for access to land were typical). As noted, the peripheral state encountered severe contradictions in attempting to mimic the ‘articulated’ capitalism of the imperium by means of import substitution. From the 1930s, Latin American states, temporarily freed from the oppression of the imperium, attempted to direct resources into industry, allocating foreign exchange earned by the primary sector to the importation of capital and intermediary goods for the growing consumer goods industries. The aim was to construct an independent industrial base to produce those manufactured commodities that had formerly been imported from the global North (de Janvry 1981). This required simultaneously the development of an agriculture sector that could supply the home market, act as a source of surplus transfer to industry, and act as a source of consumption for industrial goods (Kay 2000). This constituted an insuperable contradiction for the peripheral Junker dominated class structure, since both the supply of the home market and, more particularly, an extension and deepening of the home market required the creation of a large class of wealthier and market­

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oriented family farms, as in the global North as we have seen. The oligarchy was very reluctant to permit such a ‘farmer road’ to occur, however, since it would inevitably compromise its power and landholdings. Moreover, the continuing demand for foreign currency to finance import substitution entailed maximizing primary commodity exports, which in turn relied upon the minimization of labour costs. Thus, if peripheral states were to maintain accumulation in their industrial sectors, sources of cheap labour, surplus transfer from agriculture, and external capital had to be found (reliant on maximizing exports and exploiting cheap domestic labour), while simulta­ neously attempting to expand and deepen the national market for consumer goods (see Chapter 3). These necessary prerequisites for sectorally and socially articulated development were irreconcilable, however. Here, of course, the imperial states had been able to draw on either peripheral, and super-cheap, sources of supply to subsidize their own ‘autocentric’ growth, or, later in the case of post-war Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, were able to benefit from US largesse in the latter’s bid to fend off the threat of communism. While the oligarchy may have conceded relative political power to the national bourgeoisie in Latin America during this period, it nonetheless retained control at rural regional and local levels, and sustained its economic power by continuing to be central to the national objective of foreign exchange maximization, premised on super-exploitation of the peasantry (Marini 1974). The new urban proletariat gave rise, during this period, to ‘Marxist’ or Communist parties. While these may have endorsed, in principle, the notion of a worker-peasant alliance, in practice these parties tended to seek alliances with the ‘national’ bourgeoisie in pursuit of a productivist strategy (develop­ ing the forces of production to the maximal extent on the assumption that a condition of ‘original scarcity’ could be overcome by simple recourse to a cornucopia of goods through technological innovation), which, in effect, comprised a programme of social democratic (‘farmer road’) capitalist refor­ mism (the latest iteration of this strategy being that of Bolivia, where the former MAS Vice-President Garcia-Linera articulated precisely this putative need for capitalist development of the forces of production as a precondition for ‘socialism’; Tilzey 2019a). The central focus was, therefore, simply upon increasing agricultural yields and productivity (through the conversion of supposedly feudal haciendas to capitalist enterprises), not upon egalitarian land reform and equality of access to the means of production on the part of the peasantry. These parties also tended to be preoccupied with ‘workerist’ (reformist) struggles and organization, seeking to improve wages and working conditions but paying little attention to addressing social-property relations and the structural bases of poverty and market dependence. In general, although there were exceptions (as in the case of Ecuador, for example; see Becker 2008), the emergence of peasant-based movements in this context owed little to the urban-based left or to the social democratic, populist parties (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011). In this, these peasant movements anticipated their latter-day incarnations during the neoliberal era.

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A programme of land reform ‘from above’, as ‘passive revolution’ in its second sense (involving what we have termed ‘medial hegemony’), designed in part to foment a ‘farmer road’ to capitalism as part of the national devel­ opmentalist strategy between the 1930s and 1970s (up to the 1980s in Nicar­ agua and Peru), did not eventuate widely until the 1960s (although this was anticipated in Bolivia and Guatemala during the 1950s). This widespread adoption of ostensibly ‘farmer road’ land reform programmes was largely a defensive response to the Cuban revolution of 1959, and designed to obviate the emergence of more radical demands for change among the peasantry (Kay 2000). Thus, almost every Latin American state, with the support of the USA (now concerned to neutralize the threat of ‘communism’), initiated a broad programme of land reform that was fundamentally reformist in moti­ vation (that is, to install a slightly more inclusive and social democratic form of capitalism), the prime objective being to incorporate the peasantry into a dual, but non-radical, agenda: first, to divert existing and future dissent into constitutional channels where it might be more easily co-opted by the state; and, second, to bring smallholders, and more especially, the upper peasantry, into the orbit of a specifically capitalist development project as a class of ideologically petty bourgeois farmers, thus, it was hoped, weakening the attractiveness of a socialist alternative. While these reforms did go some way towards creating a class of small commercial farmers (the ‘farmer road’), especially in the cases of Chile and Peru (although the latter involved cen­ trally the creation of agricultural collectives [see below]), they failed largely to address the demands of the middle and lower peasantries for equitable access to land, and failed also (with the exception of Peru) to break the power of the agro-export oligarchies. Generally speaking, very little land was expropriated from the oligarchy, again with the exception of Peru; to the extent that more land was made available to the peasantry, it largely comprised former state lands or entailed settlement programmes outside areas owned by the oli­ garchy (commonly land of kin-ordered or ‘tribal’ peoples in the tropical low­ lands) (de Janvry 1981; Thiesenhusen 1995; Kay 2000). Much land redistribution occurred within the peasant reform sector itself, however, lead­ ing to the concentration of ownership of the productive land and to a process of internal peasant class differentiation. Such differentiation generated the emergence of a tripartite structure within the peasantry. First, it involved the emergence of a small stratum of rich peasants (the upper peasantry), comprising either a new class of wholly market-dependent small capitalists (employing the labour of other peasants) or wholly marketdependent petty commodity producers (using only family labour power); second, a somewhat larger middle stratum of self-sufficient (non-market dependent) peasants, able to meet their own food needs throughout the year and marketing opportunistically a surplus for the domestic market (this conforms to Wolf’s definition of the ‘peasant’ in his Preface to PWTC); and third, the largest stra­ tum, a huge rural semi-proletariat (having some land) or proletariat (having no land), obliged to sell labour power to the oligarchy or to the upper peasanty or to

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migrate seasonally to urban centres, often joining the ranks of the informal sector workforce (Kay 2000). Given that land reform generally failed to secure the demands of the middle and, particularly, lower peasantry for adequate and secure access to land, Latin American states typically then turned to preventing radicalization of demands by means of a combination of strategies involving corporativism/clientelism (unionization ‘from above’), co-opting the leadership through, for example, awarding it roles in government, attempts to contain or control peasant organizations through ‘development initiatives’ such as inte­ grated rural development or, more latterly, ‘ethno-development’, and, of course, outright repression. During this period of so-called ‘national developmentalism’, peasant-based revolutions in only the best of cases were able to secure extensive institutional reforms in the agrarian sector, that is, land reform and redistribution in favour of the peasantry (Kay 2000). The first, and the most comprehensive example (other than Cuba) was that of Mexico, a reform that, as we have seen, began only sporadically despite the Revolution and reached its high point only in the 1930s under the Cárdenas regime. In Bolivia, the 1952 revolution of miners and peasants led to substantial land reform in favour of the peasantry in the Andes, while leaving the most productive lands in the lowlands firmly in the hands of the oligarchy (see Chapter 6). At the same time, in Guate­ mala, substantial redistribution of land in favour of the peasantry occurred, only to be thrown into reverse with the US assisted overthrow of the Arbenz regime in 1954 (see Chapter 8). In Cuba, in 1959, the victory of the 26 July movement led by Fidel Castro culminated, as detailed earlier, with the con­ fiscation of most of the US and domestically owned plantations, with the land either collectivized or redistributed to smallholders (MacEwan 1981). In the Dominican Republic, Peru from 1969–1980 (see Chapter 9), Chile from 1967 to 1973, and Nicaragua from 1979 to 1986 (a rather late anomaly), sub­ stantial land redistribution took place (albeit still biased towards the upper peasantry and designed to foment a ‘farmer road’ transition to capitalism rather than a peasant-based socialist path), the outcome of mass peasant mobilizations and direct action (Kay 1981, 1982, 2000; Veltmeyer and Petras 2000; Vilas 1995). The period between the Cuban Revolution and the turn to (liberal) democracy under neoliberalism (1960–1990) was notable for the emergence guerrilla movements as peasant-based ‘wars’ stimulated by the Cuban exam­ ple (see Wickham-Crowley 2001). Armed resistance with a strong peasantbase emerged in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and, fleetingly, Bolivia. Apart from Cuba, the greatest success, mea­ sured as ‘capture’ of the state by the armed resistance movement, was in Nicaragua, where the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) over­ threw the Somoza dictatorship in 1979. Wickham-Crowley (2001) identifies the essential ingredients in the rise of these guerrilla movements, which in most cases assumed a ‘vanguardist’ form, with peasant unrest being fomen­ ted, articulated, and led by non-peasant ‘intellectuals’ and ‘outsiders’: first, an

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underlying condition of peasant anger and discontent associated with dis­ location or precarity of the subsistence base associated with the transition to fully capitalist relations of production (threat of land loss, insufficient access to land, insecurity of tenure). Guerrilla movements gained little purchase in those areas where peasants had relatively secure tenure and adequate access to land, or in those situations where the peasantry had undergone a transition to a proletariat with relatively secure employment; second, the new presence of ‘mobilizers’ to articulate and foment this underlying anger and dis­ content – this seems in many cases to have been associated with the expansion in higher education and a severe shortage of appropriate employment oppor­ tunities for those newly qualified – such individuals sought radical and often revolutionary transformation of a peripheral capitalist system still dominated by creole oligarchies. These peasant ‘mobilizers’ had to rely on ‘access to peasant resources’ to carry forward their radical programmes; third, the rise of guerrilla movements depended on the de-legitimation of the incumbent government, commonly through the use of outright repression to suppress unrest and the absence of any mitigating measures, such as anti-poverty pro­ grammes, land titling, land reform, etc. Thus, government repression used in isolation from any mitigation tended to favour the insurgents. It seems to be no accident that the two most successful revolutions occurred in states (Cuba and Nicaragua) with the two most repressive regimes in Latin America. The guerrillas in Cuba and Nicaragua could thus portray themselves in the eyes of the masses as the legitimate revolutionary alternative to outright repression, entailing a shift in mass loyalty away from the government and towards the insurgents. However, where direct competition of states and guerrillas for mass loyalties has occurred, the incumbent government has tended to be favoured – the longer-term tendency, therefore, has been for greater government use of strategic reforms (anti-poverty measures, land reform, etc.) in a targeted way to undermine support for guerrilla movements, or radicalism more generally. It should be noted that these ‘strategic reforms’ take two basic forms: con­ servative ‘reformism’ (or ‘minimal hegemony’ as defined earlier), where no basic change in regime occurs, but targeted poverty alleviation measures are adopted (typically a continuation of the ‘Junker’ road to capitalism); a social democratic reformism (‘medial hegemony’) where there is regime change towards more wealth redistribution and agrarian reform towards the ‘farmer’ road; finally, successful ‘capture’ of the state by radical insurgency depends crucially upon solidarity of the opposition movement (absence of serious fac­ tional divisions), supported by military strength (with the advent of demo­ cratization, armed resistance is now generally considered unacceptable and counter-productive, despite continued use of force by the state, such that non­ violent mass protest is now adopted as the favoured form of resistance, with the possible exception of Colombia, where armed resistance is actually or immanently characteristic). With the exception of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, however, these advances by the various class fractions of the peasantry, whether ‘from below’ (for

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example, Nicaragua) or ‘from above’ (for example, Chile, Peru), suffered severe reversals over the medium and longer-terms. In all cases, the problem for the peasantry, and particularly the middle and lower peasantry, was the relation between peasant movements and the state, in other words, the rela­ tionship between peasant class fractions and the dominant classes of the oli­ garchy and the bourgeoisie (and, lying behind this, the relationship between the dominant classes and the imperium). In virtually all the ‘revolutions’, the above-named agrarian reforms suffered reversals. Thus, in Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru, a prolonged process of state disinvestment in the reform sector culminated in legislation that afforded incentives to the agro-export oligarchy, alienating community lands (the ejido in Mexico) and opening up the national market to cheap (because subsidized) imported food from the global North. The politics of class alliances, in which the peasantry was generally sub­ ordinated to the urban petit bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie during the period of ‘national developmentalism’ for a ‘farmer road’, would often secure an initial round of redistributive reform and state assistance (usually, however, inade­ quate from the middle/lower peasantry’s perspective and biased towards the upper peasantry and commercial farms). Subsequently, however, peasant move­ ments tended to fragment and divide along ‘official’ and ‘oppositional’ lines, in which the former became a ‘patron-client’ transmission belt for state policy of containment, de-radicalization, and productivism, as part of what we have termed ‘medial hegemony’ (de Janvry 1981; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). In this context, the state, under the control of the bourgeoisie and still, to a significant degree, the agrarian oligarchy, either manipulated, or actively created, these divisions. The inability of the peasant movement to transcend its strictly sectoral and rural consciousness confined it to militant ‘pressure group’ politics in which the urban classes seized the reins of power and deployed the wider peasant movement simply as a means of clearing the way for a de facto programme of capitalist ‘modernization’ from which the majority of the peasantry failed to benefit. As Wolf presciently pointed out in PWTC: Where the peasantry has successfully rebelled against the established order – under its own banner and with its own leaders – it was sometimes able to reshape the social structure of the countryside closer to its heart’s desires; but it did not lay hold of the state, of the cities which house the centres of control, of the strategic non-agricultural resources of society. (Wolf 1973: 294) Only in the case of Cuba was the peasantry able to consolidate its position, largely due to the socialist nature of the urban leadership and its efforts to invest in and develop the countryside. Whatever the shortcomings of aspects of such development, the principle that the peasantry must engage with, ‘capture’, and transform the state before a comprehensive pro-peasant pro­ gramme of (equitable and ecological) development can occur, is nonetheless a salutary one (see Chapter 4).

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The Neoliberal Period and the Renewal of Peasant Rebellion With the advent of neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s, the era of lib­ eral (reformist) and, certainly, radical, land reform drew to a close (Kay 2000). The collapse of social democratic regimes in the USA and the UK, especially, ushered in an era in which the state was to be restructured and ‘re­ regulated’ to return the balance of power definitively in favour of capital, and transnational capital in particular. The debts incurred by many states in the South during the ‘national developmentalist’ interlude were now called in by the North, embodied in a period of renewed financial imperialism, and pla­ cing a heavy onus on peripheral states to maximize foreign exchange earnings to service their international debt. Economically and politically, this served well the interests of the agro-export oligarchy, together with other primary commodity exporters, while deeply compromising the interests and influence of nationally oriented bourgeoisies and others, notably the peasantry, produ­ cing wage goods for the national workforce. In short, this period was the graveyard of any ambition towards nationally ‘articulated’ development that may have been harboured by Latin American states. This period saw a deep retrenchment towards sectorally and socially disarticulated ‘development’, and a reassertion of the Junker road to capitalism, with the agro-export oli­ garchy, in alliance with imperial transnational capital, in the vanguard (Tilzey 2018). The issue in this new politico-economic context of the ‘new world order’ was no longer one of redistributive land reform, then, let alone one which entailed new non-individualistic or non-private property relations, but rather the capitalist ‘modernization’ of agriculture through a renewed export orien­ tation to the global North, a process to be undertaken without change in social-property relations or non-market redistribution of agrarian resources and assets (Kay 2000). In order to ‘assist’ those sections of society which were not obvious beneficiaries of this process of ‘modernization’ and marketorientation (the majority), Latin American states enlisted the support of non­ governmental organizations (NGOs) to encourage peasant and indigenous organizations and communities to make greater use of ‘market mechanisms’ (land titles, land banks, etc.) to secure property rights to such land as they might ‘own’ or occupy (as part of a fully capitalist preoccupation with abso­ lute property rights, as we saw in Chapter 2), and to commoditize use values formerly destined for auto-consumption or previously not considered to pos­ sess any exchange value (for example, cultural and ecological assets). Increased market-dependency was thus encouraged, both through more conventional means (increasing sales of wage foods), and through novel means such as ‘ethno-development’ and eco-tourism. This strategy conforms, then, to Transition Type 4 (petty commodity production under capitalism) in our transition typology set out in Chapter 1. Simultaneously, these groups were enjoined to eschew direct action and confrontational, ‘class-based’ poli­ tics, and utilize instead the ‘electoral mechanism’ of the ‘new democracy’ that

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now became a feature of the majority of Latin American states – in short, to adopt peaceful and legalistic forms of advocacy in pursuit of their interests (Veltmeyer and Petras 1997, 2000). Despite accelerated assaults on peasant livelihoods, the neoliberal period, especially following the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites from about 1990, saw a general shift from armed to non-violent forms of protest, with the notable exceptions of the FARC in Colombia and the EZLN in Mexico (the latter forming in many ways a ‘bridge’ between more traditional guerrilla movements and the ‘post­ modern’ orientation of protest from the 1990s onwards). NGOs tended, then, to replace the ‘vanguardist’ intellectuals of the previous ‘guerrilla era’, although, increasingly, the initiative for social movements came from the peasantry/indigenous people themselves due to the expansion of education, the wider experiences of subalterns due to urban employment and interna­ tional migration, and the increase in communication through the internet and, more recently, social media. The neoliberal period also coincided with a new, ‘post-modern’ preoccupa­ tion with the disavowal of class, and the elevation of indigenous/ethnic, racial, and gender issues as primary concerns disconnected from class (Tilzey 2018). In many senses, these responses to neoliberal change may be considered to be ‘conservative’ in relation to the basic tripartite categorization of ‘forms of protest’ we identified in Chapter 2. They constitute, in essence, ancillary or ‘flanking’ measures designed to contain and deflect more radical forms of protest in directions that are consistent with the dominant regime of accu­ mulation, in this instance, neoliberalism, despite the fact that this regime is actually antithetical to the fulfilment of subaltern interests. Thus, the neoliberal era ushered in a period in which the state sought increasingly to reconsolidate land ownership by the agrarian oligarchy in accordance with the promotion of the agro-export sector. For example, in northern Mexico, the Santa Cruz lowland region of Bolivia, in Peru, Nicar­ agua, and especially in Chile, ‘farmer road’ land reforms were reversed, and the old owners of the oligarchy recovered their land while purchasing new or enlarging existing holdings, all with the support of counter-revolutionary or counter-reform regimes (Crabtree 2003; Murray 2003; Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). This process of land re-concentration and reform reversal from the ‘farmer’ towards the ‘Junker’ road was itself facilitated by the co-optation of peasant leaders and the incorporation of bureaucratized, clientelistic peasant organizations as a subordinate component of the party-state. This was the case in Mexico with the PRI (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) (Morton 2013) and in Bolivia with the MNR (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucio­ nario) (Grindle 2003; Knight 2003), for example, the latter anticipating simi­ lar trends in the latter country under the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) over the last decade (Tilzey 2019a). The crucial theoretical point to be made is that revolutionary peasant movements (with the exception of Cuba) have been unable to seize state power, either through armed struggle or through non-violent mass protest, in

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order to secure the means to transform social-property relations (social rela­ tions of production) towards the redistributive aims of the middle and lower peasantry (in the present context, this strategy is likely to abjure ‘statism’, in contrast to Cuba, and undertake a programme of state devolution of func­ tions and power to local democratic institutions, although the difficulties of so doing in the face of imperial interventions, covert and overt, should by no means be underestimated). Peasant rebellions with these kinds of revolu­ tionary objectives have all too often witnessed their leaders being enticed by the rewards of government posts or other financial or career inducements deployed by the dominant bourgeois fraction of the ‘national alliance’, then to preoccupy themselves with ‘modernizing’ reforms (such as petty bourgeois land titling, and productivity improvements) to the exclusion of land redis­ tribution in favour of the land-poor and landless (Kay 2000; see Tilzey 2019a in relation to this experience in Bolivia). It is very important to appreciate, then, that the principal vehicle for all agrarian reform programmes in Latin America has been peasant influence over the state, while, for the same reason, the principal weakness has been the failure to consolidate state power in order to sustain and deepen the reform (in effect the ‘social’ revolution according to Davidson 2017, where this entails transformation of social-property relations) so as to render it irreversible (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003). Since the fate of peasant movements is inextricably bound up with relations with other classes and the state, it is vital that the peasantry engage with the state and the dominant classes if revolutionary objectives of transformed social relations of production are to be realized. Failure to do so simply consigns peasant movements to experiments in ‘autonomy’ in the interstices of the capital-state nexus, a strategy that is becoming ever more difficult to secure as capital, undergirded by the peripheral state and imperial powers, becomes increas­ ingly pervasive. There is no simple escape from the system – ‘you may not want the state, but the state wants you!’ Towards the close of the twentieth century, a somewhat new configuration of peasant resistance emerged throughout much of Latin America, for exam­ ple, in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guate­ mala, Mexico, Paraguay, and, to a lesser degree, in Chile and Peru. Peasant movements again led the resistance to neoliberalism, with this time, however, their complexion having strong indigenous, ecological, and ‘alternative/post­ developmental’ elements (Petras 1997; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, 2003; Moyo and Yeros 2005). This resurgence and radicalization of peasant and indigenous rebellion has been linked intimately to the dynamics of the per­ ipheral state-capital nexus in its relation to the imperium. While re-affirming the anti-imperialist and national sovereignty claims of the ‘first wave’ of anti­ neoliberal protests of the 1980s (which were a response largely by the ‘formal’ proletariat to sudden job losses and austerity contingent on the cessation of state subsidy to national industry and mining), the ‘second wave’ was remarkable for its articulation and valorization, in opposition both to social democratic ‘developmentalism’ and ‘progressivist’ Marxism, of a pro-peasant

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positionality, often in combination with a new concern for indigenous and gender rights, and environmental justice, as noted above. These ‘second wave’ developments were by no means always national in scale and often remained localized struggles (as in Brazil and Mexico, for example), nor did they always have an indigenous inflection even where indigenous populations still constituted a significant percentage of the population. This was the case in Peru, for example, where campesinos, even when indigenous, chose to emphasize their national status as peasants and not to rehabilitate, as in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, their indigeneity as the basis for resistance. In order to explain such differentiation between states, it is necessary to have reference to the specificities of social-property relations and class positional­ ities in each situation, and particularly to how indigeneity (where available) has been deployed and re-valorized to constitute a foundation stone for antiand post-capitalist ways of living (Yashar 1999; Lucero 2008; Rice 2012). Our case studies, below, will throw some light on this differentiation. It is important here to emphasize both the complementarities and tensions between the construction of peasant as opposed to indigenous identity and positionality. While some groups have sought to validate their identity as both peasant and indigene (where the latter term is appropriate), others have sought to denigrate the construction of the signifier peasant as economistic and reductionist, and, thus, as stripping away the important cultural element of indigenous identity (in rarer cases, as in the Peruvian Andes, peasants are proud to declare themselves as campesinos but reluctant to identify as indi­ genous, a legacy of the strong, modernizing ‘farmer road’ and collectivist agrarian reform of the 1960s and 1970s in which surviving pre-Columbian traditions were stigmatized as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ [Rice 2012]). The denigration of the term peasant during the ‘post-modern’ neoliberal era is particularly characteristic of the ‘tribal’ Amazonian peoples of Bolivia and Ecuador, for example. This is ultimately premised on the non-hierarchical character of these societies, where, in stark contrast to the Andes, no hacienda system was ever implanted. In the Andes, by contrast, the hacienda system prevailed as we have seen, building on pre-Columbian hierarchical social relations, such that class became defined along both ethnic and economic lines – subaltern classes were both peasant in economic terms and indigenous in cultural identification. This contrast refers back to Wolf ’s economic dis­ tinction, in his 1969 Preface to PWTC, between ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ popu­ lations. This has very important implications – Andean indigenous political constructions have tended to emphasize class-based (that is, peasant and indigenous) discourses and organization, while lowland Amazonian (kinordered or ‘tribal’) peoples have tended to deploy ethnic and ecological (not class-based) projects and forms of resistance. Encouraged by the ‘new social movement’ and ‘post-modern’ frame of internationally funded NGOs, the latter particularly have emphasized autonomy from the state-capital nexus and the titling and legal recognition of existing land occupancy, rather than seeking any fundamental change in social relations of production and

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exploitation. This difference between highland (peasant) indigenous people and lowland (‘tribal’) indigenous groups has made unification of the two against the state-capital nexus problematical, especially in the case of states such as Bolivia (if not so much in the case of Ecuador, where, inter alia, the unique deployment of the concept of nacionalidad indigena in reference to indigenous groupings seems to have exerted a strongly unifying influence across the Andean-Amazonian divide; Lucero 2008). Thus, while the 1990s have been nominated the ‘golden age of imperialism’ (Veltmeyer and Petras 2019), and thus the ‘lost decade’ (una decada perdida) for the subaltern majority, they could also be described as the ‘golden age of (peasant) resistance’, or the decade won (una decada ganada) (Macas 1991). While imperial capital, in alliance with the dominant domestic export-orien­ ted oligarchies, appeared to have virtual free-rein during the earlier part of the decade, the social movements detailed above, together with many others else­ where, comprising in the main semi-proletarianized peasants and indigenous communities, had effectively subverted the neoliberal model across Latin America by the close of the decade (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011). These social movements, the majority of which (with the notable exception of certain lowland indigenous ‘tribal’ groups) were ‘class-based’ in terms of their demands for social relational change (notably the cessation and reversal of primitive accumulation by means of comprehensive and egalitarian land reform) while advocating ‘alternative development’ through agroecology and the revalorization of indigeneity and territorial autonomy, dominated the political landscape of rural Latin America during the 1990s. Nonetheless, this dominance and the limitations of what these ‘radical’ forces were able to achieve as they moved towards the centre of power, needs to be con­ textualized with reference to other (anti-neoliberal) class forces with which they made common cause, and which were the source of their subsequent co­ optation or marginalization during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. These other anti-neoliberal class forces comprised in the main the upper peasantry, or small market-dependent commercial farmers, and the nationally oriented bourgeoisie (together with state-sector workers, urban intellectuals, and the growing numbers of NGOs, the latter two particularly inclined to view resistance in terms of the ‘post-modern’ ‘new social move­ ments’ problematic as issues of greater ‘democratization’ combined with ‘local’ development). They also included, however, certain lowland, Amazo­ nian indigenous people, as in the case of Bolivia, who were more inclined to negotiate and compromise with neoliberal governments rather than to con­ front them, in part because neoliberal policies of ‘devolved governance’, ‘ethno-development’, and ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’ also granted these groups a certain degree of autonomy from the state (Lucero 2008). In this regard, we can perceive three basic modalities of social change, two of which are ‘reformist’ and one of which is ‘radical’ or ‘revolutionary’. The first modality is to resort to the liberal democratic electoral mechanism, con­ testing national and local elections, with all the inherent power differentials

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that this entails. This modality is most associated with social democratic, or national developmentalist (‘medial hegemonic’), regimes characteristic of the ‘pink tide’ states that were to emerge in the twenty-first century. As we have seen, this is associated with selective agrarian reformism along the ‘farmer road’ (benefitting the upper peasantry but leaving much of the oligarchy intact). This modality typically entailed the incorporation and co-optation of formerly ‘radical’ leaders into ‘left-populist’ regimes, as was to happen in Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador. The second modality is a programme of ‘development’ for the ‘rural poor’, or increased autonomy and cultural recognition for lowland indigenous groups (‘integrated rural development’, ‘ethno-development’, ‘neoliberal mul­ ticulturalism’, etc.), as an ‘alternative’ and less confrontational approach to social change than invoked by ‘radical’ movements, designed essentially to deflect and deflate ‘revolutionary’ impulses. While this may complement modality one, as indeed it has done in Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, it can also be deployed alone in cases where electoral politics are so dominated by the oligarchic right that ‘radical’ forces are effectively excluded from them (often through the use of violence by the right to deter participation), or, in other words, ‘minimal hegemony’. This is the case in states such as Colombia and Guatemala (see below for case study of the latter). This modality, where used alone, is thus most characteristic of the Junker road, being deployed to encourage entrepreneurial petty commodity production by the peasantry in a context of no change in social-property relations away from the domination of the countryside and the state by the agro-exporting oligarchy. As noted, however, it is also part and parcel of what may be termed a neoliberal gov­ ernance regime, termed ‘de-statization’ by Jessop (2005), in which selected powers are devolved to sub-state and non-state authorities, but commonly without the levels of authority or financial resourcing to present any real challenge to the dominant mode of capital accumulation. The policies of the former Bolivian neoliberal President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (1993–1997) are exemplary here, juxtaposing radical neoliberal macroeconomic policy with the introduction of so-called ‘multi-cultural’ citi­ zenship (‘neoliberal multiculturalism’). This juxtaposition of seemingly con­ tradictory policies was encapsulated in the Plan de Todos (Plan for All). This pursued both an aggressive privatization plan along with a series of seemingly inclusionary educational, political, and agrarian reforms. Thus, the 1994 education reform institutionalized bilingual, inter-cultural education and cre­ ated Aymara, Quechua (Kichwa), Guarani, and multi-ethnic education councils. The Law of Popular Participation and accompanying decentraliza­ tion laws transferred significant financial resources (twenty per cent of the national budget) to local municipalities and gave indigenous and popular organizations a direct role in the administration of those resources. This served also to move the sites of politics away from the capital La Paz and towards the local level. Finally, the 1996 agrarian reform (Ley INRA) allowed indigenous groups legally to title their original community lands (TCOs or

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Tierras Comunitarias de Origen), while also, of course, stabilizing the absolute property rights of the agro-oligarchy, located particularly in what is known as the media luna area of Santa Cruz province, the most fertile and productive agricultural region of Bolivia (Kohl and Farthing 2006; Lucero 2008). A similar neoliberal strategy has characterized Guatemala since the Peace Accords of 1996 (see case study below). The third modality of social change is, of course, the one of confronting and challenging existing political power structures of the state-capital nexus, whether neoliberal or neo-developmentalist, by means of the ‘revolutionary road’ (Petras and Zeitlin 1968), or ‘social revolution’ in Davidson’s (2017`) terms, to common ownership and devolved democratic control of the means of production, poten­ tially uniting peasant and highland/lowland indigenous positionalities. With respect again to the second modality, it was doubtless the case that the strategy of ‘ethno-development’, ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’, and other ‘local’ development initiatives, implemented by NGOs and funded usually by the imperial powers directly or via international development institutions, was intended to demobilize ‘radical’ social movements by diverting them down the route of non-confrontational ‘community-based’ initiatives. A significant sec­ tion of the Left was inveigled into this strategy at the time, in part due to the loss of faith in the old ‘class-based’ politics that they somehow associated with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, even though there was no real connection between the bureaucratic and productivist statism of the USSR and the ‘radical’ programme of devolved common ownership, and buen vivir advo­ cated by the peasant and indigenous revolutionaries. In pursuit of this ‘new’ and post-class politics, which we may associate with the ‘new social move­ ments’, sections of the Left, particularly urban intellectuals and those less directly connected with the realities of semi-proletarian precarity, eschewed support of radical mobilizations, and now focused on ‘grassroots’ develop­ ment and ‘democratization’ increasingly dissociated from critique of socialproperty relations. This ‘new social movement’ approach of the ‘soft left’ was manifested in NGO activism, mediating between global Northern donors and recipient communities in the misplaced belief that such activism was assist­ ing the latter rather than the donors themselves in the diversion of energies into commodifying indigenous cultural ‘assets’, the ‘invention of tradition’, and the deployment of ethnic, racial, and gender rights discourse, as ‘iden­ tity politics’, shorn of its class dimension. Thus, the radicalism of CONAIE in Ecuador during the 1990s was progressively dulled as its leadership embraced this more centrist ideology associated with the NGOs (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001, 2011; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). Similarly, in Bolivia, Evo Morales, on assuming power in 2005 with the assistance of, inter alia, radical social movements, then appointed to posts in his government a sig­ nificant number of people not so much from the latter but rather from the NGO sector (although the social movements did receive some representation in this regime, the personnel in question tended to succumb to co-optation and de-radicalization; Tilzey 2019a).

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Thus, while the ‘second wave’ radical social movements were important influences on the widespread ‘turn’ to the left in Latin America during the first decade of the new millennium, they did not generally succeed in translating protest in to concrete social relational changes that might have undone the structural damage (in terms of loss of land and erosion of support for national food staple production) inflicted by neoliberalism on the middle and lower pea­ santry and indigenous peoples. Rather, the trend has been towards the fragmen­ tation and co-optation of these movements, or at least their leadership, by the left-leaning populist regimes of the ‘pink tide’ that succeeded neoliberalism, whereby these governments, typically, have pursued ‘neo-developmentalist’ and reformist policies favouring national bourgeoisies, the upper peasantry, and transnational extractive capital in a very diluted ‘farmer road’ (in effect, modest reforms in favour of the commercial small farm sector grafted onto a still dominant structure of Junker agro-export latifundia). Opposition by radical social movements to the policies of neo-extractivism that underpin these regimes has been muted by redistributive and social welfare programmes that have served to alleviate poverty, but are premised on the very extractive activities that gen­ erate poverty and inequality (Tilzey 2018, 2019a). The rise, role, and ‘post-class’ perspective of NGOs and the ‘new social movements’ (which we may identify as ‘alter-hegemonic’) in the ‘second wave’ of anti-neoliberal protest raises some important analytical questions concerning the class-based, and politically oriented Marxism which we advocate in this book. It is true, of course, that ‘objective’ class position and ‘subjective’ class positionality may not coincide, such that the central issue of political class for­ mation, class consciousness, and the role of ideology in shaping class and resis­ tance to actually experienced modes of exploitation are central considerations in articulating the Marxian position here, as they were for Wolf (Vergara-Camus 2014; Otero 1999, 2018). Thus, considerations of race, ethnicity, gender, etc. are vitally important dimensions of class, and shape how class is experienced and how class consciousness develops. To consider these dimensions as divorced from class, as ‘populists’ and ‘post-modernists’ tend to do, however, is to evacu­ ate from analysis the role of racial, ethnic, and gender categories as markers and means of ‘economic’ exploitation – in other words, their role as class categories, frequently as a justification for ‘super-exploitation’, on the one hand, or for pri­ vileged status, on the other. Such lack of precise coincidence of class position and positionality appears greater when the increasingly all-pervasive contradictions of capitalism, par­ ticularly those of an environmental nature, appear to transcend class. This is especially so in the global North where relative affluence enables ‘actors of conscience’ to possess time and knowledge to concern themselves with issues, often global in scope, that have only an indirect bearing on their own liveli­ hoods. This, at base, is the reason for the primary location of the ‘new social movements’ in the global North. The presence of such movements in the global South is, for the same reason, considerably less and is, in the main, the outcome of the presence of NGOs, dominated by Northern ideologies and

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finance. For the majority in the South and in Latin America, however, ‘environmental’ issues are of concern primarily because they may seriously compromise livelihoods in a very direct way – through contamination of water and soils, destruction of forest resources and game, etc. And such impacts usually have a clear cause – extraction of resources, or clearance and appropriation of land by transnational capital and/or the agro-exporting oli­ garchy. Such apparently ‘environmental’ issues are, therefore, quite evidently class issues in this Southern context. Respondents to contradictions under these circumstances may be termed ‘actors of victimhood’ and do not easily fit the mould of ‘new social movement’ participants. Nonetheless, the strong presence of northern NGOs, state support for the ‘re-invention of ethnic tradition’ and emphasis on local and ‘community’ development initiatives, together with the ‘soft-left’s’ identification of the ‘multitude’ as ‘corporate capital’s’ nemesis, meant that, from the 1990s, there was greater potential for ‘unification’ of disparate classes under a common banner of so-called ‘civil society’. This became the case with the agrarian populist invocation of the ‘peasant way’ and ‘food sovereignty’ on a widened definition that conflated ‘progressive’ (alter-hegemonic) and ‘radical’ (counter­ hegemonic) positions. This widened definition represented the ‘master frame’ (see Rice 2012; Claeys 2015) to which all adherents of the ‘peasant way’ could subscribe. While such a ‘master frame’ may be an important and valid basis for social movement coherence and mobilization up to a certain point, it nonetheless elides crucial differences in class position among and between followers of the ‘peasant way’, most especially between the market-dependent upper peasantry, and the market-autonomy seeking middle and lower pea­ santry and indigenous groups. Additionally, the former, along with NGOs and urban intellectuals of the ‘new social movements’ placed emphasis above all on ‘democratization’ through electoral politics, together with ‘grassroots’ ‘community-level’ initiatives. As we shall see in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, these differences in class position increasingly came to the surface as social movement strategy moved from an oppositional stance towards the formulation and implementation of policy once the coalition of anti-neo­ liberal interests attained power. The elision of class difference in the ‘new social movement’ and agrarian populist frame, while understandable and perhaps strategically necessary up to a point, nonetheless had the effect of perpetuating the ‘master frame’ as a simplistic binary between ‘civil society’, on the one hand, and ‘corporate capital’, on the other, with the state simply assigned a role, in response to the ‘democratic will’, of implementing ‘public policy’ (see Desmarais et al. 2017 as an exemplar of this populist view of the relationship between ‘civil society’, the ‘corporate sphere’, and the state). This view overemphasized the monolithic character of the ‘corporate opposition’, evacuated the immanent bases of dissention among ‘allies’ due to its postclass ontology, and failed to understand the social relational nature of the state as the ‘condensation of the balance of class forces’ in the social forma­ tion (Poulantzas 1978).

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As Petras and Veltmeyer (2003: 64) state: ‘both the history and present forms taken by the peasant/state relations in Latin America underline the folly of ignoring or underestimating the instrumentality of the state and also the class-based nature of its institutional agency. Claims about the ‘plurality’ or ‘autonomy’ of the state notwithstanding, it is clear that it has in the past acted on behalf of the capitalist class, one that is either indigenous or external to Latin America, and continues to do so in the present’. While this may support a more Milibandian than Poulantzian interpretation of the state (see above for discussion), there is little doubt that, both historically and currently, the peripheral state in Latin America has undertaken a role that has shaped agrarian change to the advantage of fractions of the capitalist class (including sometimes the upper peasantry) and to the disadvantage of the middle and lower peasantry (including the majority of indigenous people). It is true to say that the ‘default’ position of the Latin American state has been, and generally continues to be, one that supports the agro-exporting oligarchy, perpetuating the contradictions of the ‘Junker road’ to agrarian capitalism. As we have seen, in a few specific contexts, rarely ‘from below’ and almost invariably ‘from above’ as passive revolution, the state has implemented agrarian reform programmes that have ventured cautiously down the ‘farmer road’, but such ostensibly pro-peasant (usually pro-upper peasant) interventions have been both temporally and spatially delimited, involving little actual land redis­ tribution from oligarchy to peasantry (Kay 2000). The peasantry, for its part, has tended to oscillate between local struggles and confrontations with the state, occasionally playing a major role in resist­ ing and sometimes, as in the anti-neoliberal movements in Bolivia and Ecua­ dor, even ousting the incumbent ruling class. Sadly, under this scenario, the positive achievements secured by the peasantry (such as land redistribution, however limited) tend to be constrained, or even subsequently reversed, by the incapacity of the peasant movement to transform the capitalist nature of the state, and the social relations of capitalism that lie behind it. This happened in Guatemala after the fall of Arbenz, in Peru under Fujimori’s radical neo­ liberalism (see below), in Chile following the fall of Allende, threatened to happen in Bolivia with the ‘coup’ against Evo Morales (as in Chile, again supported by the USA), although this was narrowly averted when new elec­ tions in Bolivia returned MAS to power, and has now come to pass in Ecua­ dor. This speaks to the perennial problem of building alliances between the ‘radical’ peasantry and other ‘progressive’, but not necessarily anti-capitalist forces, that are strong enough to displace the neoliberal oligarchy, while at the same time resisting reformism and being able to sustain, and drive through, a programme of ‘revolutionary’ transformation of the state-capital nexus. As we have seen, this scenario is characteristic of what we have termed the ‘medial hegemony’ version of passive revolution, one that is continually under threat by a reversion to ‘minimal hegemony’. This inability of ‘counter-hegemonic’ forces to avoid co-optation into ‘sub-hegemonic’ interests, let alone to over­ throw the hegemony of the agro-exporting oligarchy, has been, and remains,

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an almost insuperable obstacle. This obstacle is massively exacerbated, moreover, by the constant threat, or reality, of state authoritarianism and repression (the regression from ‘medial’ to ‘minimal hegemony’), commonly supported overtly or covertly by the imperium (most particularly, by the USA). It should be recalled that the USA has made, and continues to make, the prevention of the emergence of ‘another Cuba’ in Latin America its number one priority. Small wonder, then, that seeking ‘autonomy’ in the interstices of the state-capital nexus has its attractions, assuming such spaces can be secured (which, of course, begs the whole question of land avail­ ability). But such attempts, much beloved of the ‘progressives’ and ‘populists’ since they apparently ‘bypass’ the state, necessarily remain merely inter­ stitial – any attempt to ‘scale-up’ such experiments in autonomy meets with the same constraints confronted by peasant social movements in seeking land redistribution. ‘Radical’ peasant movements are thus obliged to steer a perilous course between the Charybdis of co-optation through alliance with reformist and populist forces (‘medial hegemony’), and the Scylla of outright repression by the oligarchic state (‘minimal hegemony’). Confronted with these twin dan­ gers, ‘radical’ peasant movements have responded in two main ways. Firstly, they have implemented a comprehensive campaign of roadblocks (cortas de ruta), disrupting the transport of goods, including foodstuffs, to the main cities, and blocking the export of primary materials abroad. Secondly, they have instigated marches on the main and, usually, capital cities. Thus, the MST in Brazil has organized national marches to Brasilia of over 100,000 people, with many urban supporters joining the demonstration; the Zapatistas in Mexico similarly marched on Mexico City, with numbers of demonstrators exceeding 300,000; CONAIE in Ecuador occupied the capital Quito, estab­ lishing a short-lived ‘junta popular’ with progressive junior military officers; similar marches to the national capitals have taken place in Bolivia and Paraguay (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). The out­ come of such marches and demonstrations is commonly a negotiating session with the government, often securing certain concessions from the latter in return for demobilization of the protestors. While such a strategy may be as much as protest movements can realistically secure, merely extracting certain, and often temporary, concessions from the incumbent regime is nonetheless at best a reformist strategy. It results in the cyclical ritual of mass-protest/nego­ tiation/concessions/withdrawal or watered-down concessions/mass-protest (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011). It seems clear then, that the pursuit of mass pressure politics, rather than revolutionary struggle for state power (and its subversion), is indicative of weakness rather than strength. Sadly, this implies something of an impasse in terms of the effective mobilization of revolu­ tionary peasant forces, let alone the implementation of a strategy for the overturning of the state-capital nexus in favour of a programme that includes ‘radical’ food or livelihood sovereignty. This speaks more widely to the inadequacies of the ‘liberal democracy’ of the capitalist state-capital nexus,

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permitting ‘political equality’ but denying ‘economic equality’ (Tilzey 2019b). As Eckstein (2001: 400) notes: ‘in sum, most democracies [during the neo­ liberal era] opened up to previously excluded groups. Yet, at the dawn of the new millennium democratization proved no panacea to regional problems. Politics on occasion became contentious, but more significantly the new democracies left yearnings of many lower-, working-, and middle-class people, the numerical majority, unmet.’

The ‘Post-Neoliberal’ Turn, the ‘Pink Tide’ States, and Resistance in the New Millennium Built in part on the resurgence of peasant and indigenous resistance to neoli­ beralism during the 1990s, the new millennium saw the emergence of the ‘progressive’ cycle in Latin America, in which a swathe of left-leaning regimes committed themselves to moving beyond neoliberalism. This ‘post-neoliberal’ turn may be attributed to a number of factors. First was the clear de-legit­ imation of neoliberal policies, which had failed utterly to deliver the benefits claimed by their apologists. They did of course achieve what was their real purpose, the entrenchment of the power and wealth of the agro-export oli­ garchy, and the super-exploitation of peripheral workforces to the benefit of the imperium, particularly the USA. The result was, as we have seen, a resurgence of social movements seeking an end to extreme poverty, precarity, and the despoliation of the environment. The second was the erosion of the ‘Washington Consensus’ in the international financial institutions in the face of the incontrovertible failure of ‘ free markets’ to achieve their much vaunted ‘miracle cure’ in terms of poverty alleviation and ‘development’, and the consequent emergence of the ‘post-Washington Consensus’ concerning the need to ‘bring the state back into’ the development process with the objective of fostering a more inclusive form of capitalism (Sunkel 1993; Infante and Sunkel 2009). A third factor was the relative decline of the influence of the USA and the commensurate increase in the presence of China as a potential source of loans, investments, and markets, stimulated by the latter’s now insatiable demand for energy and natural resources as the new ‘workshop of the world’. This opened up a space for Latin American states to pursue more inclusive and centrist policies, under conditions of a ‘commodity boom’, relatively insulated from the economic and political stranglehold, usually in favour of oppressive right-wing regimes, exerted by the USA (Tilzey 2019a, 2020a). Under these circumstances, there was a shift from ‘minimal’ to ‘medial hegemony’ in such ‘post-neoliberal’ states. This combination of internal and external dynamics thus generated the emergence of the ‘post-neoliberal’ state throughout much, although by no means all, of Latin America, entailing ‘inclusionary state activism’ of the ‘progressive’, or centre-left (reformist), political regimes (Barrett et al. 2008; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). While neoliberalism remained state policy in Colombia, Mexico, and Peru,1 most of the remainder of Latin America

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adopted ‘neo-developmentalist’ policies, founded on ‘neo-extractivism’, whereby part of the increased export revenue from agro-exports, minerals, and fossil fuels was recycled to fund social income schemes to alleviate the poverty of the swelling numbers of the precariat. Bolivia and Ecuador, as we shall see, deployed the term buen vivir or vivir bien (good living) to put an indigenous and environmental gloss on economic policies that were none­ theless virtually identical to those employed by other ‘pink tide’ states – neo­ extractivism being used to generate revenue to alleviate symptoms of poverty and precarity caused by the very same policy of primary commodity extrac­ tion and export to the imperium and sub-imperium (China) (Tilzey 2019a). Gudynas (2013) has referred to this phenomenon as the ‘compensatory state’. Despite regime attempts to alleviate symptoms of poverty and precarity through social welfare programmes, the predication of neo-extractive policies upon enhanced processes of primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession has led to increased unrest among the peasantry and indigenous groups as ‘neo-developmental’ capitalism has unfolded and initial commit­ ments to agrarian reform and ecological development remain unfulfilled (Tilzey 2019a). In response to such unrest and protest, ‘pink tide’ states have become increasingly authoritarian, a phenomenon which may be dubbed ‘left­ authoritarianism’ (Tilzey 2020a). In this context of enhanced primitive accumulation and environmental degradation, some peasant and indigenous movements have not only engaged in the resulting political conflicts and class struggle over access to land and the means of livelihood, but have increasingly been involved in the theoretical and political debates in formulating proposals for ‘alternative’ development, or alternatives to development (Veltmeyer and Petras 2019).2 Many of the organizations comprising these movements have coalesced and constituted an alliance with a view to the dissemination of experiences and ideas. With respect to La Via Campesina, such experiences and ideals have apparently crystallized into a model of sustainable agriculture premised on small-scale production for local markets and on agroecology as part of a broader pro­ gramme of agrarian reform (Robles and Veltmeyer 2015; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). These peasant movements, together with the continental alli­ ance of indigenous communities, claim to be united in their opposition to the corporate business model and the capitalist global food regime. Nonetheless, as suggested above, such claims to unity tend to depend on a more agrarian ‘populist’ discourse. This tends to elide real differences between the ‘alter’ or ‘sub’-hegemonic upper peasantry, which generally owns sufficient land for commercial production and is interested primarily in protecting local/national markets from ‘corporate’ agriculture, and the middle/lower peasantry, which seeks radical (counter-hegemonic) land redistribution, the abolition of abso­ lute property rights, and the adoption or rehabilitation of collective or com­ munal production systems. Additionally, as we have earlier indicated, certain lowland indigenous ‘tribal’ groups tend to exhibit an ‘alter’, rather than ‘counter-hegemonic’, positionality, emphasizing territorial autonomy, cultural

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identity, and an anti-class stance in conformity to a ‘new social movement’ ethos. Thus, while suppressed when in opposition to neoliberal regimes, these immanent bases of dissention tend to emerge in the ‘post-neoliberal’ regimes, as has indeed occurred in Bolivia and Ecuador (see below in the case studies). In the current conjuncture in Latin America, capital accumulation tends to be undertaken through two principal, and juxtaposed, mechanisms, as dis­ cussed earlier: (1) ‘super-exploitation’ within the capital-labour relation, con­ fined to highly selective zones of industrialization, for export to the imperium; and (2) ‘accumulation by dispossession’, particularly in the form of ‘neo­ extractivism’, entailing the extraction of mineral, fossil fuel, and agricultural (including bio-fuel) commodities, on the basis of the expropriation of lands usually covered only by informal use rights (often communally held by indi­ genous people) which, in Latin America, are legally the property of the state (Petras and Veltmeyer 2015). The second mechanism, ‘accumulation by dispossession’, on this definition, is associated with the increasing presence of ‘land-grabbing’ (that is, largescale foreign investments in the acquisition of land, sold or leased by the state, without appropriate consultation or consent of people in long-standing occu­ pancy of that land – or, more meaningfully, of people whose ‘home’ that land is), commodification by means of the privatization of (assertion of absolute property rights over) the means of production, concessions to explore and extract metals, minerals, and fossil fuels, all entailing the violation of the ter­ ritorial ‘rights’ of indigenous peoples (enshrined to some degree in interna­ tional and national law but commonly ignored or circumvented by the state) and the serious degradation or destruction of the means of livelihood (Spronk and Webber 2007; McKay 2018). These processes have generated conflict between indigenous communities and extractive capital, where there is a clear relationship to those resisting between the operating companies and the forces of expropriation and ecological/livelihood degradation. The relationship between indigenous groups and the state is rather less clear cut, however, notwithstanding the state’s sponsorship of, and dependence for revenue on, neo-extractivist accumulation. While neoliberal regimes, such as those recently or currently incumbent in Colombia, Guatemala, and Peru, are more inclined to engage in policies of outright repression of resistance, the ‘pink tide’ states have a more ambiguous relationship with indigenous communities and extractive capital. Given their greater electoral dependence on indigenous constituencies, particularly in the Andes, the latter must have greater regard to sustaining legitimacy among this electorate. However, the huge and unre­ solvable dilemma is that the social welfare schemes on which these regimes have built their legitimacy among the precariat are themselves dependent on revenue from the very neo-extractivism, through accumulation by disposses­ sion, that generates precarity. Ultimately, therefore, these states have tended to side with neo-extractive capital against indigenous and peasant communities, at risk of alienating larger sections of their electoral support base (Petras and Veltmeyer 2015; Veltmeyer and Petras 2019). As commodity prices have

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fallen over the last half decade or so, and revenues have been squeezed, the pressure to intensify extraction to make good the shortfall has increased, with the result that ‘pink tide’ states such as Bolivia and Ecuador have become increasingly authoritarian in their response to resistance (Tilzey 2019a). The form and future of peasant and indigenous ‘class struggle’ in this conjuncture is as yet unclear. The ‘pink tide’ states were (and continue to be) built on a broad but relatively loose (populist) alliance between sub-hege­ monic (national developmentalist), alter-hegemonic (‘green’ localism, ethno­ development, ‘small-scale’ capitalism, ‘new social movements’), and counterhegemonic (lower and middle peasantry, semi-proletariat, some indigenous groups). As explained above, this populist alliance was contradictory from the outset, and as state revenues have declined and neo-extractivism has intensi­ fied, so has the alliance fragmented. So, while the ‘counter-hegemonic’ fractions of this broader alliance – the lower/middle peasantry, rural landless workers, and some indigenous com­ munities – had coalesced to a considerable degree in the 1990s and the early years of the present century and advanced the ‘class struggle’ by overturning neoliberal regimes in many states, the other ‘alter’ and ‘sub-hegemonic’ frac­ tions succeeded in subverting the road to ‘radical’ food sovereignty by diverting progressive change down the path of centrist, capitalist reformism. Through co-optation and welfarism, counter-hegemonic forces have suffered fragmentation and demoralization as the regimes in which they placed their faith have failed to carry through the promised ‘agrarian revolution’. Under such circumstances, resistance has tended to become increasingly ‘NGO-ized’ in conformity to the pre-occupations of the ‘new social movements’ and agrarian ‘populists’, tending to be ‘single-issue’ based, episodic, and localized with little connection to the wider agrarian question, class struggle, and the dynamics of peripheral capital accumulation. As Zibechi (2012) has sug­ gested, these ‘new social movements’ are not anti-systemic in the sense that they do not fundamentally challenge the social relational basis of extractive capitalism. Failure to confront the social relational basis of capitalism, and the impossibility of appeasing extractive capital, national capital, and the ‘classes of labour’ simultaneously, had led to the almost complete collapse of the ‘pink tide’ regimes in Latin America until their more recent revival – the recent re-election of MAS in Bolivia under Luis Arce, the retention of power by Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, the centrist regime of Andrés Lopez Obra­ dor in Mexico, the election of the centre-left Pedro Castillo in Peru, the new centre-left regime in Chile, and, most recently, the astounding election of Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez in Colombia suggest that a ‘pink-tide’ obituary is somewhat premature. Despite these electoral successes, however, the contradictions of peripheral capitalism remain entrenched under nationalpopular regimes, and they appear able only to ameliorate rather than to resolve these apparently insuperable difficulties. The resulting fragmentation and disorder that arises from frustrated hopes for an end to precarity on the part of the majority appears to be leading to an oscillation between ‘left­

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populism’ and ‘right-populist authoritarianism’. This pattern, and the repe­ ated failure of ‘pink tide’ regimes to realize subaltern aspirations outside the constraints of peripheral capitalism and the discourse of conventional develop­ ment, is captured well in the title of Jeffery Webber’s (2017) book The Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of the Same. Thus, failed expectations of ‘pink-tide’ regimes, as in Brazil after the fall of Dilma Rousseff or in Ecuador after Moreno, have permitted the authoritarian right to step into the breach, promising strength, law and order, and a return to ‘traditional values’, all the while reinforcing the power of the oligarchy, accelerating extractivism and ‘accumulation by disposses­ sion’, and re-opening animosities between indigenous people and the creole elite (Tilzey 2020a). As Veltmeyer and Petras suggest: social movements in the current context of Latin American politics are not positioned, nor do they have the power, to challenge the guardians of the dominant capitalist system. For this we have to await the resurgence of the labour movement and a much-needed reconstruction of the political Left. (Veltmeyer and Petras 2019: 76) However, any such reconstruction, we assert, should be founded on an eco­ socialist, agroecological ‘peasant way’ if the two profoundly important aspects of the agrarian question – the ‘political’ and the ‘ecological’ limits to capital – are to be resolved (Tilzey 2018).

Notes 1 As of 2022, these three states all had centre-left administrations, however. The leftist Peruvian President Pedro Castillo was forced from office by right-wing forces in 2023. 2 Here we may differentiate between ‘alternative development’ and ‘post-develop­ ment’: ‘alternative development’ may be seen to be equivalent to ‘radical’ food sovereignty (a counter-hegemonic position), emphasizing the need to secure social well-being and poverty eradication not through economic growth, but rather through the elimination of exploitation, the redistribution of productive resources, most espe­ cially land, among the people, and the reconfiguration of production according to ecological principles, such as those founded on agroecology. This model equates in essence to eco-socialism (Lowy 2015; Tilzey 2018). ‘Post-development’, by contrast, at least as conceptualized by Gudynas (2013, 2017), may be described as ‘alter-hege­ monic’, where the emphasis is upon living in ‘harmony with nature’ and ‘autonomous’ communities living in social solidarity, claiming also to be as opposed to socialism as it is to capitalism. It is therefore agrarian populist in tone, abjures class analysis, and seeks somehow to bypass the state in the construction of communities modelled on indigenous ‘principles’ (such as buen vivir or sumak kawsay).

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Kay, C. 2000. Latin America’s Agrarian Transformation: Peasantization and Prole­ tarianization. In: Bryceson, D., Kay, C., and Mooij, J. (eds.) Disappearing Peasan­ tries? Rural Labour in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Bourton-on-Dunsmore: ITDG Publishing. Knight, A. 1986. The Mexican Revolution, Volume 1: Porfirians, Liberals and Pea­ sants. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knight, A. 2003. The Domestic Dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions. In: Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Com­ parative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kohl, B. and Farthing, L. 2006. Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance. London: Verso. Lenin, V.I. 1964. Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline. Collected Works. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Lockhart, J. and Schwartz, S.B. 1983. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowy, M. 2015. Ecosocialism: A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chi­ cago, IL: Haymarket Books. Lucero, J. 2008. Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Macas, L. 1991. El Levantamiento Indígena Visto por sus Protagonistas. Quito: Insti­ tuto Científico de Culturas Indígenas (ICCI). Marini, R.M. 1972. Brazilian Subimperialism. Monthly Review, 23, 14–24. Marini, R.M. 1974. Dialectica de la Dependencia. Mexico: Ediciones Era. MacEwan, A. 1981. Revolution and Economic Development in Cuba. London: Macmillan. McKay, B. 2018. The Politics of Agrarian Change in Bolivia’s Soy Complex. Journal of Agrarian Change 18, 406–424. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12240. Miliband, R. 1969. The State in Capitalist Society. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Morner, M. 1984. The Rural Economy and Society of Colonial Spanish South Amer­ ica. In: Bethell, L. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Latin America: Colonial Latin America, Volume II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morton, A.D. 2013. Revolution and State in Modern Mexico: The Political Economy of Uneven Development. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Moyo, S. and Yeros, P. (eds.) 2005. Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. London: Zed Press. Murray, W.E. 2003. From Dependency to Reform and Back Again: The Chilean Peasantry during the Twentieth Century. In: Brass, T. (ed.) Latin American Pea­ sants. London: Routledge. Otero, G. 1999. Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Mexico. London: Routledge. Otero, G. 2018. The Neoliberal Diet: Healthy Profits, Unhealthy People. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Paige, J.M. 1975. Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture in the Underdeveloped World. New York: The Free Press. Pearse, A. 1975. The Latin American Peasant. London: Frank Cass. Petras, J. 1997. The Resurgence of the Left. New Left Review 223, May/June. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. 2001. Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the TwentyFirst Century. London: Zed Press.

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Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. 2003. The Peasantry and State in Latin America: A Troubled Past, an Uncertain Future. In: Brass, T. (ed.) Latin American Peasants. London: Routledge. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. 2011. Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (eds.) 2015. Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Petras, J. and Zeitlin, M. 1968. Latin America: Reform or Revolution?New York: Fawcett. Portelli, H. 1973. Gramsci y el Bloque Histórico. Mexico: Siglo XXI. Poulantzas, N. 1978. State, Power, Socialism. London: Verso. Rice, R. 2012. The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America’s Neoliberla Era. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Riley, D.J. and Desai, M. 2007. The Passive Revolutionary Route to the Modern World: Italy and India in Comparative Perspective. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 49, 815–847. Robles, W. and Veltmeyer, H. 2015. The Politics of Agrarian Reform in Brazil: The Landless Rural Workers Movement. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scott, J.C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Spronk, S. and Webber, J.R. 2007. Struggles against Accumulation by Dispossession in Bolivia: The Political Economy of Natural Resource Contention. Latin American Perpsectives, 34, 31–47. Sunkel, O. 1993. Development from Within: Toward a Neostructuralist Approach for Latin America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner. Thiesenhusen, W.C. 1995. Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tilzey, M. 2017. Reintegrating Economy, Society, and Environment for Cooperative Futures: Polanyi, Marx, and Food Sovereignty. Journal of Rural Studies, 53, 317– 334. Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, and Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilzey, M. 2019a. Authoritarian Populism and Neo-Extractivism in Bolivia and Ecuador: The Unresolved Agrarian Question and The Prospects for Food Sover­ eignty as Counter-Hegemony. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46, 626–652. Tilzey, M. 2019b. Food Democracy as ‘Radical’ Food Sovereignty: Agrarian Democ­ racy and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance to the Neo-Imperial Food Regime. Politics and Governance, 7, 202–213. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v7i4.2091. Tilzey, M. 2020a. Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism: agrarian dynamics and resis­ tance as radical food sovereignty. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 41(3), 381–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2020.1767543. Tilzey, M. 2020b. From Neoliberalism to National Developmentalism? Contested Agrarian Imaginaries of a Post-Neoliberal Future for Food and Farming. Journal of Agrarian Change https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12379. Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. 1997. New Social Movements in Latin America: The

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6

Bolivia

The Colonial Era Following the initial phase of Spanish conquest from the 1530s, the Viceroy Francisco de Toledo had consolidated a stable regime of domination in the Andes, including the area of modern-day Bolivia, by the 1570s (Hylton and Thomson 2007). The foundation of the colonial order was a state-community pact in which native populations, from diverse ethnic groupings and collec­ tively nominated ‘Indians’, were to provide labour and tribute to the Spanish crown in ‘exchange’ for protection of their land holdings (which today would be referred to as ‘territories’) and a relative degree of local autonomy. Using a strategy of indirect rule, Spain appointed ethnic authorities called caciques (kuraka in Kichwa and mallku in Aymara), drawn from the hereditary Andean nobility, as intermediaries to govern the densely settled agricultural communities of the highlands. By the middle of the eighteenth century, however, this system was subject to increasing strain and was beginning to unravel. Under increased competition from France and, particularly, Brit­ ain, the Spanish Bourbon monarchy felt compelled to introduce a series of reforms. Thus, under Carlos III (1759–1788), the Spanish crown introduced measures to secure the more efficient collection of tribute from indigenous Andeans, and the increased taxation of trade from the 1770s. These were means of enhancing surplus extraction under essentially pre-capitalist relations of production. The most onerous institution for indigenous populations in the eighteenth century was the forced distribution of commodities (reparto de mercancías), combining merchant capital with colonial state power to extract the surpluses from peasant/indigenous community labour. This system of surplus extraction entailed Spanish governors (corregidores) taking commodities on credit from merchants and then delivering them to indigenous Andeans who were obliged to accept and subsequently repay at a significantly inflated rate. The corregi­ dores established networks of agents and debt-collectors who exerted increas­ ingly stringent control over indigenous communities and coerced caciques into compliance with the system. While formally illegal (although tolerated) until the 1750s, the Spanish crown thereafter legalized the system in order to DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-10

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increase the amount of revenue it could extract through taxation. This sun­ dered the superficial trappings of moral economy of state-indigenous com­ munity relations that had previously obtained, and led to the proliferation of conflict between Spanish state, creole elite, and indigenous/peasant majority during the latter part of the eighteenth century (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). Decades of local political conflict, state crisis, and deepening disaffection with the colonial order culminated in 1780 when indigenous communities rose up in the largest anti-colonial revolution in the Americas since the Spanish conquest. The first of a series of regional insurgencies emerged in northern Potosí following years of tension between indigenous communities and the corregidor, together with his cacique class allies. An indigenous Kichwa pea­ sant, Tomás Katari, assumed, remarkably, the mantle of community defender, outwitting the despotic regional officials to enforce his ‘law and justice’ having earlier appealed to Buenos Aires to secure the legal support of the Spanish viceroy. The local state had forfeited any legitimacy among the indigenous communities, enabling Katari to establish, for a very short while as formally recognized cacique, effective governing authority to popular acclaim by redres­ sing the worst excesses of the Spanish administration. His tenure, however, was very short-lived and he was taken captive under orders from the local state in La Plata (modern-day Sucre), and executed in December 1780 (Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). Similar discontent in La Paz erupted into rebellion in March 1781, with Julián Apaza, an Aymaran commoner, assuming command. Apaza assumed the mantle of political, military, and spiritual authority, and adopted the name of Tupaj Katari (meaning resplendent serpent) in honour both of his Potosí predecessor and the contemporary leader of the Kichwa rebellion in Lower Peru (present-day Peru), Tupaj Amaru. Aymara communities rose up and laid siege to royalist forces now confined to the city of La Paz. While Tupaj Katari did invite creole and mestizo ‘compatriots’ to abandon the royalist encampment and join the insurgency, this invitation was in general declined, thwarting the possibility of a cross-class, inter-ethnic alliance (Hylton and Thomson 2007) (an earlier alliance in February 1781 in Oruro had, due to creole concerns over their own vulnerability and weakness within a generalized ‘indigenous’ movement, ended with creoles taking up arms against their erstwhile indigenous ‘comrades’). Additionally, virtually all caciques in Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia), in con­ trast to Lower Peru, remained loyal to the Spanish crown, further constraining opportunities for ethnic unity and cross-class alliance. The de-legitimation of the caciques and corregidores during the course of the later eighteenth century had, however, resulted in a process of progressive internal democratization among indigenous communities, with cacique authority devolved and dispersed, and, consequently, base-level forces playing a powerful role in influencing the political movement and decisions in 1781. This mirrored the advocacy of Tupaj Amaru (II),1 in which the Spanish overlords would be expelled and the forced con­ sumption and state sales monopolies would be eliminated. Forced labour in

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Potosí and bonded labour in textile workshops would be abolished, while indi­ genous officials, to be known as alcaldes mayores, would replace the hated cor­ regidores. These, especially in the case of Tupaj Katari and reflecting the increased internal democratization of indigenous community organization in the form of the ayllu, clearly did not represent demands simply to return to the status quo ante, even of the pre-Columbian status quo ante. While drawing on the past, these insurrectionary objectives were surprisingly forward look­ ing and represent a fundamental point of reference for radical movements, combining indigenous and socialist values, in the current conjuncture. Nonetheless, the 1780–1 insurrection ended in the defeat of both Tupaj Amaru and Tupaj Katari by government and creole forces, with the latter suffering the most gruesome of executions. As Hylton and Thomson (2007: 43) note: ‘Indians had seen the defeat of their own best hope for political hegemony in the Andes. The scope of their vision for self-rule now reduced down to the sphere of community autonomy.’ The class unity between the Spanish colonial government and creoles proved short-lived, however, and, in the wake of Napoleon’s 1807 invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, and with political sovereignty in Spain dissolved, fissures between these two elite groups emerged. Creoles occupied a strategic position in colonial social rela­ tions, and with the dead hand of Spanish pre-capitalist exactions contrasting ever more starkly with dynamism of North Atlantic capitalism and with Enlightenment values more widely, they sought increasingly to assume lea­ dership themselves. They now perceived the opportunity to direct restive social forces themselves in order to achieve greater political representation and autonomy for white and mestizo colonists and, ostensibly (although, in reality, only rhetorically) for indigenous peoples as well. In La Paz in 1809, a nucleus of mainly urban creole radicals led by Pedro Domingo Murillo made a bid for self-government, recruiting a number of caciques to assist in the raising of a small army, only to be defeated by royalist troops sent from Cuzco. It was not until 1825 that Antonio José de Sucre, one of Símon Bolí­ var’s generals, invaded Upper Peru to subdue the continent’s last royalist stronghold and to declare independence for the new state of Bolivia. ‘Bolivia’, as a new republic ‘liberated’ from colonial and monarchical rule, thus emerged from an inter-elite struggle rather than through the direct intervention of subaltern indigenous and plebeian interests seeking to shape the contours of the new politico-economic order. Where Tupaj Amaru had imagined that native Americans, creoles, mestizos, and blacks would ‘live together like brothers and congregated in a single body’ (Hylton and Thom­ son 2007: 45), although under indigenous hegemony, the creole ‘liberators’ now sought to incorporate subordinate native Americans under ‘enlightened’ white hegemony. The intention here was to transform ‘Indians’ into ‘Boli­ vians’ without, however, granting them the rights and status of ‘citizens’. Lands worked, held, and governed collectively – that is, the ayllus that formed the basis of Andean indigenous community life and which the Spanish had maintained as the foundation of colonial revenue – were now to be converted

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into alienable private property, the assertion of absolute property rights over land according to the tenets of North Atlantic capitalism. Indigenous allyu members were now expected to become autonomous small commercial farmers, responding ‘rationally’ to market signals, pursuing the ‘farmer road’ to capitalism.

Creole Independence, Indigenous Subordination This rhetorical ambition proved short-lived, however. With waning produc­ tion from mines, and little other revenue to finance the new state, the creole elite soon found themselves again resorting to traditional and pre-capitalist means of surplus extraction, entailing the reconstitution of the pre-existing class and racial hierarchy and the renewal of colonial institutions with ‘dom­ ination without hegemony’. In this way, Antonio José de Sucre, Bolivia’s first president, was obliged to repeal, in 1826, Bolívar’s earlier ban on tribute, thus re-asserting the intimate relations between state fiscal demands, the extraction of tribute, and non-capitalist relations of community life. Thus, some twothirds of the population was denied formal citizenship under the republican constitution, and tribute from indigenous labour under pre-capitalist condi­ tions was restored to its status as the prime source of state revenue. This situation continued essentially unchanged until the 1870s, when increasing revenue from silver mining decreased state dependence on pre-capitalist tri­ bute, and gave rise to a ruling-class consensus over the need to address the ‘Indian question’ by means of the break-up of indigenous Andean communities and the sale of community lands. The 1874 ‘Dis-entailment Law’ posed a serious threat to the continued existence of indigenous communities by subjecting to privatization and sale land and natural resources held in common. Despite ser­ ious indigenous resistance, one third of community lands had been privatized by the close of the 1880s, the majority in the department of La Paz (Larson 2004; Hylton and Thomson 2007). This landlord offensive against indigenous com­ munities continued into the next century, especially in the densely populated Lake Titicaca region, but eventuated not in agrarian capitalist relations, but rather in ‘neo-feudal’ or ‘semi-feudal’ agrarian structure, premised on established modes of extraction and exploitation. The large landed estate, the hacienda, based on surplus extraction from indigenous peasants through violence and extra-economic coercion, emerged as the dominant form of property and pro­ duction in the Bolivian Andes only at this time, rather than earlier as in Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (Rivera Cusicanqui 2003). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, indigenous com­ munities frequently lent their support to one or other of the creole elite poli­ tical parties, to the Liberals or to the Conservatives/Republicans, with promises from both that indigenous community lands would be restored to their previous ‘owners’ upon the assumption of power by whichever party emerged victorious from national elections (the electorate being confined to white creoles and mestizos, with indigenous people still excluded). Such

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promises were then invariably broken by the new creole government. By 1927, however, this pattern had changed, with indigenous leaders no longer forging alliances with the elite Liberals or Republicans on the basis of false promises, but rather with newly emergent radical forces and labour movements on the left, influenced profoundly by revolutionary developments in Russia, particu­ larly. At this time, the Socialist Party began to cohere as a radical force, especially under the influence of Tristán Marof, who had come under the influence of Marxism while a consular official in Europe following the First World War (he was a comrade and collaborator of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui). Marof sought to unite the Socialist Party urban intellec­ tuals, organized labour, and the caciques of indigenous/peasant communities in Sucre, Potosí, and Oruro and this approach was distinct from more ‘orthodox’ frames in recognizing the demands by indigenous Andeans for community self-government and collective land. The Third National Worker’s Congress in Oruro in 1927, with caciques in attendance, was the first to demand nationalization of Bolivia’s tin mines, campaign for women’s rights and indigenous literacy, and declare class struggle the means to achieve its demands. The call for ‘lands to the people, and mines to the state’, first articulated in Marof ’s text La Justicia del Inca (1926), was here proclaimed as an official slogan. In some respects, the Congress prefigured the nationalpopular focus of the later MNR (see below), but with a more radical agrarian component that was influenced by the participation of ayllu caciques. Continuing hacienda encroachment on indigenous community lands led to the so-called Chayanta Rebellion in July 1927, when ayllu members and hacienda colonos (peasant tenants or peons) rose up in Sucre, Potosí, Oruro, and Cochabamba (Dunkerley 2003). Urban intellectuals, artisans, and law­ yers from Sucre/Potosí, including Marof, called for urban insurrections in support of their rural, indigenous ‘comrades’ who had occupied much of the countryside in the western highland valleys. Such insurrections failed to materialize, however, and the uprising did not spread to the crucial depart­ ment of La Paz, where the power of the new hacendados was most deeply entrenched. Given the general lack of support in the cities for the rebellion, the state was then able to use urban centres as bases for military ‘pacification’ campaigns in the rural areas and the rebellion was effectively suppressed. It was not a total failure from the perspective of indigenous community mem­ bers, however. Incumbent President Siles granted amnesties to 184 leaders (caciques or apoderados) in October 1927, and thereafter proscribed further hacienda expansion in the southern Andean area of the country. Sadly, this decree came rather late for other parts of the Bolivian Andes, especially the department of La Paz, such that while ayllus had still occupied half of high­ land lands in 1880, these had been reduced to less than a third by 1930 (Klein 1982). The failure of the rebellion to spread to urban radical forces, in other words, the lack of consistent unity between rural and urban anti-capitalist and anti-elite forces, was to be a recurring theme. Nonetheless, alliances of this kind did reappear during the Chaco War (see below) and after the mid-1940s,

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contributing to the first national revolutionary cycle of 1952 (see below) (Hylton and Thomson 2007).

The Chaco War and the 1952 Revolution The Chaco War (1932–1935) was fought between Bolivia and Paraguay over disputed land in the semi-arid south east of what was then notionally Boli­ vian territory. The dispute arose, first, because both states had lost important territory to other neighbouring countries (Bolivia had lost to Chile its access to the sea, while Paraguay had lost to Argentina and Brazil a significant part of its former national territory) and were, thus, especially sensitive to the threat of further territorial loss; and, second, because the disputed area in question was reported to contain substantial oil reserves, with two competing oil companies eager to claim rights of extraction, with Standard Oil supporting Bolivian claims, and Royal Dutch Shell supporting Paraguay. The war proved disastrous for Bolivia, although the disaster was instrumental in forging a wider oppositional, national-popular ‘historical bloc’ that had previously been restricted to a radical minority, the limitations of which in terms of capacity to challenge the oligarchic elite had been demonstrated by the very limited achievements of the Chayanta Rebellion. The Chaco War was all-encompassing for Bolivians. From a population of 2,000,000, some 250,000 combatants from various regions, classes, and ethnic groups came together to fight under atrocious conditions. Casualties numbered 52,400, with the overwhelming majority dying from natural causes such as dehydration, dysentery, and hunger. Over 20,000 Bolivians were taken prisoner, 10,000 deserted, while thousands of square kilometres of claimed national territory were lost to Paraguay (Gotkowitz 2003, 2007; Hylton and Thomson 2007). As a result of the sheer incompetence and contempt for the people demon­ strated by the ruling elite under the presidency of Daniel Salamanca, compounded by its continuing administration of the state merely to serve the interests of its own narrow export-oriented membership, this oligarchy became the target of a var­ iegated but relentless nationalist invective. The oligarchy, especially the ‘tin barons’, were increasingly attacked as the anti-national tool of US imperialism. This animosity towards the oligarchy was exacerbated by the continuing expro­ priation of land by hacendados even as the Chaco War was being fought. This ‘internal war’, fought alongside the ‘external’ conflict, was especially prominent in the department of La Paz, the region most severely affected by merchant-landlord­ miner oligarchic bloc under the Republican governments of Bautista Saavedra, Hernando Siles, and Daniel Salamanca (1920–1932). As adult indigenous males were sent to fight in the Chaco War, so did landlords augment their holdings by means of arbitrary land-seizures and fraud (Gotkowitz 2007). Revolts by allyu members then intensified towards the end of 1933, and throughout the La Paz countryside and in alliance with colono peasants of the haciendas, Aymara com­ munities instigated land invasions and assaulted the property and persons of landlords (Arze Aguirre 1987; Hylton and Thomson 2007). The ayllu-colono

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insurgencies spread from La Paz to Oruro, Potosí, and Sucre in 1934, but had been suppressed by the conclusion of the Chaco War in 1935. The fiasco of the Chaco War led, however, to the removal of the Repub­ licans from power and their replacement by military men who were revolu­ tionary nationalists, ushering in a period known as ‘military socialism’ (Klein 1982). This period also saw the rise of new parties of the left including the Trotskyist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (Partido Obrero Revolucionario), the Stalinist Revolutionary-Left Party (Partido de la Izquierda Revolucionaria), and, notably, the National Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario or MNR). In this way, indigenous/peasant community insur­ gency tended to be eclipsed during the 1930s and 40s as the leading current of resistance by the protagonism of increasingly radicalized miners, rural tenants, students, and the nationalist parties and regimes affiliated with them. The anti-oligarchic military leaders of this period introduced social welfare legislation and mandatory unionization of the workforce, a measure that would bequeath an important legacy for collective popular organization down to the present day. Perhaps the most important development of this period was the 1938 national convention in La Paz which drafted a socially pro­ gressive new constitution that overturned the orthodox liberal charter of 1880. Leftist delegates at the convention articulated radical new demands, inspired by Mexico’s revolutionary constitution of 1917 and the ideas of the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui. While the socialists were unable to dominate the convention, the new constitution of 1938 did insist on the social function of property and delineated the state’s role as guarantor of public welfare and national economic interests (Gotkowitz 2003, 2007). Despite the temporary restoration to power of the rosca, or tin-mining, oligarchy in the mid-1940s, indigenous and peasant insurgency in the coun­ tryside continued, and coincided with proletarian activism, galvanized in the mining districts, both attempting to foment radical social relational change. The struggles of the cacique-apoderado (ayllu leaders) movement were sus­ tained in this period as Aymara and Kichwa community members and colo­ nos continued to challenge hacendados over land, labour, and the right to education (Gotkowitz 2007; Hylton and Thomson 2007). Seeking to subdue the conflict in the countryside and to capture indigenous support, the mili­ tary-nationalist government Colonel Gualberto Villarroel (1943–1946) inau­ gurated the first National Indigenous Congress in 1945. Prior to the Congress, the ‘Bolivian Indigenous Committee’ (Comité Indígena Boliviana), led by Luis Ramos Quevedo, had drafted an extensive programme that had been circulated in the national press. Quevedo and others sustained the radi­ cal view that the land ‘belonged to the Indians’, and demanded that it be ‘returned to the Community’ (Hylton and Thomson 2007). By the time the Congress assembled, however, Ramos Quevedo had been imprisoned as an agitator and the official agenda, set by Villarroel’s minsters and MNR allies, referred only to the sectoral problem of the colonos, especially rural labour conditions and schooling. Deliberately omitted from the official conclusions

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was any reference to the problems of land tenure and indigenous peasant communities as ayllus. (The MNR emerged out of post-Chaco War nationalist circles and was attracted by European fascist trends, being led by middle-class intellectuals. It reflected populist, nationalist, and anti-oligarchic sentiments, and sought to establish a middle-class – worker – indigenous/peasant alliance as the base of support for its plans to dismantle the traditional elitist society; Rivera Cusicanqui 1987; Gotkowitz 2003, 2007; Hylton and Thomson 2007.) Despite its limitations, the Congress proved to be of historical importance to peasant/indigenous struggle, however. It represented the first time that indigenous leaders could directly represent their own demands in a national political arena, and the first time that any creole government decreed proac­ tive legislation on behalf of peasant labourers. Of most importance was the proscription of pongueaje and mitanaje, the unremunerated non-agricultural labour services supplied by male pongos and female mitanis for patriarchal landlords and their families (Gotkowitz 2003, 2007). Hacendados, however, refused to conform to the new laws and, by 1947, there were widespread attacks on landlord power and property, culminating in a rural rebellion that was the largest of the twentieth century. Reminiscent of the of the insurgent strategies and autonomist politics that undermined local state control in the eighteenth century, the rebellion contributed fundamentally to the revolu­ tionary conjuncture that was to emerge in 1952–1953. While the uprisings of 1947 were suppressed temporarily, albeit very violently, by the short-lived right-wing government that succeeded Villarroel’s regime, the new rosca incumbents never succeeded in re-subjecting the highlands to their authority. Hacendado authority and rule in the Andes was on the wane. This was com­ pounded by the increased power and organization of proletarian miners’ organizations, especially the Trotskyist POR party. POR proclaimed the tac­ tical necessity for a united front in which proletarians would receive the sup­ port of the peasantry, artisans, and petit bourgeoisie. Yet the key to the political ascendancy of the miners transpired to be their alliance with the MNR, which POR perceived to afford potential access to the state, in addition to necessary middle-class support should strike action call forth a military response from the government. For the MNR, confronting increased hostility from the oligarchy and the military, an alliance with POR in particular offered an alternative base of support and one that could potentially be mobilized to oust the rosca. This alliance drew the MNR further to the left, and by the close of the 1940s the party had declared its support for strikes in the cities and mines, echoing POR advocacy of radical change in favour of the classes of labour (Gotkowitz 2007; Hylton and Thomson 2007). Under the leadership of Víctor Paz Estenssoro, the MNR won the 1951 national elections, only to have the results annulled by the anti-communist military junta. With the junta refusing to cede power, the MNR called for a revolution on the part of the masses and, after several days of fighting in La Paz, the people defeated the army of the oligarchy in April 1952, bringing the MNR to power (Hylton and Thomson 2007; Rice 2012).

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As in Mexico, the 1952 uprising in Bolivia constituted a major social revolution but one with a powerful nationalist (sub-hegemonic) rather than socialist (counter-hegemonic) inflection. Like Mexico, but unlike Cuba, the Bolivian ‘revolution’ did not succeed in overturning, nor did it intend to over­ turn, capitalist relations of production. Rather, the MNR intended to extinguish the remnants of ‘semi-feudal’ production relations and foment a ‘farmer road’ (at least in the Andes) to articulated capitalist development. Both the Mexican and Bolivian revolutions were led by urban middle-class reformists in con­ frontation with oligarchic elites, and both relied for their initial success in over­ turning oligarchic rule on shifting tactical, although not yet clientelistic, alliances with insurgent proletarians and peasants (Grindle and Domingo 2003; Knight 2003). It was the powerful mobilization and support of these subaltern forces that enabled the middle-class core of the MNR to sweep away the oligarchy, comprising the hacendados in the highland countryside, and the rosca elite in the mining centres, and their power in the repressive apparatus of the state. Thus, the MNR’s ostensibly revolutionary (counter-hegemonic) measures, notably the ful­ filment of the radical vision of ‘mines to the state, and land to the people’, were in reality responses to pressures ‘from below’ that had been steadily accumulat­ ing since the Chaco War (Hylton and Thomson 2007). The ‘revolution’ may thus be described as ‘national-popular’ (Zavaleta Mercado 1986) or ‘reformist’ according to our categorization of forms of protest. The convergent struggles of indigenous peasants and proletarians, in combination with progressive fractions middle-class, created a powerful ‘his­ torical bloc’, strongly anticipating the national-popular regime of the MAS that was to emerge some fifty years later. This, then, was a developmentalist regime that aspired to a sovereign new national order that would direct the country’s natural resources towards domestic growth and social welfare, and allow, through widening of the electoral franchise, more direct political par­ ticipation of subaltern groups in national affairs. The alliance of the centrist MNR with the radical forces of the indigenous peasantry and proletariat, however, obliged the new regime to introduce measures that were more revo­ lutionary (counter-hegemonic) than it would ordinarily have considered had the MNR been left to its own devices. The convergence of counter-hegemonic indigenous peasant and proletarian forces proved politically potent, however, and resulted in two notable and radical achievements for these classes. The first was the nationalization of the tin mines, giving the state direct control over the country’s most profitable mineral reserves and, thereby, con­ ferring upon union forces a key role in the management of those resources (miners produced 95 per cent of exports and 45 per cent of government rev­ enues; Dunkerley 2003). Pivotal here was the Bolivian Workers Central (Central Obrera Boliviana – COB), the trade union umbrella organization founded within a week of the April revolution, which exercised an effective dual power alongside the MNR government. The second was the agrarian reform undertaken through land occupations and ratified by the MNR as the Decree of Land Reform on 2 August 1953.

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After Mexico’s, this was the deepest agrarian reform in Latin America (only exceeded subsequently by those of Cuba and Peru). Since the expansion of haciendas from the 1880s, the number of indigenous ayllus had decreased from 11,000 to some 3,799, while the number of landless families had increased to 216,000 (Dunkerley 2003). In response to this expropriation of land from communities by haciendas, land takeovers in 1952–1953 spread throughout the Andes, resuming the actions undertaken in 1946–1947. Throughout the departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Cochabamba, in northern Potosí, and part of Chuquisaca, ayllu members, colonos, and rural labourers destroyed hacienda buildings, seized estates, and redistributed land among themselves. With this level of insurrectionary activity, the MNR was obliged to undertake, with Decree Law 3464, at least the appearance of a revolutionary redistribution of land in the Andes and in the sub-Andean valleys, a radical step it had not intended to take. Signed in front of some 100,000 peasants in Ucur­ eña, Cochabamba, where rural trade unionism had been established after the Chaco War, the Decree ordained that the six per cent of landowners who owned ninety-two per cent of land, especially in the Cochabamba area and sub-Andean valleys, were to be largely expropriated in favour of the sixty per cent who owned a mere 0.2 per cent of the land (Gotkowitz 2007; Hylton and Thomson 2007). Thus, the agrarian reform programme, initiated in 1953, expropriated nearly 1,100 haciendas and declared tenant farmers (colonos) to be the owners of their plots, while remaining lands were to be divided among the landless peasants (Rice 2012). This apparently radical agrarian reform was quite deceptive, however. Colonos, in reality, received titles only to the plots they occupied at the time of the reform, so that, although the colonato was abol­ ished, ushering in fully capitalist relations of production, the productive resources available to peasants were not, with the exception of the Cocha­ bamba area, generally increased by the land reform (Heyduk 1974; de Janvry 1981). Additionally, most landowners were able to retain part or all of their holdings: of the 11,246 properties affected by expropriation proceedings up to 1970 under the 1953 Agrarian Reform Decree, only 1,441 were classified as latifundios and suffered partial or total expropriation (Heath et al. 1969; Heyduk 1974). The remaining holdings were classified either as ‘medium properties’, the owners of which were entitled to retain 80–350 hectares in the Altiplano, 24–200 hectares in the Andean valleys, and 180–600 hectares in the Oriente. Additionally, cattle ranchers were permitted an exemption of 50,000 in the Oriente. With the important exception of the department of Cocha­ bamba then, the large landholders managed to retain much of their land through a process of reclassification of holdings. Moreover, many of the agri­ cultural policies applied after the reform, such as price supports, subsidized credits, and capitalization, differentially favoured the landed elites. Peasants, by contrast, received only minimal credit and access to public services (Heath et al. 1969; de Janvry 1981). This reform, then, constituted what may be described as a Junker road transition to agrarian capitalism, although one modified significantly in certain areas by a reformist ‘farmer’ road transition.

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The MNR government sustained the fiction that the country’s campesino problem was resolved with land redistribution, since it ostensibly lacked the resources to fund extension services and credit to support improvements in peasant production (Cariaga 1982). Indeed, despite employing two-thirds of the country’s labour force and being of vital strategic importance, the agri­ culture sector received only some eight per cent of public expenditure. Since redistribution conferred land (however inadequately) but not inputs, credit, or technical assistance on reform beneficiaries, the peasant reform sector had a disappointingly small impact on enhancing Bolivian food security (Thie­ senhusen 1995: 60). The Agrarian Reform Law stipulated that those who tilled the hacienda land prior to reform would be the new owners, thus legitimizing the land invasions that had occurred both before and after the revolution. The abol­ ished latifundio was distinguished in the law from the legal ‘agricultural enterprise’ by the latter’s substantial capital investment and its use of modern technology, and waged (not colono or feudal) labour. This was an explicit statement of the intent to transform feudal latifundia into Junker capitalist enterprises. According to the preamble of the Agrarian Reform Law, areas subject to expropriation were those ‘which inefficient landlords hold in excess, or from which they enjoy absolute rents not earned by their own personal labour in the field’ (Heath 1990: 4–5). Landlords were expected to forfeit that portion of their land on which campesinos were growing subsistence crops. Agriculture thus became bifurcated between a peasantry producing sub­ sistence and domestic food staples, on the one hand, and an exported-orien­ ted Junker oligarchy, on the other. Under the terms of the Agrarian Reform Law, five forms of legal land tenure were defined: 1 2

3

4 5

Smallholdings: plots large enough to meet the food needs of the owneroperator family (middle peasantry). Medium-sized holdings: farms larger than smallholdings, capable of pro­ ducing for the market and worked with the contribution of waged labour (small capitalist farms, the upper peasantry). Commercial farm enterprises: large-scale farms worked with wage-earn­ ing employees, using modern technology and requiring substantial capital investment (Junker capitalist enterprises). Community holdings: legally recognized indigenous-community land, worked for community benefit. Cooperative property: land worked jointly by individual farmers.

In the altiplano and high temperate valleys, where campesinos revolted against owners who extracted exorbitant rents in labour and produce, reform cover­ age was much more comprehensive than in the Oriente, only sparsely popu­ lated by settled agriculturalists in the 1950s, and hence hardly touched by redistribution. Estates in the latter were vast, and the relatively few

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hacendados were obliged to attract labour, so that campesinos had a nego­ tiating advantage and were not subject to onerous exactions. Consequently, there was little peasant unrest here, so that the land reform was largely irre­ levant despite ownership of huge areas by few hacendados (Heath 1990). The agrarian reform, concentrated in the altiplano and temperate valleys, ultimately granted land to about 256,000 families, or one million peasants (Thiesenhusen 1995). However, as indicated, awards tended to grant land occupied by campesinos at the time of the reform, doing little, therefore, to enlarge holdings of those who needed more land. Indeed, many indigenous comunidades lost land that had been formerly appropriated by hacendados since this was awarded under the reform to occupying hacienda colonos, not to the community – no effort was made to grant land to its ‘rightful’, or pre­ vious, owner. Additionally, many campesinos in comunidades farmed plots at different altitudes, a traditional Andean practice – legally, however, peasants could receive only one block of land and were prohibited from securing title to parcels in other geographical areas. The reform did little to stimulate pea­ sant production, despite its role in supplying the bulk of national food staples. Production of food staples by the peasantry failed to receive support through extension services or credit, while the price of staples was maintained at arti­ ficially low levels to render them affordable by urban classes, translating into severe disincentives at farm level. Moreover, staples that could have been produced domestically were increasingly imported (Thiesenhusen 1995). The indigenous peasantry was also the beneficiary of the extension of the electoral franchise, eliminating the literacy and occupational requirements that had previously obtained, and expanding the number of eligible voters from 200,000 to 1,000,000 (Klein 2003). Additionally, the MNR undertook important educational reforms, offering free access to public education, throughout the country, for all citizens irrespective of class or ethnicity (Hylton and Thomson 2007). All these measures undertaken by the MNR amounted to national reformist revolution, intended by the MNR to usher in capitalism in a social democratic mould. Thus, despite the strong socialist elements of the mine workers’ movement and the counter-hegemonic agrarian egalitarianism of the indigenous peasantry, the hegemonic element was nationalism, deployed by the middle-class dominated MNR. The indigenista elements of the counter-hegemonic peasantry were thereby subsumed within a progressive nationalist ideology pivoting around mestizaje or ethnic mixing, blending difference into national unity. The indigenous population of the Andes and sub-Andean valleys would no longer suffer stigmatization as ‘Indians’, therefore, but would be transformed into industrious ‘peasant’ labourers (Gotkowitz 2007). The MNR thus projected an imaginary of crossclass alliance and unitary citizenship, fulfilling the promised but frustrated national independence of 1825. The national ‘revolution’ brought significant transformation in politico-economic conditions (control over natural resour­ ces and land, state and class power), although this was in essence a bourgeois, not a socialist, revolution. In order to assert a social democratic capitalist

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programme of reform, however, it was necessarily anti-imperialist, since, in order to foment its imaginary of sectorally and socially articulated develop­ ment, it needed to abrogate subordination to the USA in particular. For this ambition to be secured, the MNR also needed to abrogate the power of the rural agro-export oligarchy, which it largely failed to achieve. In line with this changed framework for articulated national development, the MNR also sought to engender transformed citizen positionalities, abrogating ethnic and class difference in building unified identity with the nation. In all these facets, the Bolivian revolution resembled its predecessor in Mexico, although the latter undertook far more determined strides along the ‘farmer’ road to capitalism. As Knight (2003: 78) has correctly suggested, ‘the Bolivian Revo­ lution, like the Mexican, remained essentially bourgeois-nationalist. That is to say, while it promised and enacted substantial reforms – abolishing agrarian “feudalism”, democratizing society, nationalizing economic assets – it did not trespass beyond the pale of capitalism.’ The Bolivian revolution soon encountered, however, the difficulties of escaping ‘disarticulated’ dependent development while still subject to the stranglehold of the imperial-comprador alliance of the USA and exportoriented elite. The MNR administration thus shifted in an increasingly con­ servative direction during the course of the 1950s, with the USA seeking to divert the revolution into a renewed relationship of Bolivian subordination to the imperium. President Paz Estenssoro’s independent and anti-US foreign policy of 1952–1953 could survive only so long as Bolivia’s nationalized mines were without a US tin contract (Hylton and Thomson 2007). Paz Estenssoro pointed to the need for Bolivia to avoid the fate of Guatemala and Iran, where the imperium had only recently contrived to subvert left-nation­ alist regimes and install right-wing dictators, and, consequently, after June 1954, he concluded contracts with the USA for tin exports and for develop­ ment and food aid, contingent, however, upon the MNR regime’s commit­ ment to enacting ‘anti-communist’ counter-insurgency measures. Paz Estenssoro thus aligned Bolivia to the USA in the ‘Cold War’ and, under the Alliance for Progress (1961–1963), the US promoted ‘conservative’ rural development projects designed to mitigate rather than to resolve poverty and social polarization in order to thwart the diffusion of the Cuban revolution through Latin America.

Military Dictatorship and the Road to Neoliberalism By 1964, Paz Estenssoro, now serving his third presidential term, confronted increasing internal opposition from the left wing of the MNR, while, exter­ nally, the USA sought a strong partner, whether democratically elected or not, to stave off the ‘contagion’ of Cuban socialism. The imposition of US ordained ‘order’ fell to General René Barrientos, who instigated a military coup in November 1964 and plunged Bolivia into eighteen years of almost uninterrupted military rule (Rice 2012). The coup formalized the steady shift

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to the right that Paz Estenssoro had himself initiated in the 1950s and guided in the early 1960s. The counter-revolution was premised on the blocking of a potential alliance between the well-organized proletarian movement, centred around the miners, and the peasant movement. The Barrientos regime worked assiduously to cement a conservative alliance between the indigenous pea­ santry and the post-revolutionary state that would endure into the Bánzer period of the 1970s (Hylton and Thomson 2007). Barrientos thus imposed direct military rule over rural union organizing, institutionalized in the form of the so-called Military-Peasant Pact of 1964, forming the bulwark of USsupported counter-revolution in the cities and mining areas. In marked con­ trast to the union-party-state organizational structure of the MNR period, therefore, the Military-Peasant Pact sought to articulate the peasant-union apparatus directly to the state through the military. This engineered split between urban, proletarian forces and the rural peasantry was vital to the US-supported counter-insurgency project, with the aim, first, of destroying the power of the former prior to subsequently, under the later Bánzer regime (1971–1978), being able to eliminate, or at least reduce, the state’s dependence on the support of the peasantry. Before the ascendancy of Bánzer and following the death of Barrientos in a helicopter crash (1969), however, Bolivia witnessed a brief and new nationalrevolutionary interlude, modelled on Peru’s leftist military government under Juan Velasco Alvarado (see Chapter 9). These regimes undertook a second major nationalization of strategic natural resources, including the confiscation of Gulf Oil holdings in October 1969, and the formation of the Popular Assembly in June 1971. The Popular Assembly was in some senses a radical parliament, but it was heavily weighted in favour of urban left groups and the miners’ unions to the general exclusion of the peasantry, and indigenous peasantry in particular (Zavaleta Mercado 1983; Dunkerley 1984). While this exclusion was understandable given the peasantry’s recent alliance with the rightist military regimes, it nonetheless served to further alienate AymaraKichwa indigenous peasantry from the mining proletariat, thus compromising future prospects for alliance between the groups against a resurgent right that would shortly engulf Bolivia under the so-called banzerato (1971–1978). During the 1960s, the economic centre of gravity in Bolivia had shifted pro­ gressively towards the department of Santa Cruz in the Oriente, and it was here that the booming sectors of petroleum, coffee, cotton, and sugar were located, under the control of the agro/oil-export oligarchy. The cruzeño oli­ garchy was fearful of the nationalization tendencies of the leftist military regimes, and, with support from the right-wing of the MNR and the USA, plotted to install a rightist military dictatorship under the rule of its favoured local candidate General Hugo Bánzer Suárez. With the proletariat and the peasantry now divided, Bánzer was able to overthrow the Popular Assembly by means of a coup d’etat and proceeded to rule by force, largely ignoring both the miners and the state’s traditional rural base, the foundation of the previous military-peasant pact. Bánzer rewarded his oligarchic backers with

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large concessions for fossil fuel extraction and agro-exporting enterprises in the Oriente and violently suppressed increasing opposition from the pea­ santry. Any pretence of rule by Gramscian hegemony (‘minimal’ or ‘medial’) was now shattered, and a new generation of peasant/indigenous leaders emerged without ties of loyalty to the MNR and the military. Two critical political currents emerged as a consequence: indianismo and katarismo. Dis­ cursively, both owed a considerable debt to the thinking of Fausto Reinaga who criticized the use of mestizaje as a revolutionary ideology and, instead, constructed colonialism and the ‘Indian question’ as the foundation of his radical reinterpretation of Bolivia’s historical and political trajectory (Reinaga 1969; Hylton and Thomson 2007). Although indigenous peoples had been formally incorporated into the nation through universal suffrage in 1952, they continued to suffer ethnic discrimination, political manipulation, and economic marginalization (Rice 2012). In 1973, the kataristas, drawing eponymously and substantively on the legacy of Tupaj Katari, promulgated the ‘Manifesto of Tiwanaku’, a docu­ ment that acknowledged the gains of the 1952 revolution while critiquing the culturally homogenizing policies of the MNR and the military, the latter rendering Aymara and Kichwa indigenous peasantry ‘foreigners’ in their own country (Lucero 2008; Hylton and Thomson 2007). This was a vision that combined Marxian analysis and peasant class consciousness with AymaraKichwa ethnic consciousness, seeing both positions as complementary rather than contradictory. Since this synthesis of positions identified capitalism and colonialism as underpinning contemporary exploitation, kataristas were not averse to forging links with other potential class allies. Contemporaneously, Indianismo emerged as a more purely ethnicist ideology, being explicitly antiWestern, stressing autonomy from non-indigenous elements, placing greater emphasis on racial than on class domination, and calling for the reconstruc­ tion of pre-Conquest Bolivia, or Qullasuyu (Albó 2004; van Cott 2005; Rice 2012). Indianistas thus spurned alliances with what they derogatively termed the ‘mestizo-creole’ left, asserting that they would merely perpetuate the relations of racist paternalism of the MNR and the military dictatorships. Bánzer relied on the support of the agro-export oligarchy centred on Santa Cruz, and he generously subsidized their enterprises, especially the cotton growers’ association, using, for example, government revenues from soft loans from the World Bank. During the course of the 1970s, the landlord oligarchy diversified their activities into narcotics production and sale, centred on cocaine (Bolivia exported coca paste to Colombia, where it was processed into cocaine for sale primarily to the USA). This counter-revolutionary regional bloc of support for Bánzer was insufficiently broad to sustain his regime, however. It did not have the support of the urban middle-class in the Andes, and could not contain proliferating popular resistance from both the proletariat and the peasantry. Moreover, the Democratic administration in the USA under Carter found it difficult to justify support for such an overtly corrupt and dictatorial regime. Under pressure from high-profile hunger

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strikes led by wives of detained mining leaders, supported diplomatically by the USA, the Bánzer regime had collapsed by July 1978 (Dunkerley 1984). By the late 1970s, the kataristas had built a considerable base of support among the Aymara-Kichwa peasantry, finally marking the end of MNR-military hegemony over rural trade unions, while the role of unionized peasant com­ munities in the road blockades and general strike that brought down the coup of the lowland oligarchist Colonel Busch in November 1979 suggested that the balance of influence among opposition forces had shifted from the mining unions to the peasantry. Indeed, 1979 saw the foundation of the new Trade Union Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB) led by the Kararista Jenaro Flores. It rapidly became very influential and was able to mobilize thousands of campesinos in obstructing roads, earning the respect of the main, and miner-dominated union, COB, to which it was still formally affiliated (Lucero 2008). Katarismo and the CSUTCB rose in stature as liberal democracy, slowly and intermittently, returned to Bolivia. By the beginning of the 1980s, the Katarista-controlled CSUTCB had become one of the most important social forces on the left, and the most important rural-based movement, confronting a series of repressive, but unstable, post-Bánzer mili­ tary governments. In October 1982, military rule again came to an end as popular opposition, international isolation, and internal weakness obliged the latest dictatorship to honour the results of a 1980 election. Hernán Siles Zuazo of MNRI, the leftist faction of the MNR, assumed the presidency with the support of a coalition of leftist parties (Siles Zuazo had led the 1952 Revolution before conceding the presidency to Paz Estenssoro; Lucero 2008). From 1982–1985, Bolivia under Siles Zuazo attempted, unsuccessfully, to implement six suc­ cessive economic ‘stabilization’ plans, involving failed attempts to control runaway inflation. Long-suppressed demands for increased social spending were now released by the leftist alliance but, with a structurally very weak economy, the regime resorted to printing money that bore no equivalence to productive output. Each successive attempt at stabilization brought forth greater social protest and, by 1985, hyperinflation reached more than 20,000 per cent (Brysk and Wise 1997; Gamarra and Malloy 1995; Lucero 2008). The Siles regime and the left in general now gained a reputation for economic incompetence, and set the stage for the neoliberal offensive that was to be ushered in under the policies of erstwhile social democrat Paz Estenssoro. In one of history’s great ironies, the principal architect of the 1952 revolu­ tion now set about dismantling the remnants of the national-popular state. Within three days of assuming the presidential office, Paz Estenssoro issued Supreme Decree 21060, a key component of the New Economic Policy which, while ending hyperinflation, involved massive layoffs, considerable cuts in government expenditure, an overhauled monetary system, stimulus to foreign investment, and even greater emphasis on export-orientation. The mining sector, in particular, and labour, in general, bore the brunt of the neoliberal offensive. The COB organized strike action, but the government responded

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with rapid and draconian tactics. Hundreds of workers’ leaders were arrested, including the legendary leader of 1952, Juan Lechín, and were exiled to dis­ tant internment camps until the COB called off the strikes. Repression, the closing of COMIBOL mines, the growth of urban informal sectors that was to become such a feature of neoliberalism and which were beyond the mobi­ lizing reach of trade unions, all effectively undermined the strength and coherence of the left, including the CSUTCB (Conaghan and Malloy 1994; Lucero 2008). By the end of the 1980s, 45,000 jobs had been lost in mining and state administration, and another 35,000 through factory closures. Some sixty per cent of the urban labour force was now obliged to fend for itself by joining the ‘informal’ sector, with half those unable to meet basic food costs (Hylton and Thomson 2007). Many ex-miners either moved to rapidly grow­ ing Aymara city of El Alto, overlooking La Paz, or migrated to the subAndean valleys of the Yungas (department of La Paz) or the Chapare (department of Cochabamba) where many took up the cultivation of coca. Since military governments had turned a blind eye to the cultivation of coca and to the lucrative revenues generated by international cocaine trade, it seemed logical for many to divert their energies into its cultivation. Coca cultivators, or cocaleros, emphatically denied links to the cocaine trade, highlighting, rather, their role in supplying the coca leaf as an essential part of Andean culture and livelihood (Lucero 2008). When government policy shif­ ted from tolerance to aggressive eradication under pressure from the USA, cocaleros organized resistance quickly and efficiently, assisted by the experi­ ence of many as members of the highland unions of COB and CSUTCB. With the latter in factionalist decline, however, the 60,000-strong movement of cocaleros, led by a young Evo Morales, offered the only vibrant nationalpopular resistance to US imperialism and neoliberalism during the late 1980s and early 1990s (Hylton and Thomson 2007). Despite such resistance, neoliberalism was deepened still further under the regime of President Sánchez de Lozada of the (now almost unrecognizable) MNR, who took office in 1993 with an attempted hegemonic project, invol­ ving the advancement of neoliberalism by means of its legitimation and sta­ bilization through innovative social reform. In an unexpected alliance with the radical katarista Vice-President Víctor Hugo Cárdenas of the small MRTKL (Tupaj Karari Revolutionary Movement of Liberation), the coali­ tion undertook a number of crucial electoral reforms in the mid-1990s in an attempt to draw in excluded sectors of the polity (Rice 2012). A key reform initiative was the 1994 Law of Popular Participation (Ley de Participación Popular), one of several new pieces of legislation designed to incorporate increasingly mobilized indigenous peoples into the legal and politico-eco­ nomic life of the country. The collapse in the power of COB and CSUTCB had encouraged peasant organizations in new and more autonomous direc­ tions in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and class struggle was increasingly recast as, or supplanted by, ethnically defined contestation (Lucero 2008). Aymara nationalism, in particular, grew in strength, and more radical

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indianista tendencies superseded katarismo against a backdrop of factionalism within the CSUTCB. The Law of Popular Participation was the centrepiece of the government’s brand of ‘multicultural’ statecraft, ostensibly designed to ‘include the excluded’ (Arce and Rice 2009). The law instituted the first ever direct municipal elections and significantly strengthened local government. The decentralizing reforms fulfilled the dual roles of reducing central govern­ ment expenditure and responsibility by devolving these to the local level, while at the same time co-opting resistance to neoliberalism by diverting the focus of popular struggles to local and ethnic issues rather than to those of a national and class stripe. This strategy conforms to what Jessop (2005) has termed neoliberal ‘de-statization’, and aligns largely to the conservative appropriation of protest as ‘ethno-development’ or ‘neoliberal multi­ culturalism’. This programme, then, afforded recognition for local commu­ nities while attempting to marginalize their trade union representation. These conservative experiments gave a participatory democratic profile to a govern­ ment intent on liquidating remaining state enterprises and opening up the country to foreign capital (Hylton and Thomson 2007). This perhaps ironic turn to localism, ethnicity, and cultural identity at the very point when capitalism was intensifying its adverse impacts on the pre­ dominantly indigenous poor and marginalized, was most marked initially in the Oriente. Here, with over thirty ethnic groups, identity had in fact long been a framework for mobilization (Strobele-Gregor 1994) since the agrarian reform had never reached the lowlands due to ‘tribal’ and shifting agricultural nature of these social groups. Lowland indigenous groups, consequently, had never been transformed into a peasantry, in contrast to their Andean coun­ terparts, and, thus, were able to maintain their strong ethnic identification as the basis for mobilization. Even today, while lowland groups continue to identify as indigenous peoples, highland indigenous groups refer to them­ selves as pueblos originarios, not as indigenous (Rice 2012). The 1990 March for Territory and Dignity by all the indigenous groups from the Oriente to La Paz to demand territorial rights was a key turning point for the foregrounding of ethnic identity, since the march represented a broadening of indigenous mobilization in Bolivia, with highland Aymara and Kichwa groups joining forces with their Amazonian counterparts (Andolina 1999; Lucero 2008; Rice 2012). Thereafter, highland indigenous organizations began systematically to seek out politically autonomous spaces for mobilization, while lowland groups began to reach out to political parties as a means of gaining some purchase on the system without succumbing to the co-optation and manip­ ulation to which their Andean counterparts had been subject. The ‘tribal’, essentially non-hierarchical, indigenous groups of the lowlands had never felt comfortable within the union-based and classist structure of the highland CSUTCB. Rather, lowland groups, with considerable assistance from inter­ national NGOs, formed their own regional organization. The Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas de Bolivia, originally the Confederación Indígena del Oriente Boliviano, and still

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known as CIDOB) was created as early as 1982 with the intention of defending indigenous territories against logging and ranching incursions principally by the creole oligarchy. As Lucero (2008) suggests, while CSUTCB was the offspring of the political left in the era of national developmentalism, CIDOB came into being connected from the outset to NGOs and interna­ tional development organizations in the era of neoliberalism. Due to its explicitly ethno-cultural rather than classist agenda, CIDOB, rather than CSUTCB, became the favoured indigenous organization of both international development organizations and the state during the neoliberal era. Ideological diffusion, together with the attraction of potential outside funding, led highland organizations progressively to emulate the lowland movement’s discourse on territory, autonomy, and indigenous concerns, and, commensurately, to downplay the more class-configured issues of land and equality (Yashar 2005; Rice 2012). This trend culminated with the formation in 1997 of the National Council for Ayllus and Markas of Qullasuyu (Consejo Nacional de Ayllus y Markas del Qullasuyu or CONAMAQ) at the height of neoliberalism. Playing an increasingly important role in the highland indi­ genous movement, CONAMAQ’s mandate became one of promoting a strategy of reconstituting indigenous communities as ayllus, the basic social organizational unit, as we have seen, of the pre-Columbian and (in Bolivia) the colonial Andes (Lucero 2008).

The Emergence of the ‘Post-Neoliberal’ Era Despite the efforts of neoliberal governance to divert resistance into less sub­ versive and oppositional channels, new large-scale movements had emerged by the close of the 1990s. The locus of activity had shifted, however, from the historically militant mining districts and factories to the semi- or sub-prole­ tarian classes engaged in informal, marginal occupations in peri-urban areas such as El Alto, where an estimated seventy per cent of the million plus population migrate weekly between the countryside and the urban slums. El Alto, a sprawling sea of poverty, and populated by rural migrants, comprising impoverished indigenous peasants, ex-miners, and other members of the new precariat, is largely the product of neoliberal policies. Living under such appalling circumstances, neoliberal proposals to privatize essential services such a water and to cut budgets for education and healthcare came as the final straw for the precariat. The latter were joined in resistance by public sector employees, teachers, students, and remaining factory workers, who, in turn, sought common cause with coca farmers and indigenous peasant com­ munities fighting the US-mandated programmes of coca eradication and pri­ mitive accumulation on the part of the agro-export oligarchy (Hylton and Thomson 2007; Petras and Veltmeyer 2011). The economic crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s generated a major public confrontation in January 2003, followed by a popular revolt in October of that year, an insurrection which spread from El Alto throughout much of

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the country. Hundreds of thousands of impoverished Bolivians marched on La Paz, threatening to seize state power. This was averted only by the inter­ vention of the cocaleros’ leader and would-be president Evo Morales, who brokered a ‘compromise’ in which the neoliberal Vice President Carlos Mesa was permitted to succeed to the presidency in return for vague commitments to discontinue the draconian measures of his predecessor, Sánchez de Lozada. The moderating influence of Evo Morales enabled the tenuous entente between the social movements and the neoliberal regime to stumble on for two years. The essentially moribund regime succeeded only in inspiring fur­ ther national uprisings in May and June 2005, with massive demonstrations in La Paz by the full spectrum of social movements forcing Carlos Mesa to resign. Again, Evo Morales intervened, agreeing a pact with Congress to hold a general election in December 2005 in return for calling off the demonstra­ tions. Anticipating his reformist rather than revolutionary actions as pre­ sident, Morales diverted the mass social movements into his party’s campaign machinery, thereby effectively disempowering the autonomous direct-action strategies that had been effective in removing two previous neoliberal regimes (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011). The so-called ‘post-neoliberal’ era in Bolivia thus began in 2005 with the election, as the country’s new president, of Evo Morales, the leader of the coca growers’ union. His party, MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), was closely linked to, indeed was an outgrowth of, the emergent indigenous, anti-colonial, and populist social movements that had coalesced in opposition to the neo­ liberal reforms of the 1990s, and had culminated in the anti-neoliberal upris­ ing of October 2003 leading to the flight from the country of President Sánchez de Lozada (Hylton and Thomson 2007). This broad coalition of peasant, indigenous, and worker organizations had formed the Pacto de Unidad (Unity Pact) which was essential in Morales’s rise to power and became integrated, to varying degrees, within the new regime (Fabricant 2012; McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley 2014; Webber 2015). MAS was not created as a vehicle simply to move a president into power. Rather, MAS defined itself as a political instrument of its constituent social movements, relying heavily on mobilizational politics (Riofrancos 2017). Presciently, however, neither Morales nor his vice-president, Garcia Linera, saw their assumption of power as entailing a fundamental alteration of capitalist socialproperty relations. Rather, ‘it was expected to modify the rules of neoliberal capitalism in favour of a state that would work to improve the welfare of all its citizens, especially the poor rural and urban indigenous majority, through redistributive policies and social programmes’ (Hylton and Thomson 2007: 133). This, then, was to be a regime that pursued a sub-hegemonic, nationalpopular – or populist – programme of reformism (see below and Zavaleta Mercado 1986), placating its counter-hegemonic constituency through wel­ farism and anti-imperial rhetoric, and soothing the landed oligarchy through accelerated agri-food extractivism and effective exemption from the terms of the agrarian reform that the MAS had committed to undertake.

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An important source of anti-neoliberal protest derived from the continuing parlous condition of the largely indigenous peasantry in Bolivia, particularly the middle and lower peasantry. Thus, rural class structure in Bolivia con­ tinued to be characterized by very considerable concentration of land in the hands of an agrarian oligarchy, located particularly on the most productive land in the eastern lowlands. This oligarchy was, and remains, juxtaposed to large numbers of landless and land-poor peasants. Some four hundred indi­ viduals own seventy per cent of productive land, while there are two and a half million landless peasants in a country of nine million people (Enzinna 2007; Fabricant and Gustafson 2011; Webber 2015). Between these two groups is located a class of rich or upper peasants (small commercial farm­ ers), comprising a key political constituency for Morales and one which has benefitted from, and grown during, the period of MAS rule (Webber 2017a, 2017b). A key aim of the Pacto de Unidad was the implementation of a pro­ gramme of agrarian reform to address the plight of the land-poor, landless, and largely indigenous peasantry, principally by means of land expropriation and redistribution to these groups (McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley 2014). This formed a central pillar of a radical constitution, formally embodying pluri-nationalism and indigenous autonomy within the state. Unprecedented numbers of women, indigenous people, and members of the working-class were appointed to high positions in government, reflecting the status of MAS as a direct outgrowth of its indigenous/peasant/proletarian base (Farthing 2017). Thus, the first policy aim of the 2006 ‘Agrarian Revolution’ was to entail the distribution of state-owned land and redistribution by expropriation of land not serving a ‘socio-economic function’ in respect of indigenous peo­ ples and peasant communities (Fabricant 2012). This programme of land redistribution, unfortunately, has largely failed to happen, so that the main beneficiaries of this reform have been the small commercial farms of the upper peasantry, the crucial petty bourgeois con­ stituency for the MAS populist reformists (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016). Moreover, the agrarian oligarchy of the eastern lowlands has been left essen­ tially intact (Fabricant 2012; Webber 2015). Thus, superficially, the agrarian reform appeared to be successful, with more than thirty-one million hectares being titled and over 100,000 of those titles being distributed to 174,249 beneficiaries (INRA 2010; Redo, Millington, and Hindery 2011; McKay, Nehring, and Walsh-Dilley 2014). However, crucially, ninety per cent of titled land has ‘been endowed by the state and is composed entirely of forest reserves’ (Redo, Millington, and Hindery 2011: 237). Thus, less than ten per cent of land in the reform sector has actually been redistributed to those who need it most. So, while the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ was ‘intended’ to challenge the prevailing and highly unequal agrarian structure, it has failed to do so. This reluctance to implement the first policy aim of the ‘Agrarian Revolu­ tion’ has been reinforced since 2010, with a concern by the MAS government to focus on land registration and titling at the expense of expropriation and redistribution (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016; Webber 2017a, 2017b). The

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power of the landed oligarchy remains unchallenged, therefore, while the process of peasant differentiation into a growing class of small commercial farms, on the one hand, and increased semi-proletarianization and land­ lessness, on the other, has accelerated (Webber 2015; Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016). The greatest achievement of the ‘Agrarian Revolution’ has been the introduction of TCOs (Tierras Comunitarios de Origen) and the legal recognition of indigenous territories in the highlands and lowlands, a phe­ nomenon which, nonetheless, is shot through with contradictions (see Webber 2017b). Land registration, entailing the conferral on individuals of absolute property rights, has facilitated the legal consolidation of a stratum of smallscale capitalized peasants (upper peasantry). This applies particularly to the ‘intercultural’ sector, that is, migrant Quechua and Aymara peasants from the altiplano to the Oriente, small-scale, but capitalist, producers of commercial export crops such as coca, soy, and quinoa (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016: 218). With consolidation of its legal and economic position, this commercial upper peasantry makes use of the deteriorating status of the middle/lower peasantry by purchasing its labour power. As noted, it is this stratum of commercial peasantry which represents the core political constituency of the MAS and the pivot point of its populist discourse. The result of land registration has been the emergence of a tripartite structure of agrarian social-property relations, where before there was more of a dualism between the agrarian oligarchy and the peasant semi-proletariat (a dialectical complementarity between Transition Types 2 and 3 in our typol­ ogy), with the third, and novel, element comprising the consolidating class fraction of small commercial farmers (representing the process of Transition Type 1 leading to Transition Type 4 in our typology). Thus, the hegemonic class remains the agrarian oligarchy, controlling the bulk of land, surplus value production, and land rent. The sub-hegemonic class comprises the commercial small farm sector, which, however, is not so much independent but rather deeply integrated into larger value chains of agro-industrial devel­ opment (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016; Webber 2017b). Moreover, claims made for this sector’s key role in expanding the national production of food staples ring hollow, since this period has seen a significant rise in the import of wage foods, further undermining national food security and the economic viability of the middle/lower peasantries (Colque, Urioste, and Eyzaguirre 2015; Ormachea Saavedra 2015). The counter-hegemonic class of the semiproletariat and landless within this tripartite structure is either ‘functional’ with respect to the first two in terms of supplying wage labour or a reserve army of potential labour (exerting downward pressure on wages and the costs of production), or it comprises a ‘surplus’ rural population excluded from the requirements of agrarian capital accumulation (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016; McKay 2017). Politically, the agrarian oligarchy was entrenched in the state between 1996 and 2006. This neoliberal ‘disarticulated alliance’ fragmented during the openly antagonistic episode of Morales’s first administration (2006–2009).

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The open antagonism between the oligarchy and the MAS ‘historic bloc’ of sub- and counter-hegemonic movements during this period was then suc­ ceeded by a rapprochement between the former and sub-hegemonic fractions. This coincided with Morales’s new commitment to deepen neo-extractivism in alliance with the oligarchy in a ‘Productive Revolution’ (McKay 2018), and simultaneously to ‘de-radicalize’ through co-optation, or to repress through authoritarian means, the counter-hegemonic elements of the bloc. The core of the sub-hegemonic populist alliance comprises, as noted, the commercial upper peasantry, and this fraction has held sway over many public institutions such as INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria), CAN (Comunidad Andina de Naciones), and MDRyT (Ministerio de Desarrollo Rural y Tierra), together with the largest unions such as CSUTCB (Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinas de Bolivia) (Colque, Tinta, and Sanjinés 2016; Webber 2017b). This insinuation of the upper peasant fraction, Mora­ les’s core constituency, into the state and para-state apparatus, has entailed the decapitation and attempted de-mobilization of counter-hegemonic forces. Thus, the ‘Agrarian Revolution’, which was to have transformed rural socialproperty relations to the benefit of the lower peasant majority, remains in abeyance (Almaraz 2015). In the absence of a resolution to the agrarian question of the lower peasant majority through redistributive land reform, the big issue concerns the dur­ ability of the national popular alliance. The irony is that Morales sought to dampen opposition through the ‘compensatory state’, premised on extra­ ctivism that continues to drive primitive accumulation, the causal basis of that opposition. The MAS regime attempted to mitigate the resulting pre­ carity through welfarism, while failing to address its causes. As Morales sought to force through expanded extractivism in the face of declining com­ modity prices (from 2014), deepening ecological contradiction, greater social precarity, and rising opposition, so did the regime’s populism become increasingly authoritarian. Indeed, Morales’s leadership style increasingly resembled that of a caudillo (Thwaites Rey and Ouviña 2012; Zibechi 2016; Webber 2017b), while policy-making became a technocratized and de-politi­ cized, with extractive activities undertaken through resort to force. This, in turn, incited only further opposition to the extractivist export model and its concomitant ecological destruction and violence. The political repercussions of this turn to authoritarianism included the fragmentation of the Pacto de Unidad, with CIDOB and CONAMAQ splitting in 2011 (Webber 2017b). Morales, in turn, attempted to incapacitate these organizations with respect to their independent representation of indigenous and campesino groups. The dangers for MAS of this turn to authoritarianism were manifested perhaps most clearly in the decision by the formerly loyal CSUTCB to withhold sup­ port for the MAS’ attempt to change the constitution in order to stay in power for another term. This unprecedented schism is symptomatic of CSUTCB’s increased relative autonomy and deteriorating relations with the MAS in the latter’s quest for state power (McKay 2018). This alienation of

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CSUTCB was to prove prescient in relation to recent events, with its leader Nelson Condori, following the departure of Morales for Mexico after the ‘coup’ in November 2019, literally embracing the figurehead of the new ‘right populists’, Luis Camacho. The MAS regime, through its national-popular policies and rhetoric, sought to legitimize a programme of extractivist capital accumulation (Orel­ lana 2011). MAS sought to ‘embed’ capitalism by widening its cohort of beneficiaries to lower income groups through welfarism, rhetorically founded on a narrative of communalism and cooperation as faux vivir bien. This represented a temporary equilibration between the contradictory accumulation and legitimation dimensions of the state-capital nexus. By placating counterhegemonic forces between 2006 and 2009, Morales restored legitimacy of the state-capital nexus. Subsequently, he shifted emphasis to capital accumulation, differentially benefitting the landed oligarchy, transnational capital, and the upper peasantry at the expense of the subaltern majority (Webber 2017b). With MAS’s forfeiture of its legitimacy, this subaltern majority has again been seeking a ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ solution to extractivism beyond capitalism. The limits of MAS legitimacy have been defined by its increasing resort to author­ itarianism in pursuit of neo-extractivism. In October 2019, emboldened by the rightward drift of regimes in Brazil and the USA, the cruceño oligarchy and nouveau riche exploited adeptly these divisions within the left historic bloc and Morales’s authoritarianism to engineer a ‘coup’ in the name of ‘democracy’ and the ‘people’. Had this coup been successfully institutionalized, it would have ushered in a round of intensified extractivism and erosion of the social gains achieved by MAS, threatening to undermine, perhaps irretrievably, the longerterm construction of ‘livelihood sovereignty’ as authentic vivir bien. New elec­ tions, in October 2020, forced upon the unelected right-wing incumbents have, with the power of democratic legitimacy, returned MAS to power, however, this time under the leadership of Luis Arce, former finance minister under Morales. Whether this regime represents a continuation of Morales’s neo-extractivism ‘with compensation’ remains to be seen.

Note 1 Actually, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, cacique of the town of Tinta and nearby set­ tlements, whose main base of support lay in Lower Peru (present-day Peru) between Lake Titicaca and Cuzco.

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Tierra (ed.) Recientes Transformaciones Agrarias en Bolivia. La Paz: Fundación Tierra. Andolina, R.J. 1999. Colonial Legacies and Plurinational Imaginaries: Indigenous Movement Politics in Ecuador and Bolivia. PhD dissertation, University of Min­ nesota, Minneapolis. Arce, M. and Rice, R. 2009. Social Protest in Post-Stabilization Bolivia. Latin Amer­ ican Research Review, 44, 88–101. Arze Aguirre, R. 1987. La Participación Popular en la Independencia de Bolivia. La Paz: La Fundación Quipus. Brysk, A. and Wise, C. 1997. Liberalization and Ethnic Conflict in Latin America. Studies in Comparative International Development, 32, 76–104. Cariaga, J. L. 1982. The Economic Structure of Bolivia After 1964. In: Ladman, J.R. (ed.) Modern-Day Bolivia: Legacy of the Revolution and Prospects for the Future. Tempe, AZ: Centre for Latin American Studies, Arizona State University. Colque, G., Tinta, E., and Sanjinés, E. 2016. Segunda Reforma Agraria: Una Historia que Incomoda. La Paz: Fundación Tierra. Colque, G., Urioste, M., and Eyzaguirre, J.L. 2015. Marginalización de la Agricultura Campesina e Indígena: Dinamicas Locales, Seguridad y Soberanía Alimentaria. La Paz: Fundación Tierra. Conaghan, C.M. and Malloy, J.M. 1994. Unsettling Statecraft: Democracy and Neoli­ beralism in the Central Andes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. de Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Balti­ more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dunkerley, J. 1984. Rebellion in the Veins: Political Struggle in Bolivia, 1952–1982. London: Verso. Dunkerley, J. 2003. The Origins of the Bolivian Revolution in the Twentieth Century: Some Reflections. In: Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Enzinna, W. 2007. All We Want is the Earth: Agrarian Reform in Bolivia. In: Panitch, L. and Leys, C. (eds.) Socialist Register 2008: Global Flashpoints, Reactions to Imperialism and Neoliberalism. London: Merlin Press. Fabricant, N. 2012. Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Strug­ gle Over Land. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Fabricant, N. and Gustafson, B. (eds.) 2011. Remapping Bolivia: Resources, Territory, and Indigeneity in a Plurinational State. Santa Fé, NM: UNM School for Advanced Research Press. Farthing, L. 2017. Bolivia Says Goodbye to Term Limits. NACLA, 15 December. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/news/2017/12/20/bolivia-says-goodbye-term-limits. Gamarra, E.A. and Malloy, J.M. 1995. The Patrimonial Dynamics of Party Politics in Bolivia. In: Mainwaring, S. and Scully, T.R. (eds.) Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gotkowitz, L. 2003. Revisiting the Rural Roots of the Revolution. In: Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gotkowitz, L. 2007. A Revolution for Our Rights: Indigenous Struggles for Land and Justice in Bolivia, 1880–1952. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) 2003. Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Com­ parative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Heath, D., Erasmus, C., and Buechler, H. (eds.) 1969. Land Reform and Social Revo­ lution in Bolivia. New York: F.A. Praeger. Heath, D. 1990. Land Reform, Revolution, and Development: A Longitudinal Study of the Case of Bolivia. Economic Quarterly, 25, 3–15. Heyduk, D. 1974. The Hacienda System and Agrarian Reform in Highland Bolivia: A Re-Evaluation. Ethnology, 13, 71–81. Hylton, F. and Thomson, S. 2007. Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Boli­ vian Politics. London: Verso. INRA (Instituto de Reforma Agraria)2010. La Tierra Vuelve a Manos Indígenas y Campesinas. La Paz: INRA. Jessop, B. 2005. Critical Realism and the Strategic-Relational Approach. New Forma­ tions, 56, 40–53. Klein, H. 1982. Bolivia: Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Klein, H. 2003. Social Change in Bolivia since 1952. In: Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) 2003. Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. Cam­ bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Knight, A. 2003. The Domestic Dynamics of the Mexican and Bolivian Revolutions. In: Grindle, M.S. and Domingo, P. (eds.) 2003. Proclaiming Revolution: Bolivia in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Larson, B. 2004. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lockhart, J. and Schwartz, S.B. 1983. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lucero, J.A. 2008. Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes. Pittsburgh, PA: Pittsburgh University Press. Marof, T. 1926. La Justicia del Inca. Librería Falk Fils. McKay, B. 2017. Agrarian Extractivism in Bolivia. World Development, 97, 199–211. McKay, B. 2018. The Politics of Agrarian Change in Bolivia’s Soy Complex. Journal of Agrarian Change 18, 406–424. McKay, B., Nehring, R., and Walsh-Dilley, M. 2014. The State of Food Sovereignty in Latin America: Political Projects and Alternative Pathways in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 41, 1175–1200. Orellana, L. 2011. The National Question and the Autonomy of the State in Bolivia. In: Moyo, S. and Yeros, P. (eds.) Reclaiming the Nation: The Return of the National Question in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. London: Pluto Press. Ormachea Saavedra, E. 2015. Pequeña y Gran Producción Agricola Capitalista y Trabajo Asalariado en Bolivia. In: Riella, A. and Mascheroni, P. (eds.) Asalariados Rurales en America Latina. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. 2011. Social Movements in Latin America: Neoliberalism and Popular Resistance. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Redo, D., Millington, A., and Hindery, D. 2011. Deforestation Dynamics and Policy Changes in Bolivia’s Post-Neoliberal Era. Land Use Policy, 28, 227–241. Reinaga, F. 1969. La Revolución India. La Paz: Ediciones Partido Indio Boliviano. Rice, R. 2012. The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Riofrancos, T. 2017. The State of the Left in Latin America: Ecuador and Bolivia After the Pink Tide. NACLA, 19 July.

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Rivera Cusicanqui, S. 1987. Oppressed but not Defeated: Peasant Struggles among the Aymara and Quechwa in Bolivia, 1900–1980. Geneva: United Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD). Rivera Cusicanqui, S. 2003. Oprimidos pero no Vencidos: Luchas del Campesinado Aymara y Quechwa de Bolivia, 1900–1980. La Paz: Hisbol-CSUTCB. Strobele-Gregor, J. 1994. From Indio to Mestizo … to Indio: New Indianist Move­ ments in Bolivia. Latin American Perspectives, 21, 106–123. Thiesenhusen, W.C. 1995. Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Thwaites Rey, M. and Ouviña, H. 2012. La Estatalidad Latinoamericano Revisitado: Reflexiones e Hipótesis Alrededor del Problema del Poder Político y las Transi­ ciones. In: Thwaites Rey, M. (ed.) El Estado en América Latina: Continuidades in Rupturas. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. van Cott, D.L. 2005. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webber, J.R. 2015. Revolution Against ‘Progress’: Neo-Extractivism, the Compensa­ tory Sate, and the TIPNIS Conflict in Bolivia. In: Spronk, S. and Webber, J.R. (eds.) Crisis and Contradiction: Marxist Perspectives on Latin Americain the Global Economy. Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books. Webber, J.R. 2017a. Evo Morales, Transformismo, and the Consolidation of Agrarian Capitalism in Bolivia. Journal of Agrarian Change, 17, 330–347. Webber, J.R. 2017b. The Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of the Same: The Politics and Economics of the New Latin American Left. London: Pluto Press. Yashar, D.J. 2005. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Post-Liberal Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zavaleta Mercado, R. 1983. Las Masas en Noviembre. La Paz: Librería Editorial Juventud. Zavaleta Mercado, R. 1986. Lo Nacional-Popular en Bolivia. La Paz: Siglo XXI. Zibechi, R. 2016. El Caudillismo es Cultura de Derecha. La Jornada, 4 March. Retrieved from www.jornada.com.mx/2016/03/04/opinion/018a1pol.

7

Ecuador

Agrarian Structure and Land Reform Ecuador, like Bolivia, is one of several states in Latin America with a sig­ nificant indigenous population, portrayed as a model of ‘internal colonialism’ (Kay 1989) and characterized, until the land reforms of the 1960s and 1970s, by large feudal or ‘semi’-feudal agricultural estates – haciendas – owned by creoles (criollos) of European descent, and worked primarily by an indigenous (Kichwa) peasantry. A basic class divide between European/creole landlords (hacendados) and an indigenous peasantry (known in Ecuador as huasipungueros) thus cut along ethnic lines. While the feudal hacienda system largely defined the huasipungo agrarian structure in the Andean highlands (huasipungo involved the exchange of the labour power of indigenous peasant families for usufruct rights to small plots of land ‘internal’ to the hacienda), capitalist agriculture first emerged on the Coastal lowlands with the cacao boom in the late nineteenth century (Clark 2017). This latter development did little, however, to impinge on the pre-capitalist social property relations of the highlands (Conaghan 1988) and, during the 1930s and 1940s, the incapacity of the indigenous peasantry to consume nationally pro­ duced goods (and thus to be incorporated as consumer citizens within capitalism and diverted away from radicalism inspired by the Russian and Mexican revolu­ tions) became a central theme of debates surrounding national development and the so-called ‘Indian problem’ (Clark 1997). These debates, and the increasing agitation of indigenous peasantry in collaboration with urban-based Marxist ‘organic intellectuals’, led to the passage in 1937 of the Ley de Organización y Regimen de Comunas (commonly called the Ley de Comunas or Law of Commu­ nes) designed to undermine independent leftist organizing efforts (Becker 2008). This legislation provided a new level of organization to govern indigenous rural communities in order ostensibly to ‘improve their social, moral, intellectual, and material development’ (Becker 2008: 72). The law thus had a clear paternalistic intent through which the government claimed the right and obligation to protect and tutor rural communities, and the authority to modify or reject leadership and organizational structures that were not to its liking. The objective was to control peasant organizations in order to insulate them from the influence of more radical

DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-11

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social movements, and to undermine the effectiveness of existing mobilizations and unrest directed against the hacienda system. The shift to banana production on the Coast in 1948, in collaboration with multinational corporations, ushered in the first period of sustained economic expansion and industrialization in Ecuador (Rice 2012). The participation of market-dependent small and medium-sized farmers (petty commodity producers) in the banana industry contributed in some small degree to the expansion of the internal market and initiated a process of peasant class dif­ ferentiation that had significant repercussions for the hacienda system. Increased demand for domestic food staples on the part of these now specia­ lized petty commodity producers stimulated the coastal agro-export elites (with contractual relations with the banana petty commodity producers) to call for agricultural modernization in the highlands (the main source of national food staples) in order to assist with downward pressure on the cost of banana production (Conaghan 1988; Rice 2012). In addition to this pres­ sure from agro-exporting capitalist interests (who would later advocate the importation of cheap food staples from the imperium, but who at this time, before the advent of Northern surpluses, had to rely on domestic production), indigenous, peasant and leftist organizations started to increase the pressure on the state to redistribute land and transform the agrarian structure in the 1950s. The Cuban Revolution provided impetus at the end of the 1950s, while the Alliance for Progress, led by the USA and designed to defuse pressure for radical change through moderate, redistributive land reform, lent additional support at the beginning of the 1960s. Within a decade the character of indi­ genous and peasant demands had transformed from locally focused attempts to improve labour and living conditions on individual haciendas to nation­ wide efforts to foment change in social property relations away from feudalism/ ‘semi’-feudalism and towards peasant/indigenous control of the means of pro­ duction. Here, then, was an array of class forces of hegemonic, sub-hegemonic, and counter-hegemonic character all pressing for an end to pre-capitalist social relations but with markedly different views as to the ends that land reform should serve. Hegemonic agro-exporters and hacendados sought a Junker road to capitalism, retaining their existing landholdings and employing the ‘free’ labour of ex-huasipungueros, the latter confirmed in their ownership of sub­ sistence plots too small to support a peasant family throughout the year and, therefore, obliging such families to have recourse to the commoditization of their labour power as a semi-proletariat (Transition Types 2 and 3 in our typology). Sub-hegemonic interests, concerned to foment nationally articulated development along the ‘farmer’ road, sought to increase the national produc­ tion of food staples for an incipient proletariat, to widen and deepen the inter­ nal market through the creation of a new class of commercial family farms from the wealthier class fraction of the peasantry, and to enable the transfer of surplus from this newly prosperous agrarian class into nascent domestic indus­ try (Transition Types 1 and 4 in our typology). Counter-hegemonic forces, comprising the middle and lower peasantry, sought in the main the radical

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redistribution of land in their favour for the ‘autonomous’ production of use values and the abrogation of capitalist market dependency, together with the re-assertion of indigenous identity and ‘traditions’. Barsky (1984) has asserted that ‘modernizing’ hacendados initiated the agrarian reform process ‘from above’, while Guerrero (1984) has argued, to the contrary, that agrarian reform was a result of peasant actions ‘from below’, such that class struggle between huasipungueros and landowners obliged the latter to concede to the demands of the former. Following the same argument as Guerrero, Velasco (1983) has maintained that, from the beginning of 1960, there was a noticeable increase in social agitation in the countryside both in the Sierra and in the Coastal provinces, impelled and articulated fun­ damentally by the Ecuadorian Communist Party (PCE) through the Ecuador­ ian Federation of Indians (FEI)(Federación Ecuatoriana de Indios, founded in 1944) in the Sierra and the Federation of Coastal Agricultural Workers (Federación de Trabajadores Agrícolas del Litoral, founded in 1954). Thus, confronted by pressure from below, members of the hegemonic class began to advocate for change to national tenure structures both to pre-empt class strug­ gle and to reform pre-capitalist institutions regarded as impediments to the modernization of agriculture. Accordingly, Zamosc (1990: 19) argues that ‘it was class conflict, and not the mere rationale of capitalist production, that motivated some modernizing landowners’ to support agrarian reform legis­ lation. Indeed, it seems likely that the severity of protest from 1960 posed a serious threat to landlord hegemony in the country, such that there were strong intimations of right-wing moves to remove the centre-left Arosemena government of the time, stimulated especially by the regime’s support for the revolutionary Cuban government. These moves culminated in a military coup on 11 July 1963, with the military junta declaring that the coup was ‘necessary to stop the terrorist and subversive wave that today shakes the country’ (El Comercio 12 July 1963 quoted in Becker 2008: 136). The coup was followed by severe repression of the country’s popular movements, involving imprisonment of hundreds of political activists, and the forcing underground of many individuals and organizations, including the Ecua­ dorian Communist Party (PCE), the PCE being declared illegal. The mili­ tary closed down the schools for indigenous children that the FEI had established in Cayambe in 1945, and the FEI and its members were widely repressed (Becker 2008). Indeed, the FEI never recovered from this repression, and the coup represented the ‘beginning of the end’ for the organization as the primary vehicle for indigenous representation in Ecuador. On 11 July 1964, the military government promulgated the Ley de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Agrarian Reform and Colonization Law) and estab­ lished the Instituto Ecuatoriano de Reforma Agraria y Colonización (IERAC, the Ecuadorian Institute of Agrarian Reform and Colonization). Under the US-led Alliance for Progress initiative, Ecuador was one of eleven Latin American states to implement, between 1960 and 1964, agrarian reform pro­ grammes. Having effectively repressed left-wing and indigenous protest, the

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resulting reform was heavily biased in favour of modernizing agrarian capi­ talists, effectively ending pre-capitalist social relations, but doing very little to address underlying inequalities in social property relations (Zevallos 1989; Becker 2008). This, then, was an instance of ‘passive revolution’ as minimal hegemony. Thus, hacendados were granted a year in which to implement a transition away from the huasipungo system, essentially converting precapitalist extra-economic relations into those of a more or less purely capi­ talistic kind. Agricultural workers were now to be paid in cash rather than in kind (or non-cash equivalents), while receiving title to their pre-reform plots, usually of too small a size to support a family throughout the year, thereby enforcing the sale of labour power to the hacendado (Zevallos 1989; Becker 2008). Huasipungueros in this way became semi-proletarians over the course of a year as stipulated by the Agrarian Reform Law. Additionally, ex-huasingueros were to have continued access to water, firewood, and other hacienda resources from ‘common’ lands beyond the areas of cultivation, although in practice landowners sought to restrict or prohibit such continued access to increase peasant exposure to market dependency. The 1964 reform was thus a ‘classic’ example of Junker road transition to capitalism, implemented ‘from above’ as ‘passive revolution’ on the basis of ‘minimal hegemony’. The regime, through the agrarian reform, made some effort to eliminate or reduce the influence of radical left/indigenous influence through co-optation of certain key issues and demands, with IERAC effectively becoming a com­ petitor of the PCE, but with the superior resources of the national govern­ ment (Becker 2008). Co-optation was superficial, however, since, as a highly ‘conservative’ reform of ‘minimal hegemony’, few benefits accrued to the pea­ santry. The agrarian reform did very little to address the underlying structural problems of land tenure inequality and consequent poverty among the majority of ex-huasipungueros. The reform succeeded most in stimulating capitalist pene­ tration of the countryside, further concentration of landholdings, and the devel­ opment of agri-business. Most peasants were allocated small plots of land on marginal land, with the hacienda retaining the most fertile land. As Thiesenhu­ sen (1982: 211) noted, ‘the minifundismo created by the abolition of the huasi­ pungo system was as bad or worse than huasipungaje itself’. Thus, little land was actually expropriated, with only 10.2 per cent of highland peasant families (27,087 families in total) receiving land between 1964 and 1970. IERAC redistributed only 8.5 per cent (125,231 hectares) of land belonging to haciendas larger than five hundred hectares. Rather than eliminating poverty and discrimination, the reform simply reorganized and entrenched economic and racial subordination in line with ‘disarticulated’ capitalist accumulation (de Janvry 1981; Velasco 1983; Becker 2008). Pressure from indigenous and peasant groups for further and meaningful land reform did not dissipate, however, and the opportunities for pressing the case appeared more fortuitous in the early 1970s. First, the discovery of oil in the Oriente in the late 1960s dramatically increased the fiscal capacity of the state, thereby somewhat loosening the hold of the agrarian oligarchy on the

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country and opening up the potential for deepening land reform (although such ‘deepening’ would take reform only along the sub-hegemonic ‘farmer’ road and would do little to address the needs of the middle and lower pea­ santry – but, as we shall see, even the prospects for a ‘deepened’ land reform were largely to be thwarted) (Conaghan 1988). Indeed, the new Rodríguez Lara military government, which seized power in 1972, promulgated its intention to ‘radicalize’ reform and raised expectations among indigenous/ peasant movements that perhaps meaningful change was within reach. Second, the comprehensive land reform of the Velasco Alvarado military government in Peru (which effectively broke the back of the hacienda system in that country; see below) inspired the Ecuadorian regime to undertake ‘deeper’ reform (Redclift 1978), directed more towards national ‘articulated’ development than to the benefit of the agro-exporting oligarchy. Third, indi­ genous/peasant organizations had increased their strength at local, regional, and national levels since the earlier land reform, creating an increasingly robust platform for subaltern pressure on the state (Becker 2008; Goodwin 2016). The radicalization of the national peasant organization FENOC (Federación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas; later to become FENOCIN) and the establishment in 1972 of the Sierra-based indigenous movement Ecuarunari (Ecuador Runacunapac Riccharimui, a Kichwa phrase meaning ‘to awaken the Ecuadorian Indians’) were indicative of a general strengthening of counter-hegemonic forces pushing for greater access to land (Becker 2008). The Frente Unido de Reforma Agraria (FURA, the United Agrarian Reform Front) emerged from this context. Formed in 1972, FURA brought together a range of peasant and indigenous organizations, including FENOC and Ecuarunari, initiating marches and rallies over the course of 1972/1973, and convening a national meeting in August 1973 at which it presented its own land reform proposals (Becker 2008; Goodwin 2016). Inter alia, the proposals demanded much stricter limits on the maximum size of landholdings, upper and lower limits of the size of plots to be redistributed, prioritization of land redistribution for cooperatives, and strict limits on the estimated market value of land subject to expropriation (e.g. using the 1964 cadastral survey rather than current market value). While exhibiting greater tendencies towards ‘medial hegemony’ than the 1964 Agrarian Reform, sadly, the later reform implemented by the military regime included none of these proposals and did very little for the majority of the peasantry. As in 1964, the new law strongly favoured modernization, development, and capitalist efficiency (increasing ratio of product output to labour input due to capitalization), that is, the increased production of com­ modities by the land-rich for exchange, rather than the redistribution of land to the land-poor for use value production. Thus, in 1974, 50.2 per cent of cultivable land (mainly the best land) remained in the ownership of estates larger than one hundred hectares, while between 1954 and 1974, the average landholding size for a peasant fell from 1.7 to 1.5 hectares (Becker 2008). Up to 1982, agrarian reform laws affected only about fifteen per cent of

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agricultural land in the Sierra, such that Chiriboga (1984) concluded that the 1973 agrarian reform law led to an insignificant advance over the earlier 1964 law. Even the national developmentalist (sub-hegemonic) pretensions of the military regime were undermined, however, by the conservative regime that assumed power in 1976 and introduced a new law – Ley de Fomento y Desarrollo Agropecuario – which provided greater protection for private property rights and impeded the implementation of land reform (Goodwin 2016). This counter-reform measure served to re-emphasize the authority and security of the agrarian oligarchy. In response to this counter-reform measure, FEI, FENOC, and Ecuarunari redoubled their cooperative efforts in the form of the Frente Unico de Lucha Campesina (FULC, or the United Front for Peasant Struggle), calling for a true agrarian reform that not only redis­ tributed land to the peasantry, but also supplied adequate finance and exten­ sion services to support campesino production (Becker 2008). The return to democracy in 1979 provided greater space to contest land reform. Ecuarunari and FENOC organized a 10,000 people strong mobilization in Quito in 1980 to raise pressure on the new Roldós-Hurtado government, convened the Primer Encuentro Nacional Campesino Indígena in 1982, and demanded ‘agrarian reform with peasant control’ (ibid.: 164). The lack of land available to most highland indigenous/peasant families and communities provided a powerful incentive for indigenous/peasant movements to continue the struggle for the redistribution of land in their favour in order to be able to produce food to meet their own needs independent of the capitalist market.

Failed Land Reform and Indigenous/Peasant Resistance Continuing frustration on the part of indigenous/peasant people at the lack of progress in the implementation of land reform that responded to their demands led to the formation in 1986 of CONAIE (Confederación de Nacio­ nalidades Indígenas del Ecuador). CONAIE, representing nine indigenous nationalities and twenty-seven organizations, sought to combine all indigen­ ous (and peasant) people into one large pan-Indian movement dedicated to defending indigenous (and peasant) concerns and agitating for social, poli­ tical, and educational reforms, including land, funds for appropriate eco­ nomic development, respect for indigenous languages, and the development of bilingual education. Since CONAIE was organized as an overtly and explicitly indigenous organization, ‘postcolonial’ and ‘new social movement’ theorists have tended to interpret it as an embodiment of the victory of ethnic discourse and identity politics over class analysis. Scholars such as Becker (2008, 2012) Ibarra (1992), and Zamosc (2004), among others, point out that this has always been a false dichotomy and that CONAIE actually represents a successful fusion of class and ethnic perspectives. In fact, CONAIE declared itself to be an ‘organization of oppressed and exploited people’, defining itself as ‘anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and anti-imperialist’ (CONAIE 1989: 281). In addition to demands for pro-peasant land reform, CONAIE also critiqued

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industrialization, unemployment, housing, education, health, and racial dis­ crimination, while rejecting the ‘racist’ position of propounding an indigenous versus mestizo/white struggle that ‘in its most extreme position advocated the expulsion of the invaders and a return to Tawantinsuyu (the Kichwa name for the Incan Empire)’ (CONAIE 1989: 281). Rather, CONAIE proposed a synthesis of class and indigenist positionalities in which struggle was to be organized on a class basis for the social relational transformation of society while fostering independent ethnic organizations to defend indigenous cultures (Becker 2008). As Zamosc (2004: 132) has noted ‘the Ecuadorian case calls attention to the fact that class conflict continues to be a relevant factor in Latin American politics’ and, far from being confined to ‘indigenous rights’ issues ‘the Indian movement has transcended them, involving itself in broader battles over social issues and becoming a player in the contest for political power’. Becker (2008) suggests that, while ethnicity has proven capable of engaging and mobi­ lizing people, it has been less successful, when lacking a class dimension, in sus­ taining organizational energy over the longer-term. Specifically, he maintains that CONAIE was most successful when it embraced, rather than denied, the class nature of indigenous oppression. Among other authors contesting the dichotomization of ethnicity from class, Roper et al. (2003: 10–11) assert that ‘the privileging of identity construction has … obscured the material conditions and structural challenges that shape social movement dynamics’. On 4 June 1990, CONAIE launched a nationwide levantamiento (uprising), blocking roads in order to paralyse the transport system, cutting off food supplies to the cities, and effectively shutting down the country for a week. Due to frustrated negotiations with the government concerning agrarian reform, bilingual education, and recognition of Ecuador as a pluri-national country, CONAIE had resolved at its fifth assembly in April 1990 to initiate an uprising designed to force the government to consider these indigenous demands more seriously. Luis Macas (1991: 10), the leader of CONAIE stated that ‘there will be no solution to the indigenous problem unless there is a solution to the land problem’. Exemplifying the still unresolved nature of the agrarian question from an indigenous/peasant perspective, the protestors demands were still fundamentally the same as those of the FEI in the 1960s prior to the ‘first’ land reform, such that one of the most concrete outcomes of the 1990 levantamiento was to foreground land reform again as a priority issue for subalterns (Becker 2008). Two years of government inaction, how­ ever, inspired Kichwa, Shuar, and Achuar people to undertake a protest march (caminata) from the Oriente to Quito in April 1992, demanding inter alia the legalization of ‘ownership’ of their territories, and the reform of the national constitution to reflect the pluri-national and multicultural reality of Ecuador. While Sawyer (2004) regards this caminata as representing a crucial conjuncture in the process of indigenous nation-building, in fact it achieved very little in concrete terms other than talks with President Borja (who acce­ ded to their demands for indigenous territorial control only to subsequently retract this commitment).

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Frustrated again at the lack of any progress on land reform or wider demands for territorial control and recognition, peasant and indigenous groups unified, in June 1994, in La Movilización por la Vida (Mobilization for Life). The immediate catalyst for this protest lay in the proposed new law of the new conservative president Sixto Durán-Ballén (1992–1996) designed to permit communally held land to be sold or mortgaged, thus transforming inalienable land into a commodity that could potentially be taken away from indigenous peoples. This new law proposed to terminate any possibility of further redistributive land reform as part of a neoliberal programme that included the privatization of water rights, the auctioning of state-owned land, and the intensification of agro-export accumulation undertaken by the oli­ garchy (Sawyer 2004; Becker 2008). In response, indigenous/peasant move­ ments again blocked roads and paralyzed the country for ten days, representing one of the largest protests in Ecuadorian history. Nonetheless, Durán-Ballén proceeded regardless of these protests to promulgate a new law of agrarian ‘development’ (Ley de Desarrollo Agrario, or LDA) that, inter alia, created the Instituto Nacional de Desarrollo Agrario (INDA, National Institute of Agrarian Development) to replace IERAC. Despite this promulgation, the protests further strengthened inter-ethnic and indi­ genous-peasant coalitions in opposition to neoliberalism, and demonstrated clearly that land reform and land rights remained a core demand for these movements (Sawyer 2004; Becker 2008). While such indigenous/peasant pressure did undoubtedly induce the government to make a number of important revisions to the new law, especially in relation to communal and ancestral land, the final version of the LDA was far removed from the movement’s proposals (Bretón 2008; Goodwin 2016). In this way, the LDA reinforced protection for private property rights by virtually ruling out expropriation and ensuring that landowners were entitled to receive the full commercial value of land in the unlikely event that a legal basis for expropriation were to be established (Goodwin 2016). The LDA did create a space for representatives of indigenous and peasant organizations within the Consejo Superior of the INDA as an outcome of the protests. This, however, should be seen in light of the highly circumscribed redistributive dimensions of the law. Indigenous and peasant organizations achieved their long-standing aim of securing representation within the insti­ tute responsible for overseeing land reform, but only when that body had been incapacitated. As Goodwin (2016: 21) indicates, ‘the Consejo Superior was toothless’, with decisions relating to the expropriation of land now being taken, not by the Consejo Superior, but rather by the Director Executivo and Directores Distritales. The bureaucratic structure of INDA was designed to work in a way that effectively limited the power of the national committees, including those on which indigenous and peasant organizations had repre­ sentation (ibid.). In this way, the Durán-Ballén administration followed pre­ vious governments in again denying indigenous and peasant organizations the opportunity for genuine involvement in the regulation and redistribution of

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land. The intention, clearly, was to entrench the power and rights, through neoliberal legislation, of the agro-exporting oligarchy as ‘minimal hegemony’, and to re-affirm a Junker road to capitalism and further capital accumulation in which redistributive land reform had no role to play. The agrarian ques­ tion, from the perspective of the majority indigenous and peasant subalterns, however, remained largely unresolved, the ambition of these class fractions (primarily middle and lower peasantry, together with lowland ‘tribal’ popu­ lations) being adequate access to land for subsistence and autonomy from the capitalist market, not for expanded accumulation. The data on land concentration before and following the agrarian reforms do indeed confirm that there had been only marginal change in the distribu­ tion of land between 1954 and 2001 (Clark 2017). Thus, in 1954, prior to the agrarian reform processes, the Gini coefficient for land distribution was 0.86, but by 2001 it had improved only marginally to 0.80 (Martínez Valle 2014: 44). Due to the uneven nature of the agrarian reform process in Ecuador, there is a wide spectrum of producers ranging from land-poor peasants in the Sierra at one extreme, through middle and upper peasants to large-scale agro­ export operations of the oligarchy at the other (Clark 2017). There is, conse­ quently, considerable diversity in the nature of what the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Agriculture (MAGAP) call agricultura familiar campesina, or peasant family farming, a definition that includes a range of producers who do not necessarily share, and indeed often contest, economic interests and class positionalities. MAGAP employs the term campesino as an inclusive term to refer to the number of farms, or Unidades Productivas Agricolas (UPAs) that meet a number of criteria deter­ mined by the 2000 agricultural census. MAGAP defines agricultura familiar campesina as any UPA with less than five hectares in the Sierra, less than twenty hectares in the Coastal region, and less than fifty hectares in the Oriente (SENPLADES 2014: 158). Based on the 2000 census data, it is esti­ mated that there are 3,034,440 campesinos in Ecuador, with an average household size of 3.92 members in each household. According to the same census, 84.4 per cent of the UPAs are campesino, even though campesino farming represents only twenty per cent of cultivated land in Ecuador. The implication is that the other 16.6 per cent of UPAs that are classified as agro­ industrial production units occupy eighty per cent of the arable land in the country (ibid.: 159). The rise of modern agri-business in Ecuador along the Junker road (Tran­ sition Type 2 according to our typology) is thus inextricably linked to the demise of the hacienda system and the dialectical emergence of a larger, postreform pool of land-poor, semi-proletarian peasantry in the Sierra, which became the workforce in these modernized agro-industrial operations (Tran­ sition Type 3) (Martínez Valle 2017). The elimination of the feudal hacienda system through the capitalist Junker road thus deepened the integration of smallholders, typically semi-proletarians, into the rural labour market and capitalist social relations. This was never complete, however, since the

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perpetuation of disarticulated development through the ‘victory’ of the oli­ garchy meant that this (counter-hegemonic) peasantry could never be con­ verted into a full-time proletariat, the oligarchy relied on the subsidy of semiproletarianization to generate super-profits, while the semi-proletariat itself continued to resist full expropriation in order to avoid the further subjection of their livelihoods to precarity in the burgeoning informal sector (Tilzey 2018). In the Coastal provinces, the agrarian reforms had been somewhat more successful in distributing land to smallholders, albeit primarily market-dependent upper peasantry, but this had given way to a process of re-concentration into large agro-industrial properties (Cueva et al. 2008), a phenomenon associated particularly with the production of flex crops such as palm oil, soya, and corn and export commodities like bananas (Martínez Valle 2014: 50). A significant percentage of the peasantry here, then, became market-dependent petty commodity producers (Transition Type 4), a fact which gave rise to considerable resentment against the hegemonic agro-exporting oligarchy on the part of this sub-hegemonic fraction of small commercial farmers.

Neoliberalism and Neoliberal ‘Multiculturalism’ As we have seen, the neoliberal offensive in favour of the hegemonic agro­ export oligarchy culminated legally in the passage of the 1994 Ley de Desar­ rollo Agrario, facilitating the further expansion of agro-industrial production in Ecuador (Clark 2017). The failure to resolve the agrarian question in favour of the indigenous/peasant subaltern majority, however, did stimulate certain measures, having primarily a legitimation function, with the objective of defusing unrest among these class fractions. These took the form of a ‘conservative’ (‘minimal hegemonic’) response to protest, focusing on ‘rural and ethno-development’ initiatives often led and funded by international and national NGOs (Bretón 2008). Accordingly, there occurred, during the neo­ liberal period, a modest growth of smallholder and market-dependent entre­ preneurs, including those catering for ‘alternative’ value chain initiatives such as direct producer-consumer markets or ferias, food basket programmes or canastas, and certified Fair Trade and organic production, largely supplying urban middle-class markets. Chiriboga (2014) argues that these experiences in ‘social economy’ and campesino commercialization comprised the alternative models that inspired the ‘peasant’ vision of food sovereignty that was to be enshrined in the 2008 constitution (see below). This would appear to be a dubious claim, one which ignores the demands of the majority semi-proletariat for fundamental land redistribution for essentially non-market dependent food production. Chiriboga’s assertion appears to refer to a vision of the petty bourgeois fraction of the peasantry whose affiliations lie with the ‘progressive’, rather than the ‘radical’, tendency within food sovereignty advocacy. We may, therefore, describe this entrepreneurial fraction as ‘alter-hegemonic’, sharing much in common with the ‘sub-hegemonic’ class fraction other than its

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concern to produce (mainly for reasons of securing a market premium) on a ‘local’ and ‘ecological’ basis. In comparison to the expansion of agro­ industrial chains, together with the more traditional chain of commerciali­ zation for campesino production (most characteristic of the Coast), these ‘alter-hegemonic’ experiences were, symptomatically, much more marginal (Clark 2017). They represented, in essence, conservative ‘flanking’ measures to stabilize the contradictions of neoliberal accumulation through the pla­ cation of certain key fractions of the mainly upper peasantry by ‘green’ and ‘localized’ petty commodity production (Tilzey 2018). CONAIE and other indigenous/peasant organizations did not succeed entirely in escaping this process of wider co-optation into the ‘new democ­ racy’ and the new ‘post-modern’ discourse of eliding class in favour of ‘pea­ sant’ and ‘indigenous/ethnic’ essentialism as ‘neoliberal multiculturalism’. In this way, CONAIE and other organizations were persuaded of the merits of participating in the structures of representative (liberal) democracy through the formation of the new political party Pachakutik in 1996 (Pachakutik [Kichwa] refers to the Andean notion of a turning point of cosmic dimensions and the beginning of a new era through which what was below would now be on top and vice versa, pacha meaning time or land and kutik return to; Becker 2008, 2012) from what had been envisaged to be a broader movement for radical change. It seems evident that the transformation of the indigenous/ peasant alliance from a social movement into a political/electoral one in 1996 had a debilitating impact on the capacity and authority of CONAIE (Clark 2017). As rural social movement federations became more involved in elec­ toral politics, the relationship between their rank-and-file membership and national leaders deteriorated as the latter increasingly adopted a more ethnic and peasant essentialist discourse and programme (Sánchez-Parga 2010). Several scholars have indeed concluded that the creation of Pachakutik, as symptomatic of the transformation from social movement to political party, had the longer-term impact of weakening CONAIE and the unity of the indigenous/peasant movement (Becker 2012; Martínez Novo 2014; SánchezParga 2010; Zamosc 2007). The serious decline of CONAIE can be dated to January 2000, when the organization supported a coup against the adminis­ tration of Jamil Mahuad, the government that oversaw the dollarization of the Ecuadorian economy in 1999 (Clark 2017). Pachakutik’s support of the leader of the 2000 coup, Colonel Lucio Gutiérrez, in his subsequent bid in 2003, and later in its participation in his government, further served to divide and debilitate Pachakutik and CONAIE by eroding their credibility.

Correa, Neo-Developmentalism, and Neo-Extractivism A weakened and divided indigenous movement was the outcome of this brief foray into government (January–August 2005), with Gutiérrez being evicted from office that same year by a coup instigated in significant measure by dis­ affected middle-class sectors of Quito, known as forajidos (‘outlaws’) (Clark

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2017). The forajidos subsequently became a potent political force behind Rafael Correa’s 2006 ‘national-popular’ campaign to contest the Presidency. Significantly, CONAIE, for the first time in more than two decades, and having fatefully embroiled itself with the Gutiérrez regime, was marginal both to the uprising and to the wider opposition to neoliberalism that were key elements of Correa’s so-called ‘Citizens’ Revolution’. This distancing of CONAIE from the ‘Citizens’ Revolution’ is important in understanding the relationship between rural social movements and the Correa government. Comprising largely nationally focused bourgeoisies and petty bourgeois class fractions, the centrality of the forajidos to Correa’s ‘revolution’ meant that, with their new representation in government, they could relatively easily co­ opt the ‘progressive’ tendency within the food sovereignty movement (see below) through support for small-farm productivity enhancements as part of a ‘neo-developmentalist’ programme, while neutralizing the more ‘radical’ tendency through social welfare payments as a subsistence supplement (Tilzey 2019). Correa’s political programme was at heart a sub-hegemonic, ‘national­ popular’ one, in which greater state revenues from ‘neo-extractivism’ (described as ‘resource nationalism’ by Riofrancos 2020) would propel a more egalitarian model of capitalist development. Ecuador’s other peasant/indigenous movements, especially those participating in the Mesa Agraria (Agrarian Platform), did, however, constitute a powerful challenge to the prevailing neoliberal paradigm (Giunta 2014).1 Correa’s anti­ neoliberal and anti-imperialist campaign, much like that of Morales in Bolivia, relied heavily on this social unrest, and its eventual success depended on the support of these peasant/indigenous groups, in addition to the middle-class fractions identified above. Prior to 2006, the Mesa Agraria signed an agreement with Correa in which he gave an undertaking, upon election, to implement an ‘agrarian revolution’ based on the demand of the Mesa for food sovereignty, a demand centred around the democratization of land and water access, and upon state resources for the revival and stimulation of the ‘peasant’ economy (Giunta 2014; Henderson 2017). Correa did indeed fulfil one of key campaign promises in April 2007 with the convocation of a national constituent assembly. Correa’s political depen­ dence on the organizations comprising the Mesa Agraria enabled them to secure the constitutionalization of many of their core demands, specifically, state support for the distribution of land to the peasantry, and its complement by affordable credit and state-funded training (Giunta 2014). For reasons of legitimacy, the Correa regime was obliged to recognize these broad demands of food sovereignty and to integrate them, rhetorically, into its project. It subsequently became clear, however, that Correa was willing to implement some of the reformist (‘progressive’) demands of food sovereignty from the sub/alter-hegemonic fraction, while being reluctant to deliver on the ‘radical’, or counter-hegemonic, agenda of democratic land redistribution in favour of the middle and lower peasantry, and the wider precariat. This selectivity in implementation was possible, however, precisely because of the discursive

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breadth of, and lack of clarity in, food sovereignty discourse, enabling Correa differentially to fulfil commitments that accorded with national (‘sub-hegemonic’) food sovereignty (or, perhaps more accurately, food security), and the stimulation of productivity improvements for expanded accumulation among the class frac­ tions of the upper peasantry and market-dependent family farms (Tilzey 2018). Thus, as Soper (2020) has documented, Correa instigated government pro­ grammes to foment increased productivity and market-dependency among indigenous peasant family farms and cooperatives commonly on the basis of agro­ chemical productivism, which, while perhaps conforming to ‘sub-hegemonic’ food sovereignty ideals, abrogated key elements of ‘counter-hegemonic’ food sovereignty, especially in their agroecological dimension. In 2008, then, key elements of food sovereignty as demanded by the Mesa Agraria became enshrined in the Ecuadorian constitution. Perhaps most important are Articles 281 and 282 of the new constitution. Article 281 states that food sovereignty constitutes a ‘strategic objective of the state’ to guaran­ tee Ecuador’s self-sufficiency in healthy and culturally appropriate foods; while Article 282 guarantees that the state will regulate equitable access to land and that the latifundio and the concentration of land are prohibited (República del Ecuador 2008: 281, 282; Peña 2015, 2017). With the con­ solidation of Correa’s power, however, and his increasing focus on ‘neo­ developmentalism’ and ‘neo-extractivism’, it became more apparent that his rural policies contradicted, or at best only partially enacted, the peasant movement’s vision of food sovereignty, taken as a whole, as enshrined in the constitution. Henderson (2017) suggests that, from their apogee in 2006, peasant organizations were increasingly obliged to deploy food sovereignty discourse as a defensive political tool in an attempt to prevent the Correa administration from abandoning completely the core principles of the Mesa Agraria, ostensibly in pursuit of a ‘neoliberal’ programme. It is perhaps more accurate to propose that Correa pursued a ‘national-popular’, or ‘embedded’, Polanyian capitalist interpretation of food sovereignty that coincided in important ways with the ‘progressive’, sub/alter-hegemonic discourse of upper peasant, and market-dependent petty commodity producers, rather than a purely neoliberal strategy. Thus, the Correa administration’s own, implicit, conception of food sovereignty, first, was not founded on the democratization of Ecuador’s still highly unequal agrarian tenure structure, and, second, was focused on improving the productivity ‘efficiency’ (largely through agro-chemically and fossil-fuel-based means of production) of market-dependent petty commodity producers (commercial family farms) (see Soper 2020 for documentation of this policy orientation). As in Bolivia, then, the Correa and, from 2017, Lenín Moreno visions of food sovereignty were inconsistent with the counter-hegemonic demands of the lower peasantry for land redistribution, sustainability, and agroecological production (Carrión and Herrera Revelo 2012; Martínez Valle 2017) (Moreno succeeded Correa as leader of his party Allianza País and then as President of the Republic in the elections of 2017). The latter have been assuaged through

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the ‘welfarism’ of the ‘compensatory state’, the fiscal means of so doing flowing, albeit indirectly, from neo-extractivist income (Davalos and Albuja 2014). As with Morales in Bolivia, Correa and Moreno have strongly encouraged the ‘new extraction’ of minerals, fossil fuels, and agri-food, for example, oil palm principally from the Oriente, undertaken increasingly by Chi­ nese capital (Carrión 2016). Additionally, new infrastructure, such as roads and airports, has been funded through Chinese loans, their repayment reinforcing the regime’s commitment to neo-extractivism. While neo-extractivism is causing ecological devastation and social dislocation in the Oriente (Carrión 2016), the principal beneficiaries of the ‘compensatory state’ – the upper peasantry through credit and the lower peasantry through wage supplements – are largely removed spatially from these impacts. Meanwhile, opposition to extractivism is increas­ ingly suppressed on grounds of ‘terrorism’ or de-stabilizing the ‘citizens’ revolu­ tion’, indicative of a marked trend towards authoritarian populism (De la Torre 2013). De la Torre (ibid.) notes that the state is co-opting social movements and taming civil society whereby citizens are being turned into passive and grateful recipients of the leader’s benevolent and technocratically engineered policies. This is part of a clear trend towards caudillismo and authoritarianism. In con­ trast to Bolivia, however, it is not so much the case of social movement leader­ ship being co-opted into the state apparatus but rather of the membership being politically beguiled by strategically targeted policies and welfare disbursements. The result has been to progressively divorce social movement leaders from their mass base in the case of organizations such as FENOCIN, CONAIE, and Ecuarunari. The Correa/Moreno programme of enhancing commercial upper peasant productivity and competitiveness, and of re-centring the state (‘re-statization’) (Tilzey and Potter 2007) as development’s propellant (Herrera Revelo 2017), responded to the traditionally neglected needs of this commercial small-farm fraction. Predictably, the Correa/Moreno regimes remained popular with this sub-hegemonic class fraction (Henderson 2017, 2018), serving to legitimate national populism and its national market-focused rhetoric. At the same time, the regime’s policies debilitated the leadership of counter-hegemonic groups, principally Andean-based, which persisted in its call for land redistribution and condemnation of market-oriented policies, whether national-popular or neoliberal (Carrión and Herrera Revelo 2012; Henderson 2018). Counter-hegemonic organizations were, in 2006, instrumental in propelling the state towards anti-neoliberal policies. Since then, they have been con­ strained increasingly to assume reactive responses to a populist regime which has partly constitutionalized their demands, selectively co-opted their leader­ ship, and steadily appropriated their discourses and mass bases of organiza­ tional support (Becker 2012; Henderson 2017; Tilzey 2019) in a process of ‘medial hegemony’. Many peasant and indigenous organizations have suffered incapacitation as their discourse, and central planks of their policy (at least concerning the upper peasantry and market-dependent petty commodity producers), were appropriated by the Correa/Moreno regimes (Herrera

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Revelo 2017). Correa and Moreno thus responded positively to the upper and market-dependent peasantry’s demand for protection against competition from more transnational agri-food competition (together with social pro­ grammes as wage subsidies for the lower peasantry), while refusing to imple­ ment counter-hegemonic demands for mass expropriation and redistribution of land, such as is still advocated by FENOCIN’s Andean membership (Henderson 2018). ‘Radicalism’ was dulled in favour of ‘sub-hegemonic’ reformism, while the oligarchy was, at least temporarily, persuaded of the merits of the ‘compensatory state’. National populism entailed, then, the convergence towards the centre of peasant counter-hegemony, on the one hand, and oligarchic hegemony, on the other. Nonetheless, counter-hegemonic peasant demands for the democratization of land remained unfulfilled, while indi­ genous movements, notably CONAIE, developed a deep antipathy to the national-popular regime. This antipathy came to a head with the passage of the Correa regime’s Mining Law and its related water-reform bill in 2008, key elements of governments ‘neo-extractive’ policies. Thus, 20 January 2009 was desig­ nated the Day of Mobilization for Life by the country’s new anti-mining movement, comprising, indigenous peoples, peasant groups, and envir­ onmentalists, in which many thousands of activists blockaded highways and took part in marches and rallies throughout Ecuador in protest against the law’s adverse environmental and human-rights impacts (Rice 2012). These protests stood in marked contrast to the relative unity between the Correa administration and the indigenous movement that had prevailed only shortly before with the passage of the 2008 Constitution, an important provision of which had been to officially proclaim Ecuador to be a pluri-national state, a key historical objective of the nation’s indigen­ ous peoples (Van Cott 2009; Rice 2012). With the anti-mining protests only a year later, however, these fleetingly cordial relations had broken down, with Correa, in a public address, accusing the activists of being irresponsible and ‘childish’ for opposing extractive operations that were, he maintained, in the interests of ‘national development’. In the wake of the protests, the government proceeded to announce the closure of several indigenous-run government offices, including the Development Council of the Nationalities and Peoples of Ecuador, while the National Directorate of Inter-Cultural and Bilingual Education was placed under the direct control of the Ministry of Education (Dosh and Kilgerman 2009). These actions of Correa were highly symbolic of the new rift with the indigenous movement, since the award of authority over these two offices had been one of CONAIE’s most significant achievements of the previous twenty years of struggle (Lucero 2008; Rice 2012). Indeed, only the following year, CONAIE resolved, at its extraordinary assembly in February 2010, to sever all communication with the government and called for a Plurina­ tional Uprising against Correa’s extractive policies (Rice 2012; Riofrancos 2020).

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Failed ‘Agrarian Revolution’ and the Return of Neoliberalism The continuing coherence of social bases of the ‘national-popular’ alliance that returned Correa/Moreno to power in three successive elections should not be taken for granted, therefore. The failure to democratize access to land has alie­ nated large numbers of the semi-proletarian indigenous peasantry in the Sierra especially, while the government’s continuing focus on ‘neo-extractive’ policies, particularly in the Oriente, has led to a serious rift with indigenous organiza­ tions, with CONAIE perhaps most vociferous in its condemnation of this model of ‘development’. Further, revenues from the export of primary commodities have been falling sharply since the ‘commodities boom’ ended in 2014, placing a large question mark over the continuing viability of the ‘compensatory state’. Indeed, should the revenue stream from ‘neo-extractivism’ continue to dwindle, whether for ‘ecological’ or ‘political’ reasons, or both, the consumer boom, infrastructure development, and welfare disbursements will falter, with pre­ dictable adverse implications for the populist compact. The national-popular programme will then confront a legitimation crisis, marked by a distinct turn to authoritarianism. The closing period of Moreno’s presidency indeed saw an acceleration of authoritarianism and violence by the state, reacting to deepening opposition to its programme of extractivism. During this period the Moreno regime sought to introduce an austerity package in order to qualify for a loan from the IMF in response to fiscal crisis, and to reintroduce neoliberal policies more widely. In this, he received united support from the right-wing oligarchy and the USA (Resmini 2019). Legitimation crisis was also marked, however, by a resurgence of the counter-hegemonic mobilization, and its vision of ‘authentic’ buen vivir, which overthrew neoliberalism a decade and a half ago. Indeed, October 2019 witnessed widespread protests in Ecuador in response to Moreno’s attempt to force through an IMF austerity package, supported by extreme violence on the part of the armed forces (Resmini 2019). Indeed, so unpopular did Moreno become as a result of his attempt to re­ impose neoliberal austerity, that he was obliged to rule himself out as a can­ didate for the 2021 presidential elections. However, the leading candidate was a strong supporter of correísmo (policies of Correa), Andrés Arauz of the Union for Hope (Unión por la Esperanza—UNES) party, although he failed to secure enough votes for an outright victory in the elections on 7 February 2021. This meant that there would be a runoff election on 11 April 2021, contested by Arauz and the candidate with the second most votes. Initially, it was unclear as to whether this second candidate would be the indigenous environmental activist Yaku Pérez of the Pachakutik Movement for Plurina­ tional Unity (Movimiento de Unidad Plurinacional Pachakutik—MUPP) or the social conservative and pro-business candidate on the political right, Guillermo Lasso of the Creating Opportunities Movement (Movimiento Creo, Creando Oportunidades—CREO), both having secured an almost identical percentage of the vote, with ballots, as a consequence, requiring to be recounted in a significant number of provinces where results were closely tied.

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Arauz espoused a re-affirmation of the ‘statist’ left ‘national-popular’ ideol­ ogy of his predecessor and mentor Correa, a phenomenon that had the potential to rebuild the leftist block in Latin America that has eroded under the shift to the political right in the region. Arauz’s preferred running mate was Correa himself, but his addition to the ticket was rejected by Ecuador’s National Electoral Council (CNE) on the basis of the former president’s conviction on corruption charges, something that Arauz characterized as ‘political persecution’. If he had been successful in the second-round, Arauz would have appointed Correa as his main advisor, with some observers sug­ gesting that if Arauz had won, Correa would have been the real power behind the throne (Rice 2021). Pérez positioned himself as contesting both correísmo and the political right, and he became a popular ‘anti-extractivist’ political figure during Cor­ rea’s presidency by protesting against controversial mining projects, particu­ larly in his hometown of Cuenca. Former president of Ecuador’s main highland Indigenous organization Ecuarunari, Pérez was elected prefect of Azuay province in 2019 before deciding to contest the current presidential election. Pérez’s national profile was established as he helped to lead the October 2019 protests against austerity measures imposed by Lenín Moreno that nearly brought down his government. Although Pachakutik did not secure the required second place in order to contest the runoff presidential election in April, the party nonetheless out-performed the expectations of most political observers in the general election (Rice 2021). Based on results from Ecuador’s CNE, Pachakutik has become the second largest political bloc in the National Assembly (eighteen per cent) after UNES (thirty-one per cent), with CREO a distant third (ten per cent), guaranteeing that the party will continue to influence the country’s political agenda. The decision to par­ ticipate in elections was not an easy one for the indigenous movement, espe­ cially given the previously disastrous experiment in power-sharing under the Gutiérrez regime. As we have seen, the move from acting solely as a social movement of protest to a political party participating in, and hence lending legitimacy to, the structures of representative democracy is one strewn with pitfalls. By forming its own electoral vehicle, Ecuador’s indigenous movement has again sought to combine disruptive tactics with efforts to elect candidates to the national assembly. Whether this proves to be a successful strategy remains to be seen, but the emergence of Pachakutik as the second largest political bloc nationally is itself testament to a remarkable revival in its for­ tunes after the debacle of twenty years ago and the subsequent experience of political marginalization under Correa. At the time of the 2021 election, the divide between the ‘statist’ left of Arauz and the social movement left of Pérez was so wide that it could not be assumed that the vote for Pachakutik in the first round would translate into a vote for correísmo in the second (Rice 2021). Indeed, this came to pass with the second-round presidential elections on 11 April 2021 in which Pachakutik pursued a strategy of encouraging the casting of spoiled ballots by its supporters in preference to voting for Arauz.

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While, sadly, this enabled the neoliberal candidate Lasso to gain the pre­ sidency (Lasso received 52.52 per cent of the vote against 47.48 per cent for Arauz, while the null vote from spoiled ballots reached about 17 per cent), it nonetheless represented something of a breakthrough for Pérez and Pacha­ kutik in terms of voter support for what can justifiably be described as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ strategy. This new, or revived force, threatens the existing power dynamic. Even though Pérez, in a strict sense, cannot be characterized as an outsider, he does represent a project centred around crucial alternatives, including opposition to the extractivist model and advocacy of territorial autonomy linked to plurinationalism, which imply a serious questioning of the logic of capitalist domination (Cuvi 2021). Pérez has thus emerged as the anti-systemic candidate, catalysing the exasperation and disappointment of a large part of the population, and synthesizing various political agendas. In effect, the Pachakutik candidate managed to transcend the usual divisions between block voting from leftist social organizations and an ethnic identity vote. His penetration into areas historically closed off to an indigenous candidate, such as some coastal provinces, reflects a drastic change in the electoral behaviour of different social sectors. Of the twenty-seven Pacha­ kutik assembly members elected, two are from the coastal provinces of Guayas and El Oro, a result that until recently would have been unthinkable. In the end, claims of fraud against the two presidential candidates, and Arauz in particular, transmuted from demands for rights and electoral transparency to being a strategic position, a way of problematizing an exclusionary and anti-democratic political system. The spoiled ballot (null) vote, the position taken by the majority of the CONAIE members, was the obvious and coherent conclusion to this questioning, because it pointed to the illegitimacy of the other two candidates, that is, to the illegitimacy of the whole system (Cuvi 2021). The new government of Guillermo Lasso has been relatively transparent about its economic policy: opening to foreign investment, striking a deal with the IMF, promoting the private sector in the economy, prioritizing mining of minerals, easing labour restrictions, deepening an economic model based on natural resources extraction. In other words, a complete synthesis of the very neoliberal policies that led to the rise of comprehensive indigenous resistance and the rise of correísmo some twenty to thirty years ago. Lasso’s policies have nothing to offer other than ‘forward to the past’, a past that has been proven to be socially inequitable and ecologically unsustainable. Conse­ quently, conditions are less than ideal for implementing these policies in a country which, like so many others, has demonstrated clearly that such poli­ cies do not work other than for the tiny minority of the oligarchy, and simply perpetuate social and ecological contradictions that will not go away until they are addressed. The popular uprising of October 2019 showed clearly, despite the adoption of more inclusive policies under correísmo, the persis­ tence of deep structural problems that, if not amenable to resolution under national populism, are, a fortiori, impossible to resolve through a neoliberal

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economy. Indeed, they will simply be exacerbated. The indigenous move­ ment’s demands (together with those of other social movements) for a genuine plurinational state, social equity and ecological sustainability are at the heart of their alternative programme for buen vivir. Under these circumstances, the symbolic weight of the spoiled ballot (null vote) strategy will set the terms for the forthcoming political struggle (Cuvi 2021). The shadow of electoral fraud and the thin veneer of legitimacy of the new administration make the indigenous movement a fundamental political player. Juxtaposed to the staleness of neoliberalism espoused by Lasso, Pacha­ kutik is the only political force that has managed to survive the collapse of poli­ tical parties while also expanding its political base. Moreover, it can combine the exertion of pressure on parliament with social mobilization. For the time being, Pachakutik has reclaimed the banner of the left from correísmo, a feat which will allow the indigenous movement to influence more strongly the emerging political landscape. Against the fragile ‘hegemony’ of the right, which no longer has a majority in parliament, and the gradual decline of correísmo, Pachakutik and allied social movements have the opportunity to construct an alternative way that vitiates both of these political blocs. As noted, this includes a programme of community and cooperative development for sustainability (minka for life, or buen vivir) involving plurinationality, environmental defence and justice, women’s rights, etc., issues that combine to create a wave of opposition to the existing stagnant political, and exploitative economic, system.

Note 1 The Mesa Agraria comprised, at its beginning in the late 1990s, the FENOCIN (Confederación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas, Indigenas y Negras de Ecuador), successor to FENOC, CONFEUNASSC (Confederación Nacional del Seguro Social Campesino)/Coordinadora Nacional Campesina-CNC, and ECUAR­ UNARI. The latter, however, left the Mesa Agraria in 2003, and in 2005 FENA­ CLE (Federación Nacional de Campesinos e Indígenas Libres del Ecuador) joined, while in 2007 CONFEUNASSC substantially reduced its participation, after a break-up with CNC.

References Barsky, O. 1984. La Reforma Agraria Ecuatoriana. Quito: Corporación Editora Nacional. Becker, M. 2008. Indians and Leftists in the Making of Ecuador’s Modern Indigenous Movements. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Becker, M. 2012. Pachakutik! Indigenous Movements and Electoral Politics in Ecuador. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Bretón, V. 2008. From Agrarian Reform to Ethnodevelopment in the Highlands of Ecuador. Journal of Agrarian Change, 8, 583–617. Carrión, A. 2016. Extractivismo Minero y Estrategia de Desarrollo: Entre Naciona­ lismo del los Recursos y los Conflictos Socioterritoriales. In: Le Quang, M. (ed.) La Revolución Ciudadana en Escala de Grises: Avances, Continuidades y Dilemas. Quito: Editorial IAEN.

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Carrión, A. and Herrera Revelo, S. 2012. Ecuador Rural del Siglo XXI: Soberanía Alimentaria, Inversión Pública y Política Agraria. Quito: Instituto de Estudios Ecuatorianos. Chiriboga, M. 1984. Las Programas de Desarrollo Económico y Social y la Población Indígena. In: Oficina Nacional de Asuntos Indígenas Ministerio de Bienestar Social (ed.) Política Estatal y Población Indígena. Quito: Abya-Yala. Chiriboga, M. 2014. Las ONG Ecuatorianas en los Procesos de Cambio. Quito: AbyaYala. Clark, A.K. 1997. Población Indígena, Incorporación Nacional, y Procesos Globales: Del Liberalismo a Neoliberalismo (Ecuador, 1895–1995). In: Pérez Baltodano, A. (ed.) Globalización, Ciudadanía y Política Social en América Latina: Tensiones y Contradicciones. Caracas: Nueva Sociedad. Clark, P. 2017. Neo-Developmentalism and a ‘Via Campesina’ for Rural Develop­ ment: Unreconciled Projects in Ecuador’s Citizen’s Revolution. Journal of Agrarian Change, 17, 348–364. Conaghan, C. 1988. Restructuring Domination: Industrialists and the State in Ecuador. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. CONAIE. 1989. Las Nacionalidades Indígenas en el Ecuador: Nuestro Proceso Orga­ nizativo. Quito: Ediciones Tincui-Abya-Yala. Cueva, V., Jácome, G., Landivar, N., and Macías, M. 2008. Desplazados por Agroexportación: La Concentración de la Tierra por Multipropiedad y Fractura­ ción: El Caso de Quevedo. In: Brassel, F., Herrera, S., and Laforge, M. (eds.) ¿Reforma Agraria en el Ecuador? Viejos Temas, Nuevos Argumentos. Quito: SIPAE. Cuvi, J. 2021. How the Right Returned to Power in Ecuador. NACLA, 15 April. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/ecuador-elections-lasso-arauz. Davalos, P., and Albuja, V. 2014. Ecuador: Extractivist Dynamics, Politics, and Discourse. In: Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. (eds.) The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Devel­ opment Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century? London: Zed Press. de Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. De la Torre, C. 2013. Technocratic Populism in Ecuador. Journal of Democracy, 24, 33–46. Dosh, P. and Kilgerman, N. 2009. Correa vs. Social Movements: Showdown in Ecua­ dor. NACLA Report on the Americas, 42, 21–24. Giunta, I. 2014. Food Sovereignty in Ecuador: Peasant Struggles and the Challenges of Institutionalization. The Journal of Peasant Studies 41, 1201–1224. Goodwin, G. 2016. The Quest to Bring Land under Social and Political Control: Land Reform Struggles of the Past and Present in Ecuador. Journal of Agrarian Change, 17, 571–593. Guerrero, A. 1984. Haciendas, Capital, y Lucha de Clases Andina: Disolución de la Hacienda Serrana y Lucha Política en los Años 1960–64. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. Henderson, T. 2017. State-Peasant Movement Relations and the Politics of Food Sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador. The Journal of Peasant Studies 44, 33–55. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1236024. Henderson, T. 2018. The Class Dynamics of Food Sovereignty in Mexico and Ecuador. Journal of Agrarian Change, 18, 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12156. Herrera Revelo, S. 2017. Lecciones del Contradictorio Progresismo en el Ecuador. Lalineadefuego, 31 January, 1–5.

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Ibarra, A. 1992. Los Indios del Ecuador y su Demanda Frente al Estado. Boletín de Antropología Americana, 26, 69–85. Kay, C. 1989. Latin American Theories of Development and Underdevelopment. London: Routledge. Lucero, J.A. 2008. Struggles of Voice: The Politics of Indigenous Representation in the Andes. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Macas, L. 1991. El Levantamiento Indígena Visto por sus Protagonistas. Quito: Insti­ tuto Científico de Culturas Indígenas (ICCI). Martínez Novo, C. 2014. Managing Diversity in Post-Neoliberal Ecuador. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 19, 103–125. Martínez Valle, L. 2014. La Concentración de la Tierra en el Caso Ecuatoriano: Impactos en el Territorio. In: Berry, A., Martínez Valle, L., Kay, C., and North, L. (eds.) La Concentración de la Tierra: Un Problema Prioritario en el Ecuador Con­ temporáneo. Quito: Abya-Yala. Martínez Valle, L. 2017. Agribusiness, Peasant Agriculture, and Labour Markets: Ecuador in Comparative Perspective. Journal of Agrarian Change 17, 680–693. https:// doi.org/10.1111/joac.12188. Peña, K. 2015. Social Movements, the State, and the Making of Food Sovereignty in Ecuador. Latin American Perspectives, 43, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X15571278. Peña, K. 2017. State-Led Grassroots Participation and Ecuador’s Land Law. In: Des­ marais, A.A., Claeys, P., and Trauger, A. (eds.) Public Policies for Food Sovereignty: Social Movements and the State. London: Routledge. Redclift, M. 1978. Agrarian Reform and Peasant Organization in the Ecuadorian Coast. London: Athlone Press. República del Ecuador. 2008. Constitución de 2008. Retrieved from https://pdba.geor getown.edu/Constitutions/Ecuador/ecuador08.html Resmini, F. 2019. The Long Coup in Ecuador. NACLA, November 18. https://nacla. org/news/2020/03/03/long-coup-ecuador. Rice, R. 2012. The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Rice, R. 2021. Two Different Visions of the Left Divide Ecuador in the 2021 Pre­ sidential Election. NACLA, February 13. https://nacla.org/news/2021/02/13/two­ different-visions-left-divide-ecuador-2021-presidential-election. Riofrancos, T. 2020. Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Roper, J.M., Perreault, T., and Wilson, P. 2003. Introduction. Latin American Per­ spectives, 30, 5–22. Sánchez-Parga, J. 2010. El Movimiento Indígena Ecuatoriano: La Larga Ruta de la Comunidad al Partido. Quito: Abya-Yala. Sawyer, S. 2004. Crude Chronicles: Indigenous Politics, Multinational Oil, and Neoli­ beralism in Ecuador. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. SENPLADES. 2014. Estrategia Nacional para la Igualdad y la Eradicación de la Pobreza, Secretaría Tecnica para la Eradicación de la Pobreza. Quito: SENPLADES. Soper, R. 2020. From Protecting Peasant Livelihoods to Essentializing Peasant Agri­ culture: Problematic Trends in Food Sovereignty Discourse. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 47, 265–285. Thiesenhusen, W.C. 1982. Land Reform in Latin America: Some Current Literature. Latin American Research Review, 18, 199–211.

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Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilzey, M. 2019. Authoritarian Populism and Neo-Extractivism in Bolivia and Ecua­ dor: The Unresolved Agrarian Question and the Prospects for Food Sovereignty as Counter-Hegemony. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46, 626–652. Tilzey, M. and Potter, C. 2007. Neoliberalism, Neomercantilism, and Multifunctionality: Contested Political Discourses in European Post-Fordist Rural Governance. In: Cheshire, L., Higgins, V., and Lawrence, G. (eds.) International Perspectives on Rural Governance: New Power Relations in Rural Economies and Societies. London: Routledge. Van Cott, D.L. 2009. Indigenous Movements Lose Momentum. Current History, 108, 83–89. Velasco, F. 1983. Reforma Agraria y Movimiento Campesino Indígena de la Sierra. Quito: Editorial El Conejo. Zamosc, L. 1990. Peasant Struggles and Agrarian Reform: The Ecuadorian Sierra and the Colombian Atlantic Coast in Comparative Perspective. Meadville: Allegheny College. Zamosc, L. 2004. The Indian Movement in Ecuador: From Politics of Influence to Politics of Power. In: Postero, N.G. and Zamosc, L. (eds.) The Struggle for Indi­ genous Rights in Latin America. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press. Zamosc, L. 2007. The Indian Movement and Political Democracy in Ecuador. Latin American Politics and Society, 49, 1–34. Zevallos, J.V. 1989. Agrarian Reform and Structural Change: Ecuador since 1964. In: Thiesenhusen, W.C. (ed.) Searching for Agrarian Reform in Latin America. Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman.

8

Guatemala

Colonialism and the Post-Independence Period: Racialized Exploitation of Indigenous Peasantry The Spanish conquest of 1520 ushered in a period of indigenous (primarily Mayan) population decimation through, principally, the spread of European infectious diseases, leading to the estimated deaths of between seventy-five and ninety per cent of the pre-contact ‘Indian’ population (an experience that was repeated throughout the Americas through unintentional or intentional infection by Europeans of the indigenous population). This huge loss of life tore asunder the social fabric of indigenous society and subsequently increased the burden of tribute and labour imposed by the Spanish, borne by the few who survived this devastating experience. Under conditions of severe labour scarcity, the Spanish ‘concentrated’ the remaining indigenous people in ‘communities’ known as reducciones in order to facilitate the exercise of ‘extra-economic’ control through which surplus could be extracted (Handy 1994). Although these reducciones came to constitute ostensibly ‘autonomous’ and ‘self-governing’ communities, they were nonetheless obliged to yield up tribute to the Spanish overlords and their descendants (creoles). Within these parameters, and so long as tribute (surplus) continued to be paid to the creole ruling class, the communities were left largely to their own devices, such that the majority of land was ‘community’ controlled. Ladinos, more or less equivalent to mestizos elsewhere in Latin America (that is, comprising an intermediate, largely ethnically defined, class between indigenous people and the creole oligarchy arising in the main from ‘Indian’ and European miscegenation), represented a class of often petty bourgeois landholders, shopkeepers, or professionals. In the western highlands of Gua­ temala, where indigenous population levels remained higher than elsewhere and where labour demands were less onerous throughout much of the colonial period, ladinos generally comprised a tiny minority of often impoverished rural petit bourgeoisie (Handy 1994). In the eastern highlands, by contrast, where indigenous population levels were lower and labour demands impelled many Maya to forsake their communities, ladinos (here also a cultural term denoting someone who no longer ‘fitted’ into indigenous society) were often DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-12

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the majority, comprising peasants and rural workers in addition to shopkeepers and professionals (Smith 1990). The Spanish Bourbon monarchy, even before the close of the colonial period in 1821, had initiated an intentional erosion of the foundations of the distinct, predominantly indigenous communities. These beginnings of the impulse towards capital accumulation, national integration, and cultural assimilation were considerably reinforced following independence under Lib­ eral governments, with pre-capitalist communal land tenure characteristic of indigenous communities being discouraged, together with the wider colonial and church hierarchy based on the extra-economic extraction of tribute. This attempt to foment capitalist individualism and assimilation to nationalism in the creole image was temporarily thwarted, however, by a successful, combined indigenous/ladino peasant revolt led by Rafael Carrera in the 1830s (Handy 1984), overturning the Liberal regime through civil war. The conservative and largely pro-peasant policies of Carrera dominated Guatemala for the next three decades, largely replicating the ‘benign’ paternalism of the colonial era, facili­ tated by the political dominance of Guatemala City merchants who depended on peasant producers for their major export crop, cochineal, thus having little incentive to alter dominant landholding patterns (Handy 1994). This then, was a merchant capitalism allied to pre-capitalist mode of communal/feudal produc­ tion, in which indigenous/peasant production satisfied self-subsistent require­ ments, while yielding up a modest surplus to the state, and generating some cash income through the sale of cochineal to the creole merchant class. This period of relative peace and autonomy for the peasantry drew to a close in the 1870s with the resurgence of the Liberals, facilitated by the virtual elimination of the market for cochineal (synthetic dyes were increasingly substituted for this natural dye from the mid-nineteenth century) and the rise of a new, and more profitable, export crop in the form of coffee. In 1871, Liberal politicians in the capital and landowners in the western highlands, now seeking active state support for the expansion of this lucrative crop, succeeded in removing Carrera’s successor (Vicente Cerna y Cerna) from office. Now in power, the Liberals passed legislation that increasingly enabled coffee landlords to exert extra-economic force against the predominantly indigenous peasantry to secure land and labour from these communities for export production (Handy 1994). Given that the peasantry still retained full access to the means of production, such legislation had to be bolstered by armed force administered by the state in the form of a newly ‘professional’ military, the officers of which were trained at a new military academy, the Escuela Politécnica. This force was in turn supplemented by a tightly con­ trolled rural militia and, in this way, and usually implemented through local caudillos with direct links to the president, Liberal governments reinforced national control over rural Guatemala designed to compel the peasantry to supply labour to the new fincas (plantations or latifundia). In promoting coffee and other export crops, the Liberal governments established two for­ eign enclaves in Guatemala, the most important of which comprised a group

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of German coffee planters who, by 1913, owned 170 fincas and marketed the bulk of Guatemalan coffee. The other significant enclave was the US-owned United Fruit Company (UFCo) and its appendages, the International Rail­ ways of Central America (IRCA) and the UFCo Steamship Lines. Through the granting of huge land concessions to UFCo by the Liberal presidents Manuel Estrada Cabrera (1898–1920) and Jorge Ubico Castañeda, in the pro­ cess displacing large numbers of indigenous peasant cultivators, and UFCo’s control of Guatemala’s major port (Puerto Barrios), the US company (known in Guatemala as the octopus or el pulpo) dominated much of the economy and wielded significant political power behind the scenes (Handy 1984). This period of Liberal rule coincided with increasingly racist attitudes among the government and finqueros (finca owners) towards the indigenous population, and the deployment of ladinos as an intermediary class of control between the creole elite and the former. These racist attitudes served to legit­ imate the coercive, extra-economic means to secure sufficient peasant labour to work on, and particularly to harvest, the rapidly expanding coffee planta­ tions, with ladinos being ‘groomed’ by the elite as an ostensibly superior class vis-à-vis the indigenous population to aid in the exploitation of the latter by the former. The supposed ‘idleness’ and ‘laziness’ of ‘Indians’ was a persistent theme used to justify the use of coercive means to secure labour for the fincas, since it was considered ‘necessary to accustom [the Indians] to submission, for which it is indispensable to use some rigour because such is the deplorable con­ dition of the race’ (LaGuardia 1977, quoted in Handy 1994: 9). Since the ‘Indians’ still had access to the means of production, they saw no need to sell their labour to the finqueros, and a fortiori reacted with hostility to the notion that they should supply forced and under-remunerated work to the plantations. The latter, however, was the principal means by which their labour-power was secured, essentially through extra-economic and ‘semi-feudal’ means, represent­ ing, in effect, an articulation between a still pre-capitalist regime of accumulation in the periphery and a fully capitalist regime in the core. Thus, an explicitly extra-economic, ‘feudal’ means of extracting labour, the mandamiento (literally, the commandment, not dissimilar to the colonial repartimiento), requiring that each village supply a specified quantum of labour each year, was applied to the indigenous peasantry with increasing force through the 1880s and 1890s. This was slowly replaced by a ‘semi­ feudal’, quasi-market-dependent means of enforcing the delivery of labourpower to the finca – debt bondage. All peasant labourers were required to carry with them the detested libreto, containing their work and debt records, and this instrument of debt bondage was deployed by the labour contractor or habilitador (usually a ladino) who advanced money to indigenous peasants in return for labour contracts. This was usually undertaken in an underhand way, commonly through the enticement of alcohol, such that a habilitador would offer a couple of ‘free’ drinks to the peasant in return for a debt burden that the latter could never repay (indigenous peasants were invariably illiterate and could be easily duped into highly asymmetrical exchanges by literate

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ladinos). The resultant debt bondage (the rate of debt being far higher than the real value of ‘goods’ advanced by the habilitador, together with extor­ tionate rates of interest) obliged many of the indigenous peasantry to become in part market-dependent in so far as they were now forced to commodify part of their labour-power through coerced work on the fincas if the debt was to be serviced. The evidence suggests that, in the 1920s and 1930s, the majority of male indigenous peasants were subject to debt servitude with respect either to the finquero or his/her habilitador (McCreery 1983, 1994). Ubico Castañeda (1931–1944) abolished debt bondage in 1934, only to replace it with an equally coercive vagrancy law, designed to ensure that indigenous peasants still laboured on the fincas, while attempting to centralize control over labour and counterbalance the political power of the coffee elite. At the same time, Liberal governments passed laws that sought to discourage communal ownership and facilitated access by individuals to land formerly controlled by indigenous communities (McCreery 1990). This enabled the development of wealth and class differentiation within the community, with some members of the village elite being able to avoid the demands of debt bondage and accumulate land through exploiting the plight of less fortunate neighbours (McCreery 1986). Liberal governments also sought to engineer the progressive loss of control by indigenous people over municipal govern­ ment. Thus, throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Liberal regimes issued a number of decrees intended to appoint ladinos to positions of power in prevalently indigenous communities, resulting in the progressive loss of influence by indigenous communities over municipal poli­ tics and leading to a considerable increase in racial tension (Carmack 1983). The extent to which ladinos used their new positions of dominance in muni­ cipal politics to accumulate land is revealed in the 1950 population census. Ladinos controlled 123,847 farms encompassing 4,321,907 manzanas (one manzana is approximately 0.7 hectare), an average of almost thirty-five man­ zanas per farm. Indigenous people operated 224,840 farms encompassing 993,568 manzanas, an average of 4.4 manzanas per farm. In the six depart­ ments of the western highlands, the area of greatest concentration of indi­ genous people, ladinos comprised twelve per cent of farm operators but controlled sixty-six per cent of the land (Handy 1994). This pre-capitalist, ‘semi-feudal’ mode of production, articulated with the fully capitalist mode of the imperial states, was underpinned by the coercive apparatus of the Liberal Guatemalan state, whereby the military, the Guardia Civil, and the rural militias, were all firmly controlled by ladinos (here the term encompassing the creole elite). ‘The racist/positivist attitudes of the coffee elite, their determination to force cheap labour from the Indian villages, and their dominance of the instruments of state insured that there were few attempts to inculcate nationalism and allegiance to state institutions among the majority of rural Guatemalans’ (Handy 1994: 15). Given that the bulk of Guatemala’s population was tied to the state with chains ‘forged by coercion and violence’ (Smith 1990; Handy 1994: 15), and also lacked voting rights

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(illiterates, the majority population, were not politically enfranchised until after the ‘October Revolution’ of 1944), there was little need for Liberal gov­ ernments to construct hegemony in its Gramscian sense. Subject to political domination by ladinos, indigenous peasant communities were nonetheless retained relatively intact as sources of super-cheap labour for the fincas, which they supplied on a seasonal or periodic basis, at the same time being drained of surplus which might otherwise have been invested in peasant production. Such labour-power was extracted from the indigenous peasantry not through market-dependency, however, but through extra-economic coercion, rendering these relations essentially pre-capitalistic in character. The use of coercion was further justified by the racialized attribution of ‘idleness’ to the ‘Indians’, thereby over-determining class with ethnic discrimination and differentiation. The racialization of class in this way served to strengthen bonds and ethnic identity within the indigenous communities, and to reduce both class differentiation and the perception of class distinctions within these communities. Wealth differ­ entiation did occur and individual control over land did increase, with some even being deprived of access to the means of production and constituting a rural proletariat, albeit on a very small scale (Handy 1994). This was heavily miti­ gated, however, by the prevalence of community control of land in the indigen­ ous peasant sector, which the coffee elite was happy to perpetuate within certain bounds so long as it ensured a subsistence subsidy for the labour from those communities that it was able to super-exploit on the fincas. Indigenous commu­ nity resources were thus protected within these delimited bounds, and conflict within the indigenous peasant sector was most commonly expressed as struggles between communities over land (Smith 1990). These conflicting pressures con­ tributed strongly to the way in which communities were impacted by, and responded to, the subsequent reforms undertaken by the ‘national-popular’ regimes during the ‘revolution’ after 1944 (Handy 1994). The ‘revolution’ itself, like all ‘national-popular’ reforms that sought to foment a transition to ‘articulated’ capitalism along the ‘farmer road’, was inherently ambiguous, seeking to promote the interests of indigenous peasants against those of the ‘semi-feudal’ finqueros, while also encouraging the dis­ solution of communal agriculture in favour of market-dependent production by a new class of upper peasant farmers. Thus, as we shall see, the revolution frequently supported indigenous peasants against ladino finqueros while at the same time seeking to eliminate cultural distinctions between these groups through a programme of national acculturation. The agrarian reform of the revolution was designed at base to foster the extension of capitalist relations of production, so broadly benefitting the peasantry at the expense of lati­ fundia while in practice placing the middle and lower peasantry at a dis­ advantage. The Guatemalan ‘revolution’ may thus be described as a classic case of ‘passive revolution’ in its ‘second sense’ as earlier specified, in which the military, in alliance with the incipient national bourgeoisie and certain fractions of the peasantry, sought to build ‘medial hegemony’ through ‘farmer road’ land reforms and a wider programme of national developmentalism.

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The ‘October Revolution’ of 1944 and the Agrarian Reform Law of 1952 General Jorge Ubico Castañeda was forced to resign in June 1944 due to increasing opposition from a growing urban middle class, focused principally around student groups who were demanding new economic policies and meaningful democratic reforms. These demands were focused on ‘national developmentalism’, drawing inspiration especially from the US ‘New Deal’ and the general trend of the period away from liberal ‘free trade’ and sub­ ordination to international capital. Following the coup of October 1944 (the so-called ‘October Revolution’), elections were held in December and the military junta handed over power to the victor Juan José Arévalo Bermejo, a professor living in exile in Argentina. Arévalo’s policies reflected the contra­ dictory character of national developmentalism, exhibiting faith in capitalism while attempting to enact measures to benefit the subaltern majority. Its Keynesianism is captured in the following statement of the government policy of the time: ‘The orderly expansion of the economy with benefits equally divided gives to workers the purchasing power to acquire the necessities and the commodities of modern life, from which come opportunities for profitable investment of capital in plants, equipment, and houses’ (Revista de Economía 1950, quoted in Handy 1994: 26). Such rhetoric was, however, rather more impressive than the reality of economic change engendered. The government pursued the rather contradictory aim of expanding both agricultural exports and food staples for domestic consumption. Since the latter was undertaken largely by the peasantry, this required greater access to land and credit. With land reform as yet ‘beyond the pale’, the government passed Laws of Forced Rental, enabling peasants to demand that they be permitted to rent unused land at prescribed percentages of the harvest (sharecropping). In 1948, the government formed the Instituto de Fomento de Producción with the intention of expanding credit available to the peasantry to stimulate basic foodstuff production for domestic consumption. The Arévalo administration also greatly expanded the education system (focusing especially on literacy train­ ing for the indigenous population) and the social security network, the latter involving the formation of the Instituto Guatemalteco de Seguridad Social in 1946. This initially provided accident insurance for workers and later mater­ nity benefits and child-care provision, reaching many poor citizens and representing, with the literacy programme, perhaps the most concrete achievements of the regime in terms of its stated socio-economic programme. Achievements in the area of the rural economy were much more modest, however, and confronted the common problems, for a peripheral polity attempting to increase social expenditure, of high inflation and a growing fiscal deficit. The administration’s attempts to reduce the deficit and create a more equitable tax system by taxing imports, increasing export taxes on agricultural commodities, and introducing a restricted income tax stimulated vehement opposition from the landed oligarchy and the business elite,

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including US interests. These interests increasingly opposed Arévalo’s policies, and his narrowing support basis was exacerbated by his active discourage­ ment of peasant and rural labour organization in his belief in the essentially paternalistic role of the state in improving the lot of a putatively passive indigenous peasantry. The right-wing opposition coalesced around accusations that the govern­ ment, if not communist itself, was nevertheless encouraging the emergence of communism in Guatemala. Accusations levelled at Arévalo and his adminis­ tration were risible, with the president frequently labelled a communist sym­ pathizer notwithstanding his repeated denunciations of communism as a threat to democracy, his assertion that Guatemalan peasants would never accept Marxism, his support for (managed) capitalism, his discouragement of rural protest, and his closure of the Escuela Claridad (a Marxist study school). Moreover, Arévalo sought to placate US interests by abandoning reformist legislation and restricting labour and union activism. Despite such efforts at placation, the US increasingly opposed even the mild reformism of the government, in turn encouraging violent opposition by the Guatemalan landed oligarchy and business elite. These tensions culminated in 1949 and 1950 with the killing of the armed forces chief, Colonel Francisco Arano, the emergence of a nascent Communist Party, and an election campaign battle around who should succeed Arévalo. The murder of Arano, a supporter of the conservative opposition, triggered a military revolt, splitting the armed forces. This revolt was quelled only when Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán, the defence minister and supporter of the reformist left (and future president) distributed arms to workers and like-minded politicians. The unions only relinquished their weapons once it appeared as if Arbenz had the upper hand among the military factions and he represented the ‘true army of the revolu­ tion’ (Handy 1994: 35). With the support of the Partido de Acción Revolucionaria (PAR) and Renovación Nacional (RN), two of the three most powerful political parties in the country, Arbenz emerged as a clear victor in the elections of 1951 and was inaugurated as president in March of that year. Arbenz was widely regarded as a strong advocate for the aspirations of the peasants and workers, being seen as a man of the people. Nonetheless, his philosophy was, if anything, more pragmatic and less idealistic than his predecessor, and continued very much in the reformist capitalist vein of Arévalo. Again, the Arbenz adminis­ tration sought to stimulate industry, nurture economic independence, and encourage production, all part of a programme of national developmentalism. This was made explicit in Arbenz’s inaugural address as president with its identification of three goals: ‘to convert our country from a dependent nation with a semi-colonial economy into an economically independent one; to convert Guatemala from a backward country with a predominantly feudal economy into a modern capitalist country, and to carry out this transforma­ tion in a way that will bring with it the greatest increase possible in the stan­ dard of living of the greatest mass of the people’ (quoted in Handy 1994: 38).

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While the US initially welcomed this approach, which after all was in accord with policies it was supporting at the time in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and, of course, at home, subsequent threats to the UFCo and to the Guatemalan oligarchy implied by this course of action led it, as we shall see, to withdraw support and actively undermine the Arbenz regime. What was deemed acceptable as a necessary bulwark against communist China and as a nation-building exercise within the imperium, was considered unacceptable in ‘America’s backyard’ when the profits of a US multi-national were at stake. Agrarian reform constituted the centrepiece of this national devel­ opmentalist programme. As Arbenz would later declare, ‘the Agrarian Reform Law begins the economic transformation of Guatemala; it is the most precious fruit of the revolution and the fundamental base of the destiny of the nation as a new country’ (quoted in Handy 1994: 78). In fact, much of Arbenz’s programme was based on the recommendations made in an Inter­ national Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) survey and report published in 1950. This report, in accord with the dominant Key­ nesianism of the time, stressed the need not only for increased agricultural production and diversification, but also for the integration of the indigenous highland peasantry into the national economy, and the necessity of raising the peasantry’s disposable income to alleviate poverty and create demand for nationally produced goods (Handy 1994). The power of the US imperium was clear from the fact that, in 1951, the World Bank felt obliged to ask the US State Department’s permission before presenting its report on Guatemala to the Guatemalan authorities (Gleijeses 1989). The report was, in the event, submitted to a meeting of the Guatemalan National Economic Council in 1951 and was approved virtually intact, although the US embassy took a very critical view of it (Handy 1994). Despite the authority of the World Bank report, the same organization, at the behest of the US, refused to grant a loan to Guatemala to assist in the implementation of its own development propo­ sals. Making a virtue out of a necessity, Arbenz determined not to rely on the World Bank or on any foreign capital (Gleijeses 1989, 1991). For twelve months following his inauguration, however, the Guatemalan land tenure system remained unchanged and no major public infrastructure works were initiated. The parties that made up the Arbenz administration, the PAR and the RN, enjoyed a large majority in Congress and also staffed the president’s cabinet, but were more preoccupied with personal advancement than with designing and implementing a national programme of development, including agrarian reform (Gleijeses 1989). With no external, and little internal, support or guidance, Arbenz came increasingly to rely upon the honesty, integrity, and discipline of a small group of friends who happened, probably by no coin­ cidence, to be the leaders of the clandestine Communist Party of Guatemala. In particular, he came to rely upon the advice of José Manuel Fortuny, the party’s Secretary General. In contrast to the self-serving opportunists of the PAR and the RN, Fortuny and his colleagues sought advantage not for

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themselves but rather for their cause, the end of exploitation and the allevia­ tion of poverty. The Communists … impressed Arbenz as the most honest and trust­ worthy, as well as the hardest working of his supporters … The Com­ munists worked hardest in support of the President’s pet project, agrarian reform, and were able to provide the background studies, technical advice, mass support and enthusiasm which the project required. The struggle for the enactment of agrarian reform became the dividing line in the eyes of Arbenz; those who opposed it were his enemies and those whose support was only lukewarm dropped in his esteem … In contrast to the other politicians, the Communists brought him answers and plans rather than problems and constant demands for the spoils of office. (Schneider 1958: 195, 196, 197, quoted in Gleijeses 1989) Arbenz asked Fortuny to prepare the first draft of the agrarian reform law, and as Fortuny proceeded article by article, each was reviewed by the Political Commission of the PGT, Guatemala’s communist party (Partido Guate­ malteco del Trabajo, a name the Guatemalan Communist Party adopted in 1952, previously known as the Partido Comunista de Guatemala) (Gleijeses 1989, 1991). The complete draft was then presented to Arbenz and, after introducing several modifications, he then convened a second working group which included the PGT leaders (Fortuny plus Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez and Carlos Manuel Pellecer) and the Secretary General of the Confederación Nacional Campesina de Guatemala (CNCG), the country’s peasant con­ federation. After several meetings of this working group, the draft assumed its final form, essentially a brainchild of the PGT ‘with the extremely active participation of Jacobo Arbenz’ (Gleijeses 1989: 458). In April 1952, Arbenz presented an unsuspecting cabinet with what, essentially, was a fait accompli, that is, a fully developed programme of agrarian reform. Following a few days of cursory discussion in the cabinet, the draft was formally presented to Congress. Predictably, the landed oligarchy, represented by the Asociación General de Agricultores (AGA), responded with outrage, pressing Arbenz to withdraw his bill and to substitute for it the AGA’s own hastily drafted agrarian reform proposal, which emphasized, not redistribution, but, with characteristically selfless generosity, the disbursement of ample government credits to its own members. The AGA inveighed against a ‘totalitarian law’ that constituted ‘the most monstrous act of robbery ever perpetrated by any ruler in our history’, conveniently ignoring the origins of their own property acquisition through the forced expropriation of land from its original indigenous inhabitants. The Catholic Church and most of the press (owned by right-wing proprietors) rallied in support of the AGA (Gleijeses 1989, 1991). Despite such pressure, Arbenz stood his ground. Ominously, US officials were well apprised of the prominent role played by communists in the drafting of the bill and of the

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fact that the leaders of the administration parties were not especially enam­ oured of it. While some US officials were sympathetic towards the oligarchy and the UFCo, even those less sympathetic were concerned that the agrarian reform law ‘opened the way for the further extension of communist influence’, something that, for them, was by definition a bad thing. While leaders of the administration parties harboured misgivings concerning the agrarian reform bill, which they regarded as premature, radical, and imposed upon them without due consultation, they had little choice other than to support Arbenz. More than merely the leader of the government coalition, Arbenz was also a military caudillo and a formidable personality. Moreover, open defiance would have created a political crisis, while public demonstrations in the capi­ tal organized by labour unions in support of the bill created an unstoppable momentum. On 17 June 1952, the Guatemalan congress gave its approval to the Agrarian Reform Law, and, that same day, Arbenz signed it into law as Decree 900. As Gleijeses suggests, ‘if a revolution ever began in Guatemala, it began on 17 June 1952’ (Gleijeses 1989: 459). As noted, however, the Agrar­ ian Reform, which may have appeared revolutionary in relation to the precapitalist relations upheld by the oligarchy, was in reality premised on the intention to foment a ‘farmer road’ to capitalist agriculture as part of a wider social democratic regime of ‘medial hegemony’. It was focused on the pre­ vailing preoccupation of the Arbenz government to attack ‘feudalism’ in the countryside and to generate both more productive and equitable capitalist enterprises. The reform law proscribed all forms of servidumbre (defined by the administration as near slavery in the countryside) and latifundia with the intention of stimulating the ‘capitalist peasant economy and the capitalist agricultural economy in general’ (Handy 1994: 90). Land was to be given to peasants, mozos colonos (resident workers), and agricultural workers who possessed insufficient land; investment of new capital in agriculture was to be facilitated through the rental of state-owned land; peasants were to be encouraged to adopt new methods of cultivation; and credit was to be made available to all peasants and capitalist farmers to facilitate the required increases in production and productivity. Land was to be expropriated from a variety of types of agricultural enter­ prises and redistributed to peasants and workers in one of three forms. The law afforded significant protection for medium-sized and/or efficient farms: no finca of less than two caballerías in area (one caballeria equals approximately forty-five hectares) was to be affected by the law, whether cultivated or not. No finca larger than two caballerías and smaller than six on which at least two-thirds of the property was cultivated was to be affected, but if two-thirds of the property was not directly in use, uncultivated land or rented land could be expropriated. All property of fincas owned by the state (the state had expropriated German-owned coffee fincas during the Second World War) was to be redistributed, as was any land in fincas larger than six caballerías that was not in use or was rented in return for personal service, in lieu of, or to

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make up unsatisfactory salaries, during the previous three years (in other words, land that was subject to pre-capitalist, extra-economic means of sur­ plus extraction). Municipal land subject to denunciation by comunidades indígenas or comunidades campesinas (local organizations awarded legal status under the Arévalo administration) could also be expropriated and distributed to members of the comunidad (Handy 1994). The Reform Law also stipulated that land expropriated from private estates would be granted in private ownership or in lifetime tenure according to the recipient’s wishes and, in the latter case, the recipient’s family, upon the death of the beneficiary, would receive preferential consideration to rent the same land. The Fincas Nacionales would be distributed in lifetime tenure only. For twenty-five years, every beneficiary would pay the government three per cent of the annual value of the crop if the recipient had received the land in life­ time tenure and five per cent in the case of outright ownership (Gleijeses 1989). The former owners were to be compensated with three per cent agrar­ ian bonds maturing in twenty-five years and the value of the expropriated land would be that declared by the owners themselves on their tax returns prior to 10 May 1952 (the day the reform bill was presented to Congress). Since most finqueros had sought radically to undervalue their land in order to pay minimal tax, this measure was met predictably with howls of protest and accusations of under-valuation. The finqueros were well and truly hoist by their own petards. Decree 900 established a hierarchical system to implement the reform. At the base were the Local Agrarian Committees (Comités Agrarios Locales or CALs), with each CAL having five members, one appointed by the Governor of the relevant Department, one by the municipality, and three by the local labour union. In the absence of a labour organization, or where there was more than one, the peasants and agricultural workers would elect their representatives in popular assemblies. Any persons considering themselves eligible to receive land through expropriation could petition the CAL, which would then assess the validity of the request and forward its recommendation to the next level of the hierarchy, the Departmental Agrarian Committee (Comité Agrario Departamental or CAD). Each CAD, again, had five mem­ bers, one chosen by the landowners’ association (AGA), one each by the country’s two labour confederations, one by the Department’s Governor, and one by the newly formed National Agrarian Department (Departamento Agrario Nacional or DAN). The CADs would supervise the work of the CALs and report to the DAN which would then review the CADs’ decisions. At the apex stood the President of the Republic who, rather than the courts, would act as the final arbiter of all disputes arising through the implementa­ tion of the reform law (Gleijeses 1989). While the main tenor of the reform was decidedly capitalist, notably the restriction of expropriation to uncultivated land and to large estates, there were nonetheless more progressive elements such as the lifetime tenure system and the formation of CALs and CADs. Through the latter, Decree 900

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sought to stimulate the participation of peasants and labour organizations in the reform, rather than imposing it ‘from above’. This reflected the influence of the communists in the formulation of the reform law, who proposed the creation of the CALs in order to establish the foundations for the eventual radicalization of the peasantry. They believed that enabling a certain degree of control ‘from below’ would foster among the peasantry a strong sense of their common needs, while the system of lifetime tenure would sow the seeds of a more collective and cooperative society (Gleijeses 1989). Arbenz acceded to this view, but simultaneously this set alarm bells ringing in the US State Department which regarded these measures as affording the communists with ‘an excellent opportunity to extend their influence over the rural population’ (ibid.: 462). The labour confederations had to work hard to counter peasant fears, spawned by landowners and the church, that the agrarian reform would lead to the collectivization of their wives and children, economic ruin, and ‘eternal damnation’. Notwithstanding such constraints, Arbenz signed the first four decrees expropriating private land on 5 January 1953, and, for the next eighteen months, the agrarian reform proceeded apace. By June 1954, over 500,000 hectares had been expropriated, one sixth of the total arable land of Guatemala. Those who lost land owned extremely large quantities of it (and were, moreover, compensated for it) and, in many cases, the finqueros were absentee landowners (Handy 1994). Many records were lost following the coup that later overthrew Arbenz, such that there is controversy as to the exact number of reform beneficiaries. Some assert that as many as 138,000 families received land, while others accept the lower figure of 80,000–90,000 claimed by the government of Carlos Castillo Armas, who overthrew Arbenz. A reasonable figure seems to be one of around 100,000 heads of families, which, based on the national census of 1950, translates into 500,000 people, some one-sixth of the population at the time (Gleijeses 1989), a significant achievement. Arbenz also emphasized that access to credit by beneficiaries would be crucial to meaningful agrarian reform and, accordingly, Decree 900 stipulated that the provision of credit would be an integral part of the reform. Congress approved the creation of the Banco Nacional Agrario (BNA) in July 1953, the sole function of which would be to provide credit to reform beneficiaries and to small farmers in general. Between March 1953 and June 1954 (when Arbenz was overthrown and the reform was halted), the CHN (Crédito Hypotecario Nacional, an interim government agency performing the functions of the BNA before its legal constitution) and the BNA approved $11,881,432 in loans, of which $9 million were disbursed before the latter date. An average of $225 was given to each of the 53,829 applicants, a sum that was around twice Guatemala’s annual per capita income in 1950 and significantly more than twice the per capita income in rural areas (Gleijeses 1989). The BNA, in only a year, gained a reputation as one of the most efficient government organs, assisted by the bank’s director, Alfonso Bauer Paiz, who was notable for his expertise and honesty. The loans granted comprised one sixth of the government’s total

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expenditure for the fiscal year running from 1 July 1953 and, in view of the severe economic and technical constraints confronted by the government (including lack of any external assistance), the amount of credit provided by the CHN and the BNA within this short period of time was remarkable and almost unprecedented in Latin America, where redistributive land reform and the provision of credit to poor peasants were essentially unknown outside Mexico. Decree 900 did not stimulate a drop in agricultural output as the govern­ ment’s right-wing and US detractors had hoped. Rather, the corn harvest was ten per cent higher in 1953 than 1952, while rice and wheat production rose by seventy-four and twenty-one per cent respectively during the same period. Moreover, coffee production did not fall, even on the Fincas Nacionales sub­ ject to redistribution (where crops grown could not be changed without per­ mission of the agrarian authorities). In contrast to Cuba and Peru, Arbenz, supported by his communist advisers, did not attempt to impose a policy of collectivization, this being considered to be politically impossible and against the wishes of the rural majority. Moreover, the government did not turn the internal terms of trade against rural producers in order to subsidize urban consumers, as happened in Bolivia and Peru, for example. Rather, it adopted a policy of setting support prices for certain basic crops as a means of stimu­ lating agricultural production (Gleijeses 1989). As a consequence, many thousands of peasant families experienced an unprecedented improvement in living standards. Moreover, the reform benefitted even those who failed to receive land as a result of knock-on improvement in wages through a decrease in the labour pool. This process was supported additionally by rural labour unionization underwritten by government efforts on its behalf. Thus, for the first time since the Spanish conquest, the government returned land to the indigenous peasantry and empowered even landless rural workers through legal participation in trade union activities. Such ownership of, or lifetime access to, land, contributed greatly to an improvement in the status and prestige of indigenous peasants both as individuals and as a class. In addition to these obvious material improvements, the government initiated a literacy campaign in rural areas. Literacy, land, and credit were seen, rightly, to be intimately connected: peasants needed to read and write in order to present their demands for land, transact business with the agrarian autho­ rities, request credit from the Agrarian Bank, etc. (Gleijeses 1989; Handy 1994). The reform was undertaken in an orderly fashion with very little violence, or illegal encroachment by peasants, despite immense provocation and the injustices and violence perpetrated upon them by the landlord oligarchy over the centuries. Moreover, landlords were compensated fairly for expropriated property, those complaining of undervaluation having only themselves to blame due to their fraudulently low tax returns (Gleijeses 1989; Handy 1994). The Arbenz government also embarked on a number of ambitious infra­ structure projects not merely to underpin ‘national development’, but also to

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break the stranglehold of US companies, notably UFCo, over the national railway network and port facilities. These new infrastructure works included a new road from the capital to the Caribbean coast, a new port on this coast to undercut the monopoly of the UFCo facility at Puerto Barrios, and the con­ struction of a new hydroelectricity plant to mitigate the deficiencies of the existing electricity supply that ‘was insufficient, uneconomic, and controlled by a US company’ (Gleijeses 1989: 475). The funds needed for the agricultural credits provided by the government and the public works programme derived primarily from indirect taxation. The rising value of Guatemala’s foreign trade brought higher receipts from existing import and export duties. The authorities also sought to tighten col­ lection and began, in late 1952, to raise taxes and duties, targeting differen­ tially those best placed to pay them. The introduction of income tax in 1954 for the first time in Guatemalan history was intended to democratize a highly regressive fiscal system and to raise government receipts. These measures were identified as necessary to foment capitalist development of the country qua national developmentalism, not socialism or communism as the oligarchy inac­ curately portrayed it. At this time, the economy was ‘healthy’ (even according to the testimony of US embassy reports), the Arbenz administration was popular, the President’s control of government was firm, and the political opposition was in disarray (Gleijeses 1989). In the earlier part of 1954, then, there still little outward sign of the tragedy that was about to befall the Guatemalan experiment in a more equitable form of capitalist development. However, despite a pro­ gramme of ‘articulated’ capitalist development via the ‘farmer road’ such as the USA had pursued in respect of policies at home and in respect of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, the imperium could not permit such an independent and ostensibly US-unfriendly initiative to succeed in its own backyard (especially during the ‘Cold War’ period – had Arbenz’s programme happened ten years later during the ‘Alliance for Progress’ following the Cuban Revolution it might have been awarded greater latitude to succeed). In 1954, however, the USA was determined to oust Arbenz and terminate the agrarian reform, despite the State Department’s own admission that the reform was working successfully. While many have argued that it was the expropriation of UFCo’s land that stimulated President Eisenhower to authorize an invasion of Guatemala, Gleijeses (1989, 1991) suggests that this is an over-simplification. While the USA did not look kindly on this expropriation, the key issue for that country was the clear, and beneficial, influence of Arbenz’s communist advisers – the USA simply could not permit communists to be seen to be champions of a successful agrarian reform and expanded substantive democracy, and, thereby, to gain influence and respect as a result of that success. In no other country in Latin America had a president been as close to the communist party as was Arbenz, nor had a communist party been as influential in the formulation of government policy as the PGT. Moreover, the Guatemalan armed forces and the middle classes were very concerned at the devolution of powers to the indigenous peasantry either for the enactment or for the defence of the agrarian reform. Thus, ‘the army was

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most disturbed about the influence of communists and the growing challenge to its position in rural Guatemala from peasant leagues and rural workers’ unions’ (Handy 1994: 189). When the threat of invasion fomented by the USA seemed imminent, Arbenz attempted to distribute arms to worker and peasant militias to defend the ‘revolution’. His orders, however, were not carried out, indicating that the top military officers in the armed forces has ‘reached the end of their rope’ (Handy 1994: 189). They would not defend a government that, in their opinion, was supporting a dangerous radical force within the country. This internal dissent combined with the US determination to destroy the Guatemalan ‘revolution’ through a mixture of ‘narrow eco­ nomic interest, vehement anti-communism, and imperial hubris’ (Gleijeses 1989: 480). Consequently, on 17 June 1954, the USA engineered the invasion of Guatemala, forcing Arbenz to resign and go into exile, and, over the ensuing months, despite assurances to the reform beneficiaries that only ‘ille­ gal’ land acquisitions would be returned to former owners, throwing the agrarian ‘revolution’ into reverse. The great majority of peasants, especially indigenous peasants, who for the first time since the Spanish conquest had been granted land and hope for decent livelihoods, were thrown off the land (if they had not already fled, as many did in well-founded fear of reprisals from the oligarchy – unknown numbers of peasants were killed in the after­ math of the so-called ‘Liberation’), their land now returned to the bloated latifundia of the finqueros with the objective of profit-making for the few at the expense of the many (see Handy 1994 for details of the process of peasant land dispossession in the wake of the ‘Liberation’). Thus, over ninety-nine per cent of the land distributed in the agrarian reform was returned to its pre­ vious owners. Even the literacy programmes were halted on the grounds that they were tools of communist indoctrination. Writing in 1995, some forty years after the fall of Arbenz, Thiesenhusen noted that ‘tragically, many of the same social and economic problems of the pre-reform campesinos remain today’ (Thiesenhusen 1995: 80). Even today, that same sentence could be repeated with accuracy. Care of the US imperium and its oligarchic friends, ‘Guatemala had its day in the reformist sun, but nightfall came quickly’ (ibid.).

Return of the Oligarchy, Counter-Reform, and Civil War With the installation of the leader of the US-backed invasion force, Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas as president on 8 July 1954, the dominance of the agro-export elite was progressively restored. With the support of the USA and international institutions in the promotion of the agro-export model, the landed elite proceeded to reassert their rule through violence and repression for the next forty years, rule that can be described only as ‘domination with­ out consent’ without even the pretension of ‘minimal hegemony’. De Janvry (1981) characterizes this ‘reverse transition’ as one entailing a shift from an attempted ‘farmer road’ towards articulated capitalist development to a

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retrograde ‘disarticulated’ dependency in which semi-feudal elements of ‘extra-economic’ labour control were re-imposed, through outright repression, by the oligarchy. Guatemala entered what was probably the darkest period in its history, systematic oligarchic repression leading to the outbreak of civil war in 1960 between the indigenous peasantry and the military/oligarchic state (Berger 1992; Brockett 1998). Oligarchic retrenchment continued even as, in 1962, the government of Ydígoras Fuentes passed Decree 1551, the Law of Agrarian Transformation, a prerequisite for receipt of US-sponsored Alli­ ance for Progress funds (Berger 1992; Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka 2006). This law served, despite the intent of the Alliance for Progress, to institutio­ nalize the post-Arbenz counter-reform, merely proposing the redistribution of state farms and the colonization of public lands by landless campesinos, the latter largely on the northern lowland frontier lands less suitable for perma­ nent cultivation than the richer soils of the highlands. Indeed, some of the thirty-nine state-owned farms in the Sierra were redistributed not to the pea­ santry at all but rather to the oligarchy as ‘political rewards’, thus actually reinforcing the agrarian elite’s control of the great majority of the best land in the highlands (Brockett 1998). The translocation of campesinos to remote (and agriculturally unsuitable, ecologically fragile) lands in the northern low­ lands was designed primarily to defuse pressure for redistribution in the Sierra. The 1962 ‘reform’ succeeded only in exacerbating the unrest that had already led to the outbreak of civil war. Popular movements with substantial indigenous peasant support re-emerged in the 1970s, fomented by redoubled efforts by the oligarchy to appropriate campesino land in the highlands. Having no legal political representation, no ‘safety valve’ available in the form of urban employment, and confronted by a regime backed by the USA and ruling on behalf of the oligarchy, the indigenous peasantry had no alter­ native other than to resort to armed resistance. ‘Taking up arms was not a preference but a last resort for this group’ (Jonas 1991: 133–134). A series of military dictatorships during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, supported by the USA, exerted extreme repression of peasant movements, actions that led to the disappearance or death of some 200,000 people, over eighty per cent of whom were rural ethnic Mayan people. In conjunction with this brutal vio­ lence, the military dictatorships undertook counter-revolutionary land poli­ cies, involving the continued settlement of landless families on the agrarian frontier of the northern lowlands. Such ‘assisted’ re-settlement was massively complemented by the flight of thousands of landless and land-poor campesi­ nos, especially Maya-Q’eqchi’ families, from the highlands to the department of Alta Verapaz, seeking escape from bonded (pre-capitalist) labour relations and the ethnocidal violence of the armed forces in search of land, livelihoods, and autonomy from exploitation and oppression (Alonso-Fradejas 2013). Such was the climate of violence and repression that ‘in the 1960s and 1970s, it was considered subversive even to speak of land reform, but in the eco­ nomically depressed 1980s, as civil war deepened and violence escalated, there

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came renewed public calls for structural agrarian changes’ (Thiesenhusen 1995: 85). The return of a civilian government in 1986 afforded an opportu­ nity for agrarian issues and land reform to be placed, however tentatively, on the political agenda (Perera 1993). The sheer and daunting scale of land redistribution required to address the landlessness and land poverty of the peasantry is indicated by Sandoval (1987) using the 1979 agricultural census as the basis for such an assessment. Thus, over 5,400,000 hectares of land, representing more than half of Guatemalan territory and more land than was registered as farmland at the time, would have been required for requisition and redistribution in order to provide all landless and land-poor campesinos with the estimated seven hectares required to support a family throughout the year on a subsistence basis. Despite more strikes, protests, and land occupations in the first three years of civilian government than in the previous thirty, President Vinicio Cerezo (1986–1990) refused to propose a new land reform policy (Brockett 1998; Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka 2006). In response to such inaction, the CUC (Committee of Campesino Unity) and CONIC (National Coordination of Indigenous Peoples and Campesinos) began, in 1995, a programme of land occupations to foreground the land issue and to force the hand of the gov­ ernment in response to their demands. It was to this social mobilization that Brockett (1998) attributes the inclusion of land reform in the agenda of the 1996 Peace Accords. The Agreement on Socioeconomic and Agrarian Issues (ASESA), forming a key component of the 1996 Peace Accords, was the outcome of protracted negotiations between the National Coordination of Campesino Organizations (CNOC), the guerrilla forces that had prosecuted the thirty-year resistance, and the government. Among CNOC’s demands were the guarantee of land ownership for the poor, fulfilment of human rights agreements including the de-militarization of the countryside, financial and technical support reflecting a Mayan ‘worldview’, and reform of state insti­ tutions and the constitution. Significantly, and contentiously from a capitalist and neoliberal perspective, CNOC reaffirmed the concept of ‘social property’ and deployed this to advocate and legitimate the recovery of communal indi­ genous and campesino lands re-expropriated by latifundistas after the fall of Arbenz. This invocation of ‘social property’ authorizing the return of land transferred to the peasantry under Arbenz and subsequently re-expropriated by the oligarchy (and extended to refer to all contemporary ‘idle’ land held by latifundia), posed a direct challenge to the 1955 and 1985 constitutional (and capitalist) definition of property as the absolute right of the private individual to use and dispose of land without infringement, a definition constitutionally enshrined and subsequently upheld by military and civilian oligarchic regimes (Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka 2006). Needless to say, such proposals were opposed and diluted by pressure from the oligarchic capitalists’ umbrella group, the Coordinating Committee of Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial, and Financial Associations (CACIF), for whom the notion of social property was anathema. Rather, CACIF

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recommended the diametrically opposed proposal of privatizing communal and municipal lands in order to secure a supposedly more rational and effi­ cient use of land to reflect Guatemala’s comparative advantage in the new global economy (Palma Murga 1997). In other words, through ecologically and socially cost-externalizing agriculture, Guatemala would be able to deli­ ver artificially ‘cheap’ commodities to the global North to the benefit of the oligarchy, while perpetuating poverty, food and ecological insecurity for the majority subaltern population. As a result of the unsatisfactory compromise that eventuated from these diametrically opposed positions, the 1996 Peace Agreement identified four primary objectives: � � � �

the proposed revision of constitutional provisions for the expropriation of idle or under-utilized land; the reaffirmed idea of redistribution of public and state farms; the enforcement of tax provisions; and the creation of a land fund to promote ‘market-based’ solutions to the problem of distributional equity.

Sadly, the wording and programme specifications of the 1996 Peace Agree­ ment in relation to proposed changes to Guatemala’s agrarian structure were (and remain today) virtually identical to previous land reform policies of the post-Arbenz era, policies that have proven almost wholly ineffective in addressing the country’s highly inequitable land distribution (Wittman and Saldivar-Tanaka 2006). Thus, the proposals offered by the 1996 Peace Accords offered few, if any, new solutions, or a strategic plan, to resolve the issues of rural poverty, food insecurity, and ecological degradation that derive from the high level of land concentration in Guatemala. Rather, the pro­ grammes of market-based (FONTIERRAS) and tax-based land reform, together with promises of conflict resolution, were merely ‘flanking measures’ to quell political opposition and unrest undertaken or threatened by the indigenous peasantry, while securing ‘minimal hegemony’ for the ruling oli­ garchy. The latter was then employed to further consolidate the agro-export orientation of Guatemala and the power of its latifundist beneficiaries.

The Post-1996 Peace Accords Era: Neoliberal ‘Democracy’ and ‘Development’ In this way, the programme of ‘Market Assisted Land Reform’ (MALR) established FONTIERRAS with the goal of providing credit, financial sup­ port, and technical assistance to landless and land-poor families, and mana­ ging the task of land regularization and titling. Between 1997 and 2008, FONTIERRAS redistributed a paltry four per cent of Guatemala’s arable land to less than five per cent of the country’s landless families. Moreover, from 2009, FONTIERRAS funding for land purchase was discontinued and restricted to leasing on a yearly basis. Many of the families ‘fortunate’ enough

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to access land through FONTIERRAS have since, unfortunately, been obliged to sell their titles due to the high interest rates attached to their pur­ chase loans, compounded by the difficulties of selling their produce onto markets dominated by large producers (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013, 2015). Indeed, one of the premises underlying the ‘market-assisted land reform’ frame informing FONTIERRAS was that it should create market-depen­ dency among its ‘beneficiaries’. FONTIERRAS thus failed utterly to create conditions for peasant ‘autonomy’ (or market independence) since it was not designed to achieve this. Those FONTIERRAS ‘beneficiaries’ who contrive to avoid ‘stress-selling’ their land are nonetheless saddled with crippling and accumulating debt (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013). FONTIERRAS has thus failed miserably in its stated objective of redistributing land to the landless, but has succeeded admirably in its implicit purpose of rendering marketdependent an indigenous peasantry that had sought to escape repression by building self-subsistent autonomy ‘on the frontier’. Thus, while FONTIERRAS failed to redistribute land to those in need, it succeeded moderately in titling land. Filtering indigenous and peasant demands for land rights through the prism of neoliberal absolute property rights, FONTIERRAS translated these demands into a programme of indi­ vidual land titling. As a consequence, many village common lands, once col­ lectively farmed according to community needs, were divided up, privatized, and titled as individual property (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2015). In a highly competitive market, where market support and extension services for small­ holders have been stripped away, and where subsistence orientation is impos­ sible due to the need to pay off debt (and debt interest) incurred in land purchase, many new titleholders have been obliged to stress-sell their property. This has led to peasant differentiation, whereby wealthier peasants buy up land from less fortunate neighbours who then become members of the land­ less proletariat (Transition Type 1 in our typology). More commonly, it has led to further land appropriation by the oligarchy. While the World Bank and the Guatemalan government consider this to be a beneficial situation in which secure (private) property rights allow for markets to transfer land towards more ‘efficient’ uses and producers, the reality, of course, is that this implies a process of ecological and social cost externalization in a transition from more sustainable self-subsistence and local/national food need supply, to unsus­ tainable agro-chemical and export-oriented capitalist production. As AlonsoFradejas (2013: 4) suggests, ‘in practice, [this process] has amounted to the legally sanctioned dispossession of indigenous peasant families’. We have already seen that the indigenous peasantry was deprived almost entirely of any gains it had secured during the Arbenz era by pro-oligarchic land policies thereafter. Deprived of any opportunities for land acquisition in the Sierra, the northern frontier appeared to offer the only feasible means of acquiring adequate land during the subsequent civil war and following the 1996 Peace Accords. Even this limited autonomy secured by indigenous pea­ sants on the northern frontier has been placed increasingly in jeopardy since

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2003, however, with the onset of ‘land-grabbing’, principally by the oligarchy for the purposes of sugarcane and oil palm production. In 2003, a survey by the Censo Nacional Agropecuario (Instituto Nacional Estadística 2003) revealed the severe inequality of Guatemala’s landownership, with seventy-eight per cent of the country’s arable land controlled by only eight per cent of land­ holders. This highly skewed pattern of landholding has since increased still fur­ ther in the northern lowlands as indigenous peasant land is acquired by latifundia through the above means. Sugarcane and, particularly, oil palm plan­ tations have been expanding rapidly throughout the northern lowlands since the early years of the new millennium. As of 2010, seventy per cent of the sugar and crude palm oil produced in the country was exported, while this figure was ninety per cent for sugarcane ethanol. Crude palm oil is exported primarily to the European Union (EU), the USA, and Mexico, while the EU is also the main export destination for ethanol (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013, 2015). The monetary benefits of this export boom are highly concentrated in the hands of the oligarchy, an extractive model that simply reinforces ‘dis­ articulated (distorted) development’. Only fourteen companies, owned by fourteen oligarchic families, comprise the powerful Sugar Producers’ Guild (ASAZGUA), controlling over eighty per cent of Guatemala’s plantations and one hundred per cent of sugar mills. A mere five companies control all of the country’s ethanol production. Similarly, only eight families comprise the influential Oil Palm Growers’ Guild (GREPALMA), controlling ninety eight per cent of the harvested oil palm and one hundred per cent of palm oil mills. Both ASAZGUA and GREPALMA are members of the powerful CACIF. Alongside domestic capital, international finance capital plays a vital role in funding these enterprises through loans (for example, the Inter-American Development Bank [IDB], the Central American Bank for Economic Inte­ gration [CABEI], among others). ‘Land-grabbing’ from the indigenous pea­ santry, located, in the northern lowlands, principally in the departments of Alta Verapaz and Izabal, takes place largely through ‘stress-sales’ and is, as such, ‘legal’, although frequently accompanied by enticements and coercion (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013). Most of the land relinquished by peasant owners was originally titled by FONTIERRAS. Recipients of land titles through this land fund found themselves rapidly saddled, however, with unmanageable debts, and many consequently were obliged to sell up. In this way, the neoliberal, private, individual property rights promoted by FON­ TIERRAS granted access to land and credit, but only by imposing exorbitant interest payments and wholesale market dependency in order to service those debts. Individual titling has also subverted the prior, and more sustainable, cooperative or collective system of swidden (shifting) agriculture by confining families permanently to small plots of land. Unable to rotate land as per the previous swidden system, individual plots suffer from progressively declining fertility, forcing recourse to external and expensive agri-chemical inputs, in turn increasing debt/subordination to the market and the adverse ecological impacts of agriculture (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013, 2015).

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Sales of peasant land through the ‘impersonal’ force of the market have commonly been abetted by ‘extra-economic’ force involving violent evictions and other physically coercive practices, such as harassment and enclosure of peasant plots by large plantations, thereby obstructing access by their campesino proprietors (Alonso-Fradejas 2013, 2015). The preceding social relations con­ form to our Transition Type 2: the Junker road, semi-proletarianization, and accumulation by dispossession, the latter entailing accumulation based on mini­ mal employment of the expropriated peasantry, however, generating a burgeoning population of a landless, or near landless, precariat. Where not ‘forced’ to sell up, either by ‘economic’ or by ‘extra-economic’ means, peasant proprietors may have no alternative other than to become contract farmers for the oligarchic plantations. Thus, under the Oil Palm Programme launched in 2009, peasants received $528 per hectare credit from the government, transferred directly to an agribusiness as a payment for seedlings, transportation, and agricultural extension services. However, the contracts excluded crop insurance, thus shifting all of the risks entailed in production onto the peasant producer (Alonso-Fradejas 2013). Nor was any provision made for the rehabilitation of the soil following the demise of the plan­ tation crop, the life expectancy of oil palm being twenty-five years. Oil palm both depletes nutrients from the soil and forms a dense network of horizontal roots, rendering rehabilitation and conversion back to food production very difficult (Corley and Tinker 2015). Moreover, conversion to palm production (or to sugarcane) entails the replacement of highly biodiverse primary or secondary tro­ pical forest by an agro-chemically dependent monoculture, releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas in the process. Recovery of such biodiversity (together with its carbon sequestration potential), if feasible at all, is likely to take generations. Such contract farming may be seen to conform to our Transition Type 4: petty commodity production under capitalism. Where peasants are expropriated, or near expropriated, in the latter case seeking to supplement income through off-farm wages as semi-proletarians, employment on plantations or on lands of the upper peasantry becomes the norm. However, oil palm or sugarcane plantations require only casual, tem­ porary employment for a limited number of days in the year, thus requiring a high level of worker flexibility. Such precarity and low wages oblige peasants to seek to borrow or lease land for food production (where full expropriation has occurred) or to hang on to land for this purpose when it is possible to do so. This strategy represents Transition Type 3 in our typology: the supply of labour by the subsistence-oriented family farm – partial- or semi-proletarianization. We can see from the above examples that our transition types are far from mutually exclusive – indeed, they can either co-exist or are mutually presupposing. The expansion of plantations in the northern lowlands, fomented largely by the Guatemalan oligarchy, but funded largely through international finance capital (Alonso-Fradejas 2015), has generated huge direct, and indirect, land use changes, typically with damaging implications for indigenous peasant food security, livelihoods, and ecological sustainability. A large percentage of

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lands transformed into oil palm plantations was formerly peasant farmland producing food staples for family and local consumption. As noted, the pro­ motion of individual land ownership and agro-chemically dependent agri­ culture has subverted agroecologically efficient and sustainable swidden systems. Formerly reciprocal relations are now increasingly commodified, another symptom of increased market dependence indicated by all the above trends. These dynamics of peasant dispossession, semi-proletarianization, and precarity generated by the accumulation of oligarchic ‘land-grabbing’ are not accepted passively by subalterns so affected, however. Struggles against this unsustainable, destructive, and self-serving mode of accumulation are increasing in northern Guatemala, and converge on attempts to strengthen family and community-controlled agroecological and/or low external-input food production (Alonso-Fradejas 2012, 2013, 2015). Since the state is largely a vehicle of the oligarchy, little support derives from that quarter – indeed, the state enforces the accumulation of capital by military means if necessary. Many indigenous (and also non-indigenous [Ladino]) peasant communities are resisting legal dispossession mechanisms by effectively over-ruling stateendorsed individual land ownership through the community prohibition of land deals with the oligarchy and transnational capital. In some instances, community governance institutions attempt to regulate the continuing process of legalized dispossession by obstructing the borrowing or leasing of land by community members to those who sold their land against community norms or interests (Alonso-Fradejas 2015). Related practices include the proscription on community membership of anyone known to have sold voluntarily their land, and the expulsion from the community those who violate the communal agreement against selling land. These practices have an affinity with those of the MST in Bolivia, for example (Fabricant 2012). Collective identity is re­ forged by drawing on Q’eqchi’ self-identification as R’al Ch’och or ‘sons and daughters of the earth’ (Alonso-Fradejas 2013). While these struggles employ non-violent strategies such as litigation, demonstrations, and land occupa­ tions, the state, needless to say, routinely criminalizes and represses them, often with violence, aided and abetted by private security forces employed by the oligarchy (Alonso-Fradejas 2015). In the face of these pressures, peasants are nonetheless increasingly well-organized as ‘grassroots’ movements in defence of their territories in which class, culture, and identity are seamlessly intertwined. While their immediate aim is to defend, reclaim, or gain new access to land and resources essential for meeting fundamental needs, this is embedded in a demand for territorial self-determination (autonomy), or ‘defence of territory’, for the Q’eqchi’ (Alonso-Fradejas 2015). Alonso-Fra­ dejas, importantly, notes a shift in the discursive character of (indigenous) peasant opposition during the first decade of the 2000s. Thus, he states: On top of the exclusion of the (indigenous) peasantry from food, labour, and credit markets, and the drastic reduction in public support for their forms of farming during the orthodox neoliberal globalization period,

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Other Case Studies of Peasant Resistance in the Periphery from the mid-2000s onwards they became excluded from controlling the most productive land resources … It is in this context that resistance to the emergent project of agrarian extractivism [accumulation by dis­ possession, funded largely by imperial finance capital] came to be framed as defence of territory … the ultimate goal of this frame of contention is to move from practices of cultural resistance to the full exercise of col­ lective rights in territory. (Alonso-Fradejas 2015: 499–500)

This seems to mark an important shift, on the one hand, from a more ‘sub­ hegemonic’ and traditional concern of ‘land-to-the-tiller’, and, on the other, from more culturalist (post-modern) and identity-based, ‘alter-hegemonic’ concern, towards a fusion of ‘peasant’ and ‘indigenous’ contention in the form of a ‘counter-hegemonic’ strategy – combining a concern for social equity and food security with one for ecological sustainability and culturally influenced, place-based, and collective responses to precarity. As Alonso-Fradejas (2015: 500) suggests, ‘defence of territory’ discourse aims to bring together two dis­ tinct, but intimately related, visions: one, a vision for a self-determined gov­ ernment of social relations of access, control, and use of land resources; the other, a territorialized vision of food sovereignty, to inform social relations around food production and distribution. These visions, however, are unlikely to eventuate without a wider alliance with nationwide indigenous/peasant movements, which will be obliged to confront head-on the continuing power of the Guatemalan oligarchy. While ‘flight’ to the northern frontier still presents, for these Q’eqchi’, the prospect of some ‘autonomy’, however temporary and ephemeral, even this evanescent opportunity is lacking for peasantry of the highlands. It seems selfevident here that autonomy and market independence can arise only by con­ fronting the dominant social-property relations that generate land poverty, precarity, and repression. Since the Peace Accords of 1996, however, although many still idealize a radical, or even revolutionary, vision of social justice, the peasantry is obliged to conceal all trace of such aspiration. Survival of social justice activists in the post-genocidal era, even given the supposed de-militar­ ization of the countryside, depends upon the presentation of subservient exteriors to the army and the adoption of ‘democratic’ identities compatible with their ‘formal’ and ‘limited’ parameters under neoliberalism. ‘After the peace accords, targeted violence against social movements that was previously enacted in the name of annihilating democratic desire was [now] framed as a defence of democratic order’ (Copeland 2019b: 194). Continuing state vio­ lence, although much more targeted than in the genocidal era, highlights asymmetries in the use of force between the state and subalterns, and is a reminder that the former is both willing and able to crush the latter when the power of the oligarchy and its imperial supporters is challenged. The initial optimism among the peasantry following the Peace Accords soon transmuted into demoralization and demobilization as it became increasingly evident that

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the ‘politics of development’ could now only be ‘thought’ within the indivi­ dualized market logic of neoliberalism. Moreover, for a small but influential minority of ‘successful’ villagers (the upper peasantry, petty bourgeoisie) structural change to social-property relations was no longer seen as necessary or pressing (Copeland 2019a, 2019b). Neoliberal ‘democracy’ (that is, ‘formal’ rather than ‘substantive’ democ­ racy – see Tilzey 2019) and ‘development’ (that is, livelihood strategies undertaken by individuals through market-dependent activities) prescribed productive activity within the parameters defined by violence. Violence, ‘democracy’, and ‘development’ became mutually constitutive: violence dis­ qualified revolutionary politics, while indigenous/peasant inclusion in market development and electoral politics diverted pressure for structural transfor­ mation and made political violence seem less repressive. By differentiating the domain of ‘legitimate’ democratic demands (confined to the reified ‘political’ sphere) from those of an ‘impossible’ and ‘undemocratic’ nature (that is, economic democracy and equality, and, especially, meaningful redistributive land reform), violence directed pre-existing struggles for material resources into strictly delimited spaces of cultural memory, market-friendly ‘development’, and formal electoral politics. The neoliberal state mimicked and partially acquiesced to ‘grassroots’ desires, such that market-oriented individual ‘capacity development’ opened opportunities for individual economic advancement and inducted peasants as ‘democratic citizens’. At the same time, ‘capacity development’ fomented a new class of younger community leaders to direct development committees and poli­ tical campaigns. ‘This reorientation of politics was not simply, or even primarily, ideological, however; it was framed by violence, materialized through projects, and taken up by an actively cultivated class of modernizing villagers who possessed the technical capacities to “advance economically”, win elections, and govern’ (Copeland 2019b: 195). This, then, was (and remains today) a relation of ‘minimal hegemony’ in which ‘flanking measures’, designed to construct docile and com­ pliant, capitalist-friendly citizens, are only partially developed (and do not con­ stitute a comprehensive ‘mode of regulation’), and need, therefore, to be backed up by violence. ‘Indigenous empowerment’, under these circumstances, could now be achieved only via these neoliberally domesticated channels. After the Peace Accords, and in the context of new discourses about indigenous rights, (rights shorn of their class dimension and confined to ‘identity politics’), indigenous peasantry now came to frame their politics as more explicitly ‘Mayan’. As with ‘ethno-development’ initiatives elsewhere, bilingualism and multi-cultur­ alism now became acceptable, as was a degree of devolution, as long as the parameters of oligarchic power and market dependency were not questioned. ‘The recognition of this developmentalist vanguard as the rightful leadership of the local Mayan population obscured growing class differences among vil­ lagers accelerated by market development’ (Copeland 2019b: 196). Attaining market advancement and electoral ‘spoils’ of selective development assistance has required the indigenous peasantry to betray their reciprocal obligations to

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their neighbours and extended kin, together with their hopes of national-level structural transformation. Market dependency has thus replaced generally horizontal relationships of mutual support with antagonistic class divisions, increasingly blaming poverty and precarity on individual choices. Clientelist electoral politics have transmuted shared concerns about poverty into competing party factions focused on projects that have succeeded only by excluding others. Although political ‘inclusion’ and market advancement/dependency have bene­ fitted a small number, the majority has been ‘left behind’. Some migrated north to the ‘frontier’, many became landless, unemployed, or underemployed (a pre­ cariat) and without options, all hope of self-empowerment or autonomy closed down by the oligarchy, backed by the imperium. Most indigenous peasants now continue to live in a state of constant precarity and vulnerability, exposed to economic downturns and rising prices for inputs, crime, ‘natural’ (and increas­ ingly capitalogenic) disasters, sickness, and imminent loss of land, food, and shelter. The optimism concerning political inclusion and development that fol­ lowed the Peace Accords quickly evaporated when demands outstripped the limited and clientelistic patronage available, with many villagers failing to access ‘development’ project money at all. ‘Neoliberal democracy [thus] staged a mockery of indigenous rights and inclusion, even though the democracy devel­ opment machine actively undermined autonomous structures of communal governance’ (Copeland 2019b: 198). The indigenous peasantry has reluctantly acquiesced to ‘democracy and development’, not as a result of ideological subsumption, but rather because this class has no other options – the peasantry pursues, against its better judgement, forms of ‘freedom’ within a political economic order founded upon its continued subjugation to the oligarchy. Thus, ‘democracy and develop­ ment’ in neoliberal mould have achieved the oligarchy’s counter-insurgency aim of neutralizing opposition through faux empowerment, bolstered where needed by repression. This does not seem, however, to have legitimated the new marketdependent order in the minds of most indigenous peasants (in contrast to the situation in the global North). Rather, most are constrained to accede simply because other options have been closed down. This strategy was successful initi­ ally, however, because, rather than completely denying the possibility of politicoeconomic reform, the oligarchic state and its imperial backers presented ‘democracy and development’ ‘as ideal and safe modes of social transformation, promising…resources, empowerment, and dignity’ (Copeland 2019b: 200). The discourse and practice of neoliberal ‘democracy and development’ thus reorga­ nized prior struggles for land, substantive democracy, and equality by re-con­ figuring them to fit a competitive and unequal market framework, and by channelling them into local concerns and ‘achievements’ such as individual entrepreneurial success, election to municipal office, and projects directed selec­ tively to politically compliant recipients. Rather than a right to resources, neo­ liberal ‘democracy’ extends a lesser ‘right’, that is, to compete for access to circumscribed resources in return for political compliance. As Demetrio Cojtí (a Mayan intellectual) has noted, ‘the state, as well as the democratic system,

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remains structurally colonialist and racist’ (Cojtí Cuxil 2007: 124), despite the putative transition to multiculturalism. It also remains structurally peripheral, capitalist, and subordinate to the imperium. In response to this betrayal at the hands of neoliberally configured ‘democracy and development’, Mayan indigenous people across the highlands and beyond are attempting to reimagine these concepts through efforts to revitalize traditional indigenous governance structures that did at least gain formal recognition through the Peace Accords and have received support from national and international donors and institutions. Disenchantment with the status quo has been compounded by the ‘new extractivism’, whereby the oligarchic state employs violence and repression to move people from land from which it wishes to extract minerals for export and for its own enrich­ ment (Veltmeyer and Petras 2014). Indigenous peasants are exploring the extent to which ‘traditional’ indigenous authorities can exercise sovereignty over their territories and somehow attain parity with the Ladino state which continues to assert violently its supremacy (Cojtí Cuxil 2007). Here, they decry neoliberal ‘democracy’ as the ‘wrong order’, bemoaning the erosion of collective wellbeing by individual interest in the form of party-political com­ petition, growing class divisions, and relations of exploitation undergirded by state violence. Such alternative democratic imaginaries are not ‘pure survivals’ of ‘indi­ genous cosmologies’ (as some postcolonial thinkers would assert), but, rather, complex reactions to imposed realities grounded in pre-existing and hetero­ geneous forms of life and histories of struggle that are continually evolving in relation to changing realities of exploitation. Thus, rather than rejecting out­ right concepts such as ‘democracy’ and ‘development’ as simply colonial impositions, indigenous peasant organizations, such as the Consejo del Pue­ blos del Occidente (CPO), propose decolonized (or de-capitalized/de-imper­ ialized?) models of democracy and development (Copeland 2019b). Drawing inspiration from Andean indigenous peasant movements, such organizations propose real democratization and reversal of the dispossession of land by the oligarchy as the necessary preconditions for the creation of a plurinational state founded on buen vivir. This involves the concept of ‘defence of territory’ (subsuming reclamation of territory), an anti-capitalist vision, recognizing the role of market-oriented development and ‘green revolution’ technologies in generating a crisis of non-agro-chemical subsistence farming. In the current context, this vision is focused on opposing the new wave of extractivism that is undermining, quite literally, livelihoods, health, and the future of both humans and non-humans alike. As in Andes, the dilemma for these initiatives is the perennial one con­ cerning the relation between the ‘ancestral authorities’ of the plurinational state and the national state (that is, Guatemala). One reaction is to ‘opt out’ altogether. Notwithstanding the injunctions of postcolonial purists and populists, this is clearly not an option while the oligarchic state retains dom­ inance. How is it possible to opt out when the constraints imposed by the

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oligarchy and the state are all-pervasive? It is clearly impossible to do so without confronting those constraints and the social-property relations that lie behind them. Despite this, there is some advocacy for greater ‘autonomy’ within these severe constraints. Even agroecology, shorn of its ‘political’ dimension, is recommended as a means to enhance peasant ‘resilience’ within, and without questioning, the wider politico-economic constraints imposed by the oligarchic state. Thus, such ‘agroecological alternatives often share ele­ ments with neoliberal efforts to empower individuals within market frame­ works that systematically harm collectives. These tendencies affect participation in agroecology, and reflect the penetration of reduced and pri­ vatized conceptions of food sovereignty into even radical agroecology initia­ tives, especially in societies where redistributive movements are repressed and stigmatized’ (Copeland 2019c: 847). The other reaction, then, is to point to the ‘pink tide’ states and the strategy of ‘taking state power’. While, as we have seen, considerable and unprecedented advances have been secured by indigenous/peasant movements in the context of the rise of the ‘pink tide’ states (notably in Bolivia and Ecuador with the constitutionalization of food sovereignty and pluri-nationalism), ultimately the substantive results have been disappointing, with counter-hegemonic groups being co-opted into, or marginalized by, national, extractivist developmentalism. The lesson for radical movements is not necessarily to avoid the state as a site of struggle, but rather to stress the importance of maintaining organizational autonomy as they interact with states, while seeking to shape state policy in ways that can bolster radical alternatives. In less than a decade after the Peace Accords, the loss of faith in main­ stream parties to deliver resources to the poor, the routinization of corrupt, self-interested politics, and growing inequality created opportunities for rightwing authoritarian populists to exploit this disillusionment by peddling ‘solutions’ to these grievances, even as they perpetuated and deepened the politico-economic structures that had generated discontent in the first place. Authoritarian populism in the global North is founded on a broad ideological resonance, or hegemony, that is, the manufacture of consent. In Guatemala, as in much of the global South, it is by contrast not founded on ideological resonance but rather upon raw need, pessimism, and resentment among a fragmented electorate – some crumbs, or the prospect thereof, are better than no crumbs. Populism initially succeeded because it mimicked commonly held criticisms of the political economic system, and then proceeded to displace them onto local divisions that it would not only fail to solve, but would actually exacerbate. Thus, the deeply ironical support by indigenous pea­ santry in some municipalities for ‘reinvented’ populists like the former pre­ sident Ríos Montt (perhaps the worst perpetrator of genocidal atrocities during the civil war) was driven primarily by a desire to break the grip of an indigenous political elite on local power and state resources, rather than by any vain hope of challenging the power and property rights of the national oligarchy and imperial corporations (Copeland 2019b). This initial appeal of

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authoritarian populism is now waning, however, as it inevitably fails to meet the material needs of the majority who continue to worry about their liveli­ hoods, are deeply suspicious of the state and corporations, and are cynical about the future. This lack of ideological hegemony (in other words, minimal hegemony) of either neoliberalism or its modified successor, authoritarian populism, in Guatemala contrasts again with the global North ‘where [the latter] more closely tracks hegemonic ideology, even as it rails against the establishment’ (Copeland 2019b: 210). Here, right-wing populists’ ability to direct anger against politically expedient scapegoats, rather than against structural and widening inequalities, is facilitated by ‘spontaneous’ faith in capitalism and militaristic nationalism among the majority of the populace – in other words, full hegemony. Despite neoliberals being the cause of inequality and the ‘off­ shoring’ of jobs, etc., their successors, the authoritarian populists, thus encounter few constraints in presenting themselves, through slight reinven­ tion, as the arbiters of common sense and national culture, defenders of tra­ dition, and a return to the ‘normality’ that did, for a short while, deliver the ‘good life’ of consumer capitalism to the majority in the global North. ‘Democracy’ and ‘development’ under neoliberalism in Guatemala are predicated on the exclusion of generalized redistributive politics, the diversion of radical aspiration into harmless or counterproductive culs-de-sac, the exacerbation of class division, the erosion of social solidarity, all, thereby, creating a fertile seedbed for the rise of reactionary authoritarian populism. This further twist in the spiral of ruling class ideological obfuscation serves only to deepen still further the contradictions of capitalism, with adverse impacts again falling differentially upon subalterns. ‘Authoritarian populism constitutes the reactionary organization of pessimism, the victory of resent­ ment, and the substitution of revenge for empowerment. The radical organi­ zation of pessimism, by contrast, would harness disillusionment into movements for transformative goals such as territorial autonomy and farreaching redistribution’ (Copeland 2019b: 212). As in Bolivia and Ecuador, an important new conceptual focus for these transformative goals in Guatemala is the political articulation of indigeneity. In the wake of failed revolution, discourses of indigeneity afford a political language less incendiary than a Marxian imaginary through which to contest marginalization and oppression, and one that, because of its apparently postclass character, is, at least outwardly, less antagonistic towards the dominant models of ‘democracy’ and ‘development’. While it is true, as we have seen, that certain ‘domesticated’ versions of indigeneity, such as ‘ethno-develop­ ment’, are compatible with neoliberal ‘democracy’ and ‘development’, in practice it has been difficult for power holders to delimit ‘the political ima­ ginaries and projects assembled under that sign, especially the opposition to extractivism’ (Copeland 2019b: 213). Indigeneity is thus central to the new concept of ‘defence of territory’, the master frame for a heterogeneous array of movements against extractivism. The defence of territory draws together

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diverse struggles against mining, hydroelectric dams, and agro-extractive lands grabs, regarding these as manifestations of an ecologically unsustainable ‘development’ model directed by a national and transnational elite. Stimu­ lated, as noted, by the concept of buen vivir, the ‘defence of territory’ master frame contrasts indigenous ‘connectedness with nature’ with anthropocentric, extractivist neoliberalism, articulating these ‘cosmological’ ecopolitics with movements for human rights, feminism, and peasant rights. While this ‘post­ developmental’ approach engages in populism and cultural essentialism of the indigenous, together with an unsupportable ontological collapse of humanity into nature on the indigenous ‘side’ of its binary construction, compounded by the loss of class analysis (see Tilzey 2018), it is nonetheless potentially radical in its alterity and certainly subverts the ‘domesticated’ indigeneity of neoliberal ‘ethno-development’. Emboldened by the ‘defence of territory’ discourse, by 2018 over one hun­ dred municipalities in Guatemala had conducted consultas against resource extraction under ILO Convention 169, overwhelmingly rejecting extraction (Copeland 2019a, 2019b) (in ILO Convention 169, ratified by Guatemala in 1996, Articles 6 and 7 recognize indigenous peoples’ collective right to be consulted regarding policies affecting them, to shape development policy, and to protect and preserve the environment of the territories they inhabit). Although the ‘defence of territory’ master frame does engage in simplistic binaries of what might be called ‘left populism’ (lacking the critical class analysis of eco-socialism), it does nonetheless connect peasant movements for land and food sovereignty, and articulates a compelling alternative vision of how to allocate and manage resources in order to meet fundamental needs, as opposed to capital accumulation. Thus, despite differences, ‘defence of terri­ tory’ and food sovereignty discourses do converge in significant ways, with activists increasingly conceptualizing the latter within the frame of the former. In this way, LVC (La Via Campesina) has become increasingly influenced by indi­ genous conceptions of territory, moving from a preoccupation with exclusive, individual property rights for peasants to assertions of collective and ancestral claims to land as ‘commons’, nominated by LVC as ‘land sovereignty’ (Cope­ land 2019a: 32). Food sovereignty brings to ‘land sovereignty’ an approach that ‘defence of territory’ of itself may lack, such as a proactive set of concrete pro­ posals to engender a new politico-economic order based on equality and nonoppression centred around the defence of subsistence livelihoods (something that Tilzey 2018 terms ‘livelihood sovereignty’). Food sovereignty thus moves dis­ cussions of indigenous rights and ‘cosmovisions’ away from mere negation, nostalgic utopianism, and romantic essentialism that may characterize ‘defence of territory’ and towards a definition of the kinds of social productive relations that could be established within an indigenous/peasant territorial project (Cope­ land 2019a). It thus responds to criticisms that the ‘defence of territory’ opposes ‘development’ (even when sustainable) by providing alternative (as opposed to post) developmental proposals. Food (or, more inclusively, ‘land’ or ‘livelihood’) sovereignty also includes non-indigenous people in its alternative vision by

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moving beyond (while still including) specific indigenous concerns and policies. It also provides a critique of class divisions and exploitation among indigenous and peasant communities that ‘defence of territory’, as a form of populism, tends to lack. The ‘defence of territory’ dimension of food sovereignty, embodying prin­ ciples of ecological sustainability, ethnicity and cultural identity, valuation of tradition and sense of place, and a rejection of the alienating and individua­ lizing practices of the capitalist market, render present-day peasant concerns, as ‘land’ or ‘livelihood’ sovereignty, relatively distinct from the ‘peasant wars’ of the twentieth century addressed by Wolf (1973). While ‘traditional’ peasant demands for land redistribution, subsidized credit and extension services, etc. do persist, these demands have evolved through dialogue with indigenous perspectives. This productive fusion between ‘defence of territory’ and food sovereignty problematics as ‘land/livelihood’ sovereignty can help to overcome the tendency of the former both to understate the scope of the structural changes implied by the latter, and to disqualify the state as a strategic site for politics (Tilzey 2018; Copeland 2019a). Despite efforts to position land within the territorial frame through recognition of multiple territories, some ‘defence of territory’ rhetoric, when more ethnically essentialist and divested of class analysis, tips over into conservative ‘populism’ and attempts to erase histor­ ical peasant struggles for land redistribution. Thus, a specific emphasis on ethnically defined land claims significantly limits the horizon of land reform and, in extreme cases, may imply the exclusion of people who do not belong to the ethnic group in question, undermining land sovereignty conceptualiza­ tions that emphasize universal access to the means of production. There are even attempts in ethnically essentialist ‘defence of territory’ discourse to deny linkages to the peasant indigenous armed struggle of the civil war era (Copeland 2019a). Such disavowals of revolutionary politics places ‘defence of territory’ discourse on a path of convergence with the conservative counter­ insurgency vision of neoliberal ‘democracy’ that specifically excludes the possibility of radical land reform (Grandin and Klein 2011; Copeland 2019a). Nonetheless, ‘land’ or ‘livelihood’ sovereignty, representing a fusion of radical food sovereignty and ‘defence of territory’ problematics, can cohere as a powerful counter-hegemonic movement against neo-imperialism and neo­ extractivism (Tilzey 2018). Indeed, a broad opposition front, somewhat reminiscent of the anti-neo­ liberal protests that preceded the AP and MAS regimes in Ecuador and Bolivia (and, therefore, a combination of sub- and counter-hegemonic forces), had coalesced in opposition to the extreme ‘crony capitalism’ that was exposed by CICIG (the UN International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala) in 2015. CICIG’s findings provoked protests in the capital, initi­ ally led by the Ladino middle class and joined subsequently by peasant/indi­ genous organizations, shutting down the country and forcing the resignation and imprisonment of the president Otto Perez Molina. Protestors assembled in the Plaza de la Constitución and issued calls for a boycott of the 2015

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elections. Nonetheless, the elections proceeded, and Jimmy Morales, a come­ dian with no prior political experience, ran as a populist candidate against the corrupt establishment (Copeland 2019b). Unfortunately, he represented the National Convergence Front, a far-right party formed by ex-military officers, and, having narrowly defeated the centre-left UNE candidate, soon became embroiled scandals over illegal campaign financing and bribery. He proceeded to attempt to weaken CICIG and announced in August 2018 that the UN body’s mandate would not be renewed. In July 2021, the Attorney General Maria Con­ suelo Porras dismissed the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against impunity (FECI), Juan Sandoval. FECI worked alongside CICIG in investigating govern­ ment officials and corruption, and it continued to do this work following CICIG’s expulsion. Sandoval’s arbitrary and illegal dismissal occurred soon after FECI began investigations into incumbent President Alejandro Giammattei, including allegations that he accepted bribes from a foreign-backed mining company. Sandoval was forced into exile, the latest in a long list of those forced to flee the country for denouncing corruption and impunity (Batz 2021). Sandoval’s dismissal provoked national protests and a national strike, the largest since 2015. This, again, is a strike against extractive capitalism and its principal representative body CACIF, and collaborators in government, the military, and foreign corporations. There are calls in Guatemala to envision a ‘Future without CACIF’. Indigenous communities and peasants have again been at the forefront of these protests, organizing strikes and blockades throughout the country. They demand both the resignation of Giammattei and structural changes, including a plurinational state and constituent assembly. In response to these protests, Giammattei has militarized the country by declaring multiple ‘states of prevention’ and ‘states of calamity’, restricting public gatherings and civil liberties, and using the COVID-19 pandemic as the justification for the clamp down (Batz 2021). In some senses, as noted, these national protests are similar to those char­ acteristic of Bolivia and Ecuador in the early years of the new millennium. The organizations comprising Guatemala’s Social and Popular Assembly (ASP) believe that the path to the radical ‘organization of pessimism’ lies with an articulation of diverse movements rooted in the lives and experiences of the poor and marginalized, all treated as equal partners (ASP 2016). It formed in 2015 out of the movement for a constitutional convention as an effort to unite the anti-corruption uprising with rural political struggles. Rather than opposing identity politics to class politics, or urban to rural, these organizations attempt to connect diverse movements within a radically democratic, cross-sectional alliance. Their ultimate objective is a constitu­ tional convention to re-found the state as a de-colonized, egalitarian, noncapitalist, and ecologically sustainable polity. These are very similar goals to the counter-hegemonic forces that helped to bring ‘pink tide’ regimes to power in Bolivia and Ecuador. The difficulty again, however, is that this goal appears politically achievable only if reformist (that is, sub-hegemonic and alter-hegemonic) sectors of the urban middle class join forces with rural (more

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counter-hegemonic) demands for full implementation of the Peace Accords, territorial autonomy, real land reform and development, and the cessation of privatization, austerity, and extractivism. An alliance of this kind is likely to form a ‘left populism’ which, while immeasurably superior to the ‘crony neoliberalism’ and right authoritarian populism currently in place, may well repeat the experiences of Bolivia and Ecuador, entailing the co-optation of the needed eco-socialist transition into a programme of extractivist-funded ‘national developmentalism’ in the vain hope of replicating the ‘articulated’ capitalism of the global North.

References Alonso-Fradejas, A. 2012. Land Contro-Grabbing in Guatemala: The Political Economy of Contemporary Agrarian Change. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 33, 509–528. Alonso-Fradejas, A. 2013. ‘Sons and Duaghters of the Earth’: Indigenous Communities and Land Grabs in Guatemala. Land and Sovereignty in the Americas, Issue Brief No. 1. Oakland, CA: Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy and Transnational Institute. Alonso-Fradejas, A. 2015. Anything but a Story Foretold: Multiple Politics of Resis­ tance to the Agrarian Extractivist Project in Guatemala. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 42, 489–515. ASP (Asamblea Social y Popular)2016. Una Mirada Crítica a Nuestra Conformación y Fortalecimiento, Abril a Octubre de 2015. Guatemala City: ASP. Batz, G. 2021. Guatemala’s National Strike Demands Structural Change. NACLA, 7 September. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/guatemala’s-national-strike-demands­ structural-change. Berger, S. 1992. Political and Agrarian Development in Guatemala. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Brockett, C.D. 1998. Land, Power, and Poverty: Agrarian Transformation and Political Conflict in Central America. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Carmack, R. 1983. Spanish-Indian Relations in Highland Guatemala, 1800–1944. In: MacLeod, M. and Wasserstrom, R. (eds.) Spaniards and Indians in Southeastern Mesoamerica. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Cojtí Cuxil, D. 2007. Indigenous Nations in Guatemalan Democracy and the State: A Tentative Assessment. International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, 51, 124–147. Copeland, N. 2019a. The Defence of Territory and Food Sovereignty: Two Paradigms for Radical Territorial Restructuring in Neoliberal Guatemala. Journal of Agrarian Change, 19, 21–40. Copeland, N. 2019b. The Democracy Development Machine: Neoliberalism, Radical Pessimism, and Authoritarian Populism in Mayan Guatemala. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Copeland, N. 2019c. Meeting Peasants Where They Are: Assessing Agroecological Alternatives in Neoliberal Guatemala. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 46, 831–852. Corley, R.H.V. and Tinker, P.B. 2015. Oil Palm. Chichester: Wiley. de Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Balti­ more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Fabricant, N. 2012. Mobilizing Bolivia’s Displaced: Indigenous Politics and the Strug­ gle Over Land. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Gleijeses, P. 1989. The Agrarian Reform of Arbenz. Journal of Latin American Studies, 21, 453–480. Gleijeses, P. 1991. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944–1954. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Grandin, G. and Klein, N. 2011. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Handy, J. 1994. Revolution in the Countryside: Rural Conflict and Agrarian Reform in Guatemala, 1944–1954. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Instituto Nacional Estadística. 2003. Censo Nacional Agropecuario. Guatemala City: Instituto Nacional Estadística. Jonas, S. 1991. The Battle for Guatemala: Rebels, Death Squads, and US Power. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Laguardia, G. 1977. La Pensamiento Liberal de Guatemala. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial Universitaria. McCreery, D. 1983. Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, 1876–1936. Hispanic Amer­ ican Historical Review, 63, 735–759. McCreery, D. 1986. An Odious Feudalism: Mandamiento and Commercial Agri­ culture in Guatemala, 1858–1920. Latin American Perspectives, 13, 99–118. McCreery, D. 1990. State Power, Indigenous Communities, and Land in Nineteenth Century Guatemala, 1820–1920. In: Smith, C. (ed.) Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540–1988. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. McCreery, D. 1994. Rural Guatemala: 1760–1940. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Palma Murga, G. 1997. Promised Earth: Agrarian Reform in the Socio-Economic Agreement. London: Accord. Perera, V. 1993. Unfinished Conquest: The Guatemalan Tragedy. Berkeley, CA: Uni­ versity of California Press. Sandoval, L. 1987. Estructura Agraria y Nuevo Régimen Constitucional. Guatemala City: ASIES. Schneider, R. 1958. Communism in Guatemala, 1944–1954. New York: F.A. Praeger. Smith, C. (ed.) 1990. Guatemalan Indians and the State: 1540–1988. Austin: University of Texas Press. Thiesenhusen, W.C. 1995. Broken Promises: Agrarian Reform and the Latin American Campesino. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistence, Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilzey, M. 2019. Food Democracy as ‘Radical’ Food Sovereignty: Agrarian Democ­ racy and Counter-Hegemonic Resistance to the Neo-Imperial Food Regime. Politics and Governance, Volume 7, 202–213. https://doi.org/10.17645/pag.v7i4.2091. Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. (eds.) 2014. The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Devel­ opment Model or Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century? London: Zed Books. Wittman, H. with Saldivar-Tanaka, L. 2006. The Agrarian Question in Guatemala. In: Rosset, P., Patel, P., and Courville, M. (eds.) Promised Land: Competing Visions of Agrarian Reform. Oakland, CA: Food First Books. Wolf, E.R. 1973. Peasants Wars of the Twenty-First Century. London: Faber & Faber.

9

Peru

Agrarian Change in Pre-1969 Reform Peru As elsewhere in Spanish Latin America, the encomienda system in Peru was already showing signs of collapse by the 1560s, especially in less marginal areas, due to indigenous population decline, a simultaneous increase in Eur­ opean settler colonization, and commensurate demand for commodities that the encomienda system was ill-equipped to provide. Thus, by the late sixteenth century, encomienda was conceding, at least in the central coastal valleys, to direct European control of land and labour in the form of the hacienda. These haciendas produced commodities for sale on local and international markets, but controlled indigenous labour by ‘extra-economic’ means on the basis, therefore, of pre-capitalist relations of exploitation (Keith 1976; Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, lands occu­ pied by indigenous communities, known as ayllus in the Sierra, were increas­ ingly appropriated by the haciendas, through direct dispossession, through marriage (whereby Spaniards/creoles married daughters of local kurakas), through land auction, or through formal land grants from the Crown. The emptying, or abandonment, of indigenous communal lands occurred addi­ tionally through the disintegration of communities due to disease, political fragmentation, and the colonial concentration of these formerly dispersed populations into reducciones as part of the Toledo reforms from 1567 (Keith 1976; Klaren 2000). Despite this increasing, although spatially variable, dominance of haciendas, the communal tribute system based on indigenous communities (repúblicas de indios) remained significant and, indeed, constituted a valuable source of reserve labour for the new latifundia. Indigenous community auto-subsistence thus per­ mitted hacendados to draw on servile labour only when required, thereby obviating the need to maintain a permanent workforce. The mines similarly exploited this source of servile indigenous labour, while the Crown continued its tributary exactions from these communities as an important basis of revenue. The Crown therefore endorsed the conferral of land titles to communities both to ostensibly ‘protect’ indigenous ‘subjects’ and, perhaps more pertinently, to sustain, for the above reasons, a labour reserve at no cost to itself (Keith 1976; DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-13

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Lockhart and Schwartz 1983). Despite the commercial (mercantile) orientation of coastal haciendas particularly, social relations of exploitation at this time clearly remained subject to ‘extra-economic’ coercion and were, therefore, pre-capitalist in nature. Even these limited protections for indigenous communities became pro­ gressively attenuated after Peruvian independence from the Spanish Crown in 1821. Indigenous communities ceased to exist in legal terms and were no longer recognized as collective landowners since only individual property titles now had this status (Klaren 2000; Cant 2021). The rationale behind this legal change lay in the assumption by the new creole power holders that commercial agriculture (or, more specifically, capitalist agriculture) was con­ strained by communal property relations. With communal property rendered illegal, hacendados were now empowered to accumulate or expropriate former indigenous lands, through commercial acquisition or forcible occupation, respectively (Peloso and Tenenbaum 1996; Cant 2021). Indigenous commu­ nities became increasingly confined to more marginal and less productive terrain, while still being obliged to pay, in cash, tribute to the provincial authorities, forcing community members to seek employment on the hacien­ das. Other indigenous people lived ‘internally’ to the haciendas as yanaconas, or peasant serfs (forming the social relation of yanaconaje), granted a portion of land on which to practise subsistence farming ‘in return’ for personal ser­ vice to the hacendado and/or for work on the hacienda ‘demesne’ lands. This relation could also take the form of payment in cash or kind as a rent. These, then, were semi-feudal relations, with some elements approximating capitalist extractive mechanisms but ultimately enforced by ‘extra-economic’ means of coercion. The privatization of communal lands also produced a class of small landowners, or parceleros, surviving principally through subsistence farming, while selling any surplus that might occasionally arise onto the local market. While significant elements of reciprocity between these landowners survived as a legacy of communal landholding, and market dependency was very low, privatization marked the beginnings of peasant differentiation. Based as it was on the kin-ordered mode of production and on shifting agri­ cultural systems, the Peruvian Amazon region, or selva, was not subject to the development of the hacienda system. It became, much later in the twentieth century, the focus of sporadic government attempts to colonize the area using landless, or land-poor, Andean peasants both in an attempt to defuse lati­ fundio-minifundio tensions in the Sierra and to integrate the selva ‘into the nation’. Amazonian regions were thus not included in the 1969 agrarian reform, but were subject to separate legislation through the 1974 ‘law of native communities and agricultural promotion of selva regions’ (Matos Mar and Mejía 1980; Cant 2021). During the first half of the twentieth century, coastal haciendas, specializing in sugar and cotton production, expanded rapidly and became subject to increasing integration into global capitalist markets and to direct foreign investment in industrial production methods on the plantations. Formerly

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reliant on black slave labour until 1854, and then upon Chinese unskilled labour, both being forms of racialized class exploitation, the coastal haciendas became thereafter increasingly dependent on migrant labour from indigenous highland communities. These seasonal migrant labourers became in effect semi-proletarians, working for wages part of the year on the plantations and returning to their communities when the haciendas did not require their labour. Land concentration in the sugar industry, particularly, was achieved at the expense of small landowners and indigenous communities, with inequality between latifundio and minifundio becoming ever greater (Cant 2021). Migrant labour on sugar and cotton plantations did become increasingly unionized, however, with some significant improvements in wages and work­ ing conditions, leading to the beginnings of the ‘making of the Peruvian working class’ and the formation of APRA (Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana) as a party in 1924 (Klaren 2000). In the southern Sierra, by contrast, traditional (feudal or semi-feudal) haciendas continued to expand at the expense of indigenous ‘communities’, with other indigenous populations becoming captive (pre-capitalist) labour for the latifundia (Matos Mar and Mejía 1980). Such regional differences would become very important considerations in the 1969 agrarian reform. Thus, while indigenous campesinos in the Sierra sought to reclaim ancestral lands lost relatively recently to hacienda encroachment (a ‘peasantist’ posi­ tion), agricultural labourers on coastal plantations pursued more proletarian demands, seeking improved remuneration and working conditions rather than land restitution (Cant 2021). Kapsoli Escudero (1982) suggests that, before the 1930s, peasant protests were contained with relative ease by the governing oligarchy through the use of violent repression. After this date, he argues that both the scale and orga­ nizational capacity of peasant protests presented a greater challenge to the creole power holders. Flores Galindo (1977) proposes a division of peasant unrest into three distinct phases: uprisings and banditry (1910–1925); peasant land invasions and trade unionism (1945–1965); and the new peasant move­ ments emerging in the context of agrarian reform (1969 onward). While the first period was characterized by episodic, localized protests which failed to win wider social support, the second period was marked by highly organized protests at regional or national scale. In this latter period, peasant demands extended beyond land to wider social issues such as education and improved working conditions, enabling alliances with labour and student movements to be forged. Flores Galindo emphasizes the intensification of capitalist development in the countryside as a key factor underpinning this shift in peasant organization, whereby the growth of wage labour in place of, or in combination with, feudal/ semi-feudal systems presented opportunities for greater bargaining power, strengthened in turn by the emergence of peasant unions and assemblies such as the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP) founded in 1947. The differences between the northern coastal/highland semi-proletariat and the semi-feudal peasantry of the central/southern highlands were manifested

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in the divergent forms of protest between the two in the pre-1969 era. In the latter, land occupations (tomas de tierra) became the most characteristic form of protest, while, in the former, strikes and boycotts on the coastal plantations became prevalent. Peasant protests in the central/southern Sierra culminated in the seizure of Quillabamba (provincial capital of La Convención), the occupa­ tion of Hacienda Chaupimayo together with many other haciendas, and con­ tinued until March 1964 (see below). The scale and cohesion of these protests differentiated them from previous unrest and generated considerable alarm among the agrarian oligarchy, concerned that a Cuba-inspired insurrection was in the offing (Cant 2021). Agrarian reform ‘from above’, as ‘passive revolution’, came to be seen, especially by those seeking a more nationally oriented form of capitalism, as a way of containing insurgent radicalism that was more viable than outright repression. This reflected a prospective move from the ‘minimal hegemony’ of the oligarchy to the ‘medial hegemony’ of national capitalists and the armed forces (at least at that time). Emerging ‘class consciousness’ of the peasantry (or, at least of the middle and lower peasantry, as differentiated from the more ‘populist’ inclined upper peasantry – see Brass 2003) was manifested in the emergence of ‘organic intellectuals’ and political parties from the 1920s that sought to understand and address the ‘peasant problem’ (stated otherwise, the agrarian question). Thus, José Carlos Mariátegui in 1928 (2007) asserted that the so-called ‘Indian problem’ should be re-framed as an issue of land distribution, sum­ marized in his celebrated Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad per­ uana. Mariátegui founded what would later become the Partido Comunista del Perú (PCP), with his theories remaining highly influential in left-wing circles for long thereafter. The efflorescence of peasant protest during the 1950s and early 1960s afforded evidence for left-wing radicals that the pea­ santry constituted a potentially revolutionary agent, a view strengthened by the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In 1965, two radical left-wing parties accord­ ingly launched a guerrilla insurgency in the central and southern Sierra. The Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) had constituted itself as a breakaway faction of APRA in 1959, following that party’s rightward drift. The Ejército de Liberación Nacional emerged simultaneously among PCP members seeking a radical alternative to the Soviet-allied party leadership (Cant 2021). These two parties operated essentially independently of one another and, having suffered heavy casualties, were defeated by government armed forces in December 1965. Despite this defeat of the insurrection, the government became more convinced that a programme of reformist national development was the best way of thwarting revolution on the Cuban model (Caballero 1980). While piecemeal reform proposals and some action in relation to the unrest in La Convención were undertaken in 1962, it was not until the general elec­ tion of 1963 that a major agrarian reform was promised, in this instance by the Acción Popular (AP) party candidate Fernando Belaúnde Terry. Follow­ ing his election as president, Belaúnde duly presented a bill to parliament,

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making little progress, however, due to AP’s lack of parliamentary majority (AP was not supported in this measure by APRA, for example). It was not until May 1964 (Law No. 15037) that a reform bill was passed by Congress. The new law made land redistribution a priority, creating provisions for land to be expropriated across all forms of agricultural production, including the agro-industrial coastal plantations, and throughout the country (except the selva, where it had no applicability). The agrarian reform did, however, make many concessions to hacendados, including provision for parcelling land pri­ vately, essentially permitting haciendas to be divided up among family mem­ bers, a system of graduated affectation restructuring the total area of land liable to expropriation, and the exemption of agro-industrial complexes. Where ‘efficiency’ of haciendas could be demonstrated, landowners could, moreover, evade expropriation. These concessions, together with the bureau­ cratic complexity of expropriation and adjudication, meant that only an esti­ mated two per cent of the peasant population needful of land had, by 1968, benefitted from the reform (Matos Mar and Mejía 1980; Cant 2021).

The Peruvian Agrarian Reform of 1969 and its Causes It was the desire to undertake substantive agrarian reform to foment national development that motivated the 1968 coup led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado (Cant 2021). Between 1969 and 1980, this Peruvian military regime implemented the most comprehensive programme of agrarian reform in Latin America outside Cuba. This has been characterized by de Janvry (1981) as a transition from the ‘Junker’ to ‘farmer road’ to capitalism, while Kay (1982: 166) has described it as an agrarian reform which ‘spawned a new form of transition to agrarian capitalism: the State capitalist road’. He suggests that the agrarian reform had a paradoxical character, involving a military gov­ ernment implementing a collectivist reform to develop and strengthen the capitalist system. Assies (1987) largely concurs with the latter view, empha­ sizing the importance to the reform of the creation of agrarian co-operatives rather than farmer-type capitalism. In order to understand both the ‘political’ and the ‘ecological’ bases of the Peruvian agrarian reform, we need first to delineate the main agrarian sys­ tems underpinning the social formation (as in other Andean states, before the 1960s settled agriculture was confined to the Highlands and the Coast, with the eastern wet tropical lowlands characterized by the shifting agriculture of kin-ordered, or ‘tribal’, indigenous groups). Within the Highlands and the Coast, pre-reform Peru was characterized by three main agrarian systems: plantations on the Coast, with the other two, haciendas and peasant (usually indigenous) communities, both located in the Highlands (or Sierra) and notable for their long history of conflictual relations (Kay 1982). Although characterized by semi-arid conditions, irrigation and flat terrain render the coastal zone suitable for large-scale plantation agriculture. Foreign capital investment in sugar-cane plantations, particularly, increased during the

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second half of the nineteenth century, and a process of large-scale land con­ centration was the consequence. Seasonal workers from the Sierra (eventuales) were hired to undertake the more menial, low-paid, tasks, such as cane-cut­ ting and loading, while fully proletarianized permanent workers performed more specialized and highly paid jobs. The smaller cotton and rice planta­ tions, by contrast, were substantially dependent for their labour force on tenants and sharecroppers. Cotton plantations were reliant primarily on sharecropping, or yanaconaje, while the rice plantations were characterized by the colonato, whereby the tenant, or colono, was granted a small parcel of land on which to grow rice and other subsistence crops. While the latter was obliged to work for a significant number of days per year on the plantation owner’s demesne lands (the produce of which went exclusively to the land­ lord), such was rarely the case with the yanacona. While both labour forces were obliged to pay rents in kind or money for their plots, the colonato had additionally to pay a labour rent in the form of working on the landlord’s demesne. While the plantations in both cases were commercial enterprises, the relationship between landlord and tenant was thus pre-capitalistic, not being reliant on wage-labour. These pre-capitalist production relations persisted until the 1940s, when landlords began either to expel or proletarianize the workforce as wage labour became a more efficient means through which to extract surplus. The process was most marked on the estates undergoing capitalization and was characterized by strong resistance by those subject to proletarianization (Kay 1982; Assies 1987). The Sierra was characterized by two forms of hacienda: the huge livestock estates and the smaller mixed livestock-crop estates. The first were character­ istic particularly of the south in the departments of Ayacucho, Huancavelica, Puno, and Apurimac, and were devoted to rearing sheep, llamas, alpacas, and cattle (at lower altitudes). On these estates, huacchilleros (shepherds) tended the hacendados’ flocks in return for the right to graze their own livestock. Prior to the reform, a process of proletarianization was evident as landlords attempted to dispossess huacchilleros in order to claim more pasture for themselves as their sheep became more profitable due to improved breeding. On the mixed or crop-only haciendas, by contrast, proletarianization was much less characteristic, with hacendados relying on non-capitalistic labour relations undertaken by colonos, or feudatarios. The latter cultivated the majority of the hacienda’s cropland, the demesne of the hacendado was often quite small (absentee landlordism being common), such that surplus was extracted through rent in kind (rarely money rent), rather than through labour rent. Crops included maize, potatoes, native and non-native grains, and vegetables either for subsistence or for sale on the domestic market. A small level of proletarianization took place before the reform on those haciendas where the demesne was larger than the average and the hacendado had a greater presence on the estate (Kay 1982). Unlike the Coast, the Sierra was, and remains, the primary repository of indigenous (Indian) and mestizo tradition (Peru has the largest absolute

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number of indigenous people of any country in Latin America [Rice 2012]). Quechua (Kichwa) is the primary language, with Aymara also spoken in the southern departments, especially Puno. Again, unlike the coastal plantations, serrano haciendas usually produced food not for export but for local markets and/or for Lima-Callao. While hacendados lacked the politico-economic power of the coastal oligarchy, they exerted great influence at the local level (Handelman 1975). Within the hacienda itself, they exercised considerable power over the feudatarios well into the middle of the twentieth century. In return for the usufruct of a small plot of land and, perhaps, limited grazing rights, the feudatario rendered virtually unpaid labour on the demesne for as many as 150–200 days per year, while being obliged to sell his/her crop sur­ plus to the hacendado at below market prices. Resistance to these pre-capita­ listic relations was reduced by the feudatarios’ dependence on their ‘patrón’ for tools, loans, aid in times of medical need, and support for fiestas, an example of severely asymmetrical reciprocity. Traditionally, the feudatarios were kept isolated from potentially subversive contacts with outsiders, with peasants on other haciendas, and even with potential ‘troublemakers’ on the same estate. Peasants who were construed by the hacendado to be ‘trouble­ makers’ could be expelled from the estate or subject to severe punishment. Thus, until the 1960s, unionization of hacienda peasants was extremely rare and, even during the outbreak of peasant unrest in the early part of that decade, the feudatarios were less mobilized than members of the peasant communities (comuneros) (see below) (Handelman 1975). The peasant community comprised the other main agrarian system in the Sierra prior to the agrarian reform. Peasant communities, made up over­ whelmingly of indigenous people, were associations, membership of which conferred certain rights and responsibilities (Kay 1982). Individual plots of cultivable land were distributed by the community authorities to members in usufruct, while members (comuneros) worked collectively those parts of culti­ vable land, the proceeds of which financed communal activity. Comuneros also undertook collective tasks such as construction and maintenance work, while reciprocal exchange of labour between members in the cultivation of individual plots was a common occurrence (Alberti and Mayer 1974; Kay 1982). Pastureland was not subject to parcellization, and was always managed collectively. These arrangements came under strain with the penetration of capitalist market relations and the incursions of haciendas into community land. Hacienda appropriation of community land obliged some comuneros to become labour-service tenants on the estates or to rent grazing from the hacienda. The penetration of capitalist market relations initiated the privati­ zation of communal arable land, embodied in legislation that accelerated the establishment of private property relations over cropland previously subject solely to usufruct rights. While pastureland was generally exempt from pri­ vatization due to the financial unviability of enclosing poor-quality land, communal ownership was no barrier to wealthier comuneros pasturing larger numbers of their own animals than poorer members (Figueroa 1978, 1979).

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In tandem with these developments, collective work arrangements gradually diminished until only essential construction and maintenance tasks were undertaken. With the advent of capitalist relations, comuneros underwent differentia­ tion, with richer members entering increasingly into commerce, transport, and small-scale craft activity, while poorer comuneros were obliged to sell part of their labour for a wage, becoming a semi-proletariat (Long and Roberts 1978). In a similar way, while initially only richer comuneros sold a significant portion of their agricultural produce on the capitalist market and purchased commodities in return, subsequently the bulk of members became incorpo­ rated in this way. The culmination of these trends was that peasant commu­ nities had been largely transformed into associations of private peasant producers by the time of the agrarian reform. Land tenure structure before the agrarian reform was very unequal, with estates (plantations and haciendas), comprising 1.2 per cent of farms, holding 52.3 per cent of the land. Minifundios (smallholdings) and peasant commu­ nities (84.6 per cent of farms) meanwhile owned just 40.8 per cent of the land in 1961 (Matos Mar and Mejía 1980). Land concentration was considerably greater on the Coast than in the Sierra, however, with estates in the former holding eighty-six per cent of land, and haciendas in the latter only fifty-two per cent (land quality, moreover, was considerably poorer in the latter) (Bar­ raclough 1973). The latifundia-minifundia land tenure structure generated both inequality and inefficiency (Kay 1982). ‘Landlords owned too much land and employed too little labour, while peasants had too little land and used too much labour’ (Kay 1982: 145). Thus, while a large proportion of hacienda land lay idle, with the remainder lightly cultivated, peasant farms were small, fragmented, and intensively cultivated. Inadequate access to land and con­ sequent over-intensive cultivation led to a decline in soil fertility, while over­ grazing eroded the quality of pastureland (de Janvry and Garramón 1977). Nonetheless, yields per area were still greater on peasant farms than on haciendas. The land tenure structure prior to the agrarian reform also contained a variety of social relations of production. A substantial majority of agricultural families had access to land (however inadequate) as proprietors (76.9 per cent) or as tenants (14.0 per cent), while wage-labourers comprised only 9.1 per cent of agricultural families. In the Sierra sixty-nine per cent of agri­ cultural families were minifundistas, seventeen per cent were tenants, only five per cent wage labourers, while some two-thirds of minifundistas were members of peasant communities. On the Coast, wage labour comprised a greater per­ centage of agricultural families (twenty per cent), although minifundistas still constituted the most important group (fifty-seven per cent). The structural characteristics of the economy and unequal access to the means of production generated severe inequalities in the distribution of income among the popu­ lation, perpetuating poverty. Thus, the poorest 53.8 per cent of rural families earned 14.7 of the total rural income, while the richest 2.5 per cent

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appropriated twenty-one per cent. Low incomes together with such distribu­ tional inequity, generated widespread poverty, especially in the Sierra (Caballero 1980; Kay 1982). The first organized resistance to this strongly hierarchical rural structure arose, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the more capitalistic, modernized Coast. Here, the plantation workers’ greater hispanization, higher levels of education and literacy, and greater exposure to the national political culture by com­ parison to the Andean peasantry, combined with the impersonalized labour relations of capitalist agriculture, generated a certain degree of proletarian class-consciousness (Handelman 1981). During the 1940s, assisted by APRA (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), these plantation workers were able to secure government recognition of their unions, the right to collective bargaining, the minimum wage, and the few social security benefits afforded by Peruvian law. While militant action and strikes did occur during the next two decades, coastal workers, tempered by the APRA unions’ moderate and populist inclinations, never challenged the class structure of the national political system or the inequitable bases of the country’s agricultural social property relations (Handelman 1981). In the Sierra, by contrast, the organizational capacities of the peasantry were constrained by its low level of hispanization, education, and literacy, together with its relative isolation from national politics. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, socio-economic changes were occurring that culminated in the widespread mobilization of the serrano peasantry, posing a far more dramatic and militant challenge to the status quo than the coastal proletariat. The spread of rural education in the Sierra fostered a corpus of politicized and radicalized students and teachers who provided leadership for incipient campesino organization. Increased literacy and the spread of mass commu­ nication brought the peasantry within the orbit of the Peruvian political system. Furthermore, increasing migration of serrano campesinos to urban centres brought them into contact with unions and political parties, and the influence of the latter were taken back to the peasant communities when migrants returned home. As emphasized by Wolf (1973) in PWTC, these forces of modernization, stemming ultimately from ‘North Atlantic capital­ ism’, were diffusing throughout Latin America and the ‘Third World’ during the post-war decades. These influences were mediated through factors that were specific to the Peruvian social formation. Thus, in the central serrano departments of Junín and Pasco, for example, the expansion of mining and metal refining attracted large numbers of campesinos from neighbouring communities as a workforce. Here, they came under the influence of union activism, acquiring organizational skills and political consciousness for sub­ sequent dissemination in their home communities (Handelman 1975, 1981). Meanwhile, increasing numbers of hacendados managed their property as absentee landlords, thereby reducing their degree of control over their feuda­ tarios, or sold their estates to land-hungry campesinos. In some cases, con­ traction in control by hacendados stimulated some feudatarios simply to

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terminate payment of rent or delivery of labour service (Cotler 1970; Tullis 1970). By the early 1960s, only some thirty per cent of the Sierra and less than a quarter of the peasantry were still subject to pre-capitalist social rela­ tions, with the remaining land either rented to the peasantry or owned by communities and minifundistas (Handelman 1981). Thus, in the Sierra, the semi-feudal relations of the hacienda system were already in marked decline before the implementation of the agrarian reform. These trends were exacer­ bated by the adoption of an import-substituting-industrialization strategy from 1959, which had the effect of depriving agriculture of investment funds and stimulating a fall in production. Over-valuation of the national currency made food imports cheaper, undercutting domestic production. Similarly, price controls on food products to support urban consumers and industrial workforces led to a deterioration of agriculture’s terms of trade with the rest of the economy during the 1960s (Alberts 2019; Kay 1982). As a consequence of these trends, peasant unrest erupted across the Sierra, although initially focused on two areas: the department of Pasco and the province of La Convención (department of Cusco) (Handelman 1981). In Pasco, several villages, frustrated by hacienda encroachment on community grazing lands and inflamed by conflicts with the Cerro de Pasco mining cor­ poration, embarked on a series of estate invasions to ‘recuperate’ land (alleg­ edly) stolen from them over the years. Between 1959 and 1962 a number of attempted ‘recuperations’ occurred, some successful, others being repressed by the police with considerable violence. In La Convención, uprisings involved both independent comuneros and hacienda sharecroppers, the latter forming a union to resist exploitation by their hacendados. With the involve­ ment of Hugo Blanco, the Peruvian Trotskyist activist, the campesinos at first insisted merely on paying rent in cash (rather than rendered as labour service or in kind), then refused to pay rent at all, then finally seized the haciendas. Both sets of peasant movements resulted in the establishment of sindicato (union) federations and elicited support from leftist urban unions and uni­ versity students (Handelman 1975, 1981). While both these uprisings had been suppressed by 1962, they nonetheless inspired, in 1963, a more general rebellion across the Sierra, involving, in the main, land seizures and hacienda invasions. This coincided with the election of reformist President Fernando Belaúnde Terry, who had actively curried the peasant vote (literate peasants being a significant voting bloc by 1963) and promised land redistribution. The uprisings, encouraged by Belaúnde’s initially tolerant attitude towards land occupations, led to the seizure of haciendas by hundreds of peasant commu­ nities claiming the land as their own. These land seizures were accompanied by the formation of campesino federations, frequently linked to urban radical groups, among the very few political interests willing to support the peasant rebellion. By 1964, however, the Belaúnde administration had been subjected to intense pressure from the oligarchy, opposition political parties (including APRA), and the military to suppress what these groups perceived to be a

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revolutionary threat, placing capitalist relations of production in question. The majority of the peasant federations were indeed repressed as a result, especially those in the south with links to urban Marxists. Belaúnde did enact a limited land reform programme, however, which, despite its attempted financial evisceration by the opposition majority in Congress, was able at least to legalize a small number of campesino land occupations in the areas of most intense conflict. Only some 12,000 families benefitted, receiving 380,000 hectares primarily on an individual basis, and representing an insignificant fraction of the total rural population and land area (Petras and LaPorte 1971; Kay 1982). While a further peasant uprising was suppressed in 1965, the military came increasingly to the view that only a reformist ‘revolution from above’ (passive revolution), involving comprehensive agrarian reform, the elimination of latifundia, and the capitalist modernization of the country through ‘national developmentalism’, could neutralize the peasant clamour for radical revolutionary change ‘from below’. Consequently, in 1968, Pre­ sident Belaúnde was removed from office in a military coup by reform-orien­ ted officers with General Velasco Alvarado at their head (Handelman 1975). A new concept of ‘national security’ comprised a key part of the military’s rationale for assuming power, with the resolution of internal conflicts being regarded as a prerequisite for the defence of national sovereignty and national development (Kay 1982). In June 1969, Agrarian Reform Decree No. 17716 came into effect, the rationale for which performed both ‘economic’ (accu­ mulation) and, perhaps more importantly, ‘political’ (legitimacy) functions. With respect to the first, the primary objective was to expand the agricultural marketable surplus for rapidly growing urban centres in addition to widening the internal market for as yet incipient domestic industry. This expanded marketable surplus could also be used as the essential means of transferring capital from the insulated, highland agricultural sector into the modern, industrial sectors of the economy (Handelman 1981). Agrarian reform was expected to create rural employment and attenuate migration to Lima and other major urban centres. In all this, the landed oligarchy and the latifundia system was seen as a major impediment to national industrialization and modernization, and its destruction was seen, therefore, as an essential pre­ requisite to the success of the military’s objectives. The military government, in line with these objectives, reinforced the pre-existing ISI strategy and, moreover, assigned a new urgency and directorial role to the state in foment­ ing national development. With respect to the ‘political’, or legitimacy, func­ tions of the reform, these perhaps were the priority for the military regime which took the view that, without reform, national political tranquillity would always be threatened by the latent potential for rural revolution. One of the principal aims of the agrarian reform, therefore, was the incorporation of the peasantry into the political system under the tutelage of the state, widening the social base and thereby legitimizing its rule (Valderrama 1978; Kay 1982). Thus, while the motivation of the military regime was anti-oli­ garchical, it was most definitely not socialist. While the largest haciendas and

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plantations were to be expropriated, the regime envisaged an important role in the new rural order for the middle-sized farmer, at least outside those parts of the reform sector that were to be collectivized. While the latter were anticipated to have a key role in increasing agricultural efficiency and pro­ ductivity (aims that were not to be realized, especially in the Sierra), the former were designed to stabilize and de-radicalize the reform process politi­ cally by fostering the ‘petty bourgeois’ consciousness of the commercial small family farm. The formation of middle-sized farms occurred initially primarily outside the reform sector, as hacendados pre-empted appropriation by selling land to former tenants, with subsequent peasant differentiation favouring the upper peasantry (de Janvry 1981). Even the collectives, however, proved to be dysfunctional in the context of unfavourable national economic policies for agriculture (low investment, low prices, cheap food imports), which led to individualized production strategies among the peasantry, and to a process of further differentiation favouring the consolidation of a new class of upper peasantry (the policy of ‘farmer road’ reform and trends towards differentia­ tion represent, respectively, Transition Types 4 and 1 in our typology) (Kay 1982). The agrarian reform may be said, then, to represent something of a hybrid between the ‘farmer road’ and ‘state collective’ road to capitalism. For a period of some two years following the promulgation of the reform decree, official land expropriations were confined largely to the Coast. Here, reform via expropriation was largely complete by mid-1971 and, thereafter, such activity would be concentrated overwhelmingly in the Sierra (Handel­ man 1981). In the latter, reform activity had to date been confined to the departments of Cusco, Junín, and Pasco, the areas of greatest peasant mobi­ lization, and had consisted principally of the transferral of title to peasant cooperatives of land already held by the agrarian reform institute under the terms of the 1964 legislation, or of property in de facto control of peasants as a result of hacienda invasions. Outside these areas, however, agrarian reform was very slow to get started in part because of the sheer complexity and financial cost of expropriation and adjudication (the transfer of title to the new owner), a process that, typically, could take about two years to complete. Hacendados, however, anticipating expropriation, used this time lapse to decapitalize their estates, to divide up land between relatives, or to sell the land to wealthier tenants, as indicated above (de Janvry 1981; Handelman 1981). Much to the frustration of the majority middle and lower peasantry, the ser­ rano hacendados were largely successful during the first two years of the reform in slowing down the pace of land expropriation. Receiving encour­ agement from the Ministry of Agriculture, many hacendados sold parts of their estates to better off peasants at prices that were more favourable to the former (and not to the latter) than those obtaining under the terms of the reform law. By 1973, the magnitude of rural discontent had grown both in terms of geographical extent and the intensity of protest. In 1974, peasant militancy had reached fever pitch in the province of Andahuaylas in the department of

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Apurímac, an area dominated by large haciendas but as yet virtually untou­ ched by the agrarian reform. As of mid-1973, only four of the provinces 130 haciendas had been expropriated, a period during which hacendados actively de-capitalized their estates and/or sold of parcels of land to wealthier tenants. Frustrated by a reform which appeared never to arrive, in July 1974 militant campesinos occupied a local hacienda, an action that was swiftly followed by further land invasions until sixty-eight estates had been seized across Anda­ huaylas (Handelman 1981). These actions, and uprisings by campesinos in other departments such as Piura, obliged the government to undertake expropriations at a higher rate than before such that, in many ways, 1974 marked the apex of the radicalization of Peru’s land reform. While the Velasco government was overthrown by the more conservative military regime of General Francisco Morales Bermúdez, the events of 1974 nonetheless generated an inexorable momentum towards the completion of land redis­ tribution, a momentum the new government did not attempt to impede. As a result of the agrarian reform, about half of the twenty-one million hectares of agricultural land (arable and pasture) in the Coast and Sierra were expropriated from hacendados and adjudicated to the peasantry. Another three million hectares was already in the hands of small farmers (under twenty hectares) before the reform, while officially recognized peasant com­ munities, which had controlled about 6.6 million hectares before the reform, were adjudicated some 900,000 hectares more through the redistributive pro­ cess. One and a half to two million hectares (less than ten per cent of all land) remained in medium-sized haciendas (20–150 hectares), while none remained in the huge latifundia that had once dominated the Peruvian land tenure system. In short, about forty per cent of the national (agricultural) land area had been adjudicated to thirty-five per cent of agrarian families (Matos Mar and Mejía 1980; Handelman 1981; Kay 1982). The majority of the expro­ priated coastal estates were transformed into cooperatives, known as CAPs (Agricultural Production Cooperatives), where the land was intended to be utilized as a single production unit and CAP members were to be paid workers (proletarians, as most had been on the more modern plantations before the reform). The beneficiaries of the reform within the CAPs were thus the plantation’s workers rather than neighbouring villagers or independent smallholders who may have harboured hopes of gaining estate land through redistribution. In the Sierra, by contrast, while some CAPs were formed, the majority of expropriated land was converted into units known as SAIS (Agricultural Society for Social Interest). The SAIS were intended to reconcile the oftenconflicting demands for land of the former hacienda feudatarios, on the one hand, and the surrounding comunitarios, on the other. As many as thirty adjacent peasant communities might be joined with the former feudatarios of one or more haciendas to constitute a SAIS. The rationale behind the creation of CAPs and SAIS was the preservation of haciendas as productive units, avoiding thereby their fragmentation into smallholdings, which the

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government considered would be less productive (Kay 1982). The original intention was to transform some eighty per cent of agrarian reform land into CAPs/SAIS, with the remaining twenty per cent to be transferred to peasant communities, ‘peasant groups’ (groups of smallholders who joined forces as a cooperative in order to receive agrarian reform lands), or, in a small number of cases, to individual smallholders. While the proportion of land ultimately devoted to CAPs/SAIS was somewhat smaller than originally intended, the government nonetheless had a clear preference for the retention of large pro­ duction units in the form of cooperatives of some kind (Kay 1982; Assies 1987). Despite this, the degree of cooperative farming was in reality far less than official data would suggest. Thus, Handelman (1981) and Kay (1982), following Caballero (1980, 1981), demonstrate that most of the SAIS (although not most of the mainly coastal CAPs), while technically classified as cooperatives, continued in fact to farm their land on an individual family basis. This was particularly true in the Sierra where the SAIS campesinos seemed determined to have their own land such that, in total, some two-thirds of SAIS and CAP lands, largely in the highlands, actually comprised indivi­ dual plots (Caballero 1980, 1981). As the surplus from CAPs/SAIS was initi­ ally small (and continued to be so), beneficiaries preferred to work on their individual plots and maintain private pasture rights; the small size of the surplus did not permit wage increases large enough to entice beneficiaries to relinquish their former tenancies and pasture rights and develop the collective enterprise; this neglect of the collective then conspired to keep the surplus low, engendering a vicious circle that could have been broken only by state action to invest major capital resources into developing the productivity of the central enterprise, and to render more favourable the terms of trade between agriculture and the rest of the economy. Since neither of these actions occurred, the process of re-affirmation of individual family plots combined with encroachment on the central enterprise became dominant, and effectively subverted the collective by a de facto individual appropriation of its resources (Kay 1982). By the close of 1978, the redistribution of land was all but complete. Ninety-four per cent of the 9.5 million hectares scheduled for expropriation had been expropriated; eighty-three per cent of the final total had been adju­ dicated to the peasantry; and eighty-seven per cent of the planned bene­ ficiaries had received their land (Handelman 1981). Thus, unlike other Latin American agrarian reform programmes that were approximately con­ temporaneous with it (Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela), the Peruvian reform was the only one to succeed in eradicating the hacienda system from its territory. Despite this far-reaching redistribution of latifundia, however, the agrarian reform programme failed to fulfil the hopes of the majority of the peasantry, and deep discontent continued among many campesinos. Thus, many peasants failed to receive any land at all, and only around thirty per cent of the agrarian population benefitted directly from land redistribution. Moreover, this estimate is exaggerated both because many families did not

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receive enough land to satisfy the government’s own minimum subsistence criteria, and because many of the 61,000 families listed as SAIS beneficiaries were members of organized peasant communities (comuneros). They thus shared in SAIS decision-making and in the profits of the central enterprise (such as they were), but received no land. Caballero (1980, 1981) estimates that only forty-five per cent of peasant families which required land actually received it. It is, therefore, one of the great contradictions and paradoxes of the agrar­ ian reform that a programme designed to defuse latent rural unrest largely excluded and frustrated the most potentially explosive fraction of the pea­ santry, the very fraction that, politically, forced the state to enact the reform – that is, the comuneros. During the massive peasant mobilization of the 1960s involving land invasions and sindicato demonstrations, it was the indepen­ dent, and largely indigenous, comuneros of the comunidades that comprised the core of the movement, with the hacienda feudatarios remaining more iso­ lated and disorganized (Handelman 1975, 1981). The response of the military regime in 1969 with its reform decree was, in part, a response, albeit belated, to that unrest. This political rationale for reform was then subordinated to the supposed economic rationality of not breaking up the haciendas as productive units in the belief that agricultural output would decline if the adjoining communities were afforded the use of the now cooperative central enterprise. The comunidades were thus effectively excluded from the benefits of redis­ tribution, such that they gained only marginally useful participation in the SAIS and only limited land grants – less than eleven per cent of the area redistributed (Handelman 1981). Indeed, the land of many comunidades which had been subject to hacienda encroachment over many years, was now incorporated into the new reform cooperatives, with the result that commu­ nities were now largely excluded from using it. It was perhaps predictable then that, in the years following 1976, an increasing number of communities felt compelled to invade co-op lands. From 1977, a new wave of land invasions engulfed the Sierra, threatening the demise of the SAIS (Kay 1982). While such land invasions were often quelled violently, in some cases the govern­ ment implemented a process of redimensionamiento, the restructuring the reformed enterprise by relocating boundaries. This often entailed the adjudi­ cation of some of the less productive land to the most militant peasant com­ munities in an attempt to mollify them. These shortcomings were compounded by national food policies that were inimical to peasant production and favoured the importation of cheap food to placate urban consumers and exert downward pressure on the cost of urban labour as a subsidy to national industry. In this way, the military government continued its ISI strategy, discriminating against the domestic agricultural sector and favouring agricultural imports. Food subsidies introduced in 1973 to prevent increases in food prices were directed overwhelmingly to imported food products, undermining the viability of domestic food staple production. Agrarian reform itself could do little to counteract these adverse economic

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policies. Furthermore, the type of agrarian reform implemented by the mili­ tary regime failed to capitalize on the benefits that a reform programme might have generated for agricultural production and rural employment more generally. Thus, the statist co-operativist type of reform favoured by the mili­ tary regime was generally unsuccessful in terms of significantly increasing production, creating more employment, or achieving higher incomes for the majority of peasants. Its lack of success in these areas served to fuel further conflict. The regime’s vision for agro-industrial, capital-intensive estates, based on economies of scale, could be realized only on the sugar plantations of the coast, and was wholly inappropriate for the small and fragmented croplands of the Sierra. Small and family farm-based agriculture was much more appropriate in such circumstances, and the award of land to tenants and peasant communities would have removed a major source of rural conflict. As it was, the military’s model of large-scale and co-operative agriculture suc­ ceeded only in generating substantial opposition from sectors of the pea­ santry, thereby preventing its full implementation (Kay 1982). Few peasant communities were restructured due to the hostility of comuneros to the pro­ spect of losing their autonomy through integration into the state co-operative model (Caballero 1980). The ability of the peasantry to resist the agrarian reform model in the Sierra (and to organize strikes on the coastal sugar plantations), suggests strongly that the government failed to fulfil its political objective of co-opting subaltern resistance through agrarian reform (McClintock 2001). Indeed, it would seem that the failure to mobilize the peasantry (and, to a lesser extent, coastal plantation proletariat) around the government’s goal of co-oper­ ativism was one of the major flaws of the agrarian reform programme. As Kay (1982: 164) suggests, ‘in the absence of genuine mass participation, the collective co-operative model had to be imposed from above and was per­ ceived as a constraint by the very people it was supposed to benefit’. While the reform was largely successful in eradicating the hacienda system, it failed by-and-large to stimulate production, eradicate rural poverty, or solve the land problem of the peasant communities (Smith 1989). While these fail­ ings reflected in part the inappropriateness of attempting to subordinate family-based production to the strictures of collective co-operativism, they reflected, equally, the adverse economic policies pursued by the military regime, in which resources from agriculture were transferred to other sectors of the economy. Production for the (national) market was thus encouraged, from which surplus would be transferred to industry, but under conditions in which that very market itself was depressed by the importation of competitive produce. Incomes from the collective co-operatives were thus depressed and peasants were reluctant to participate, since the resulting wages were poor. It was more rational under such circumstances to maximize production for auto-consumption on family plots, while selling any surplus (or cash crop) onto the market on an opportunistic basis. Had the regime not been obsessed with ISI strategy, it might have alleviated these contradictions by facilitating

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the transfer of resources into agriculture to enhance national self-sufficiency in food staples and ensuring eradication of land and food poverty among the peasantry. The Peruvian agrarian reform resulted from an admixture of economic/ accumulation and political/legitimation rationales, with perhaps the latter predominating. Marini (1972) argued that agrarian reforms are implemented principally for political reasons since they are implemented where the pea­ santry poses a threat to the existing order (feudalism or capitalism), with land redistribution purporting to dissipate this danger. Since the bourgeoisie in peripheral social formations is weak and incapable of withstanding peasant pressure, it seeks to ally with the latter to overturn the feudal oligarchy. While an agrarian reform along the ‘farmer’ road might serve the national bour­ geoisie’s interest through an expansion in the internal market, its political interests might nonetheless be threatened by the ensuing social upheaval which may be difficult to contain within the parameters of ‘reformism’. Marini’s position appears to be vindicated, at least in part, by the response of the Belaúnde government to peasant unrest through the redistribution of some land in precisely those areas where conflicts were most threatening. The bourgeoisie, however, lacked the strength to overturn the oligarchy and was simultaneously fearful of unleashing peasant mobilization as a force behind agrarian reform. Given this impasse, it fell to the military government to carry forward the agrarian reform, first by expropriating the coastal planta­ tions in order primarily to weaken the oligarchy politically, then by under­ taking, or committing to, redistributive reform without prior mobilization of the peasantry in order, it was hoped, to pre-empt social upheaval. While the military helped to foment the development of capitalist relations of produc­ tion through the destruction of the semi-feudal hacienda system, it failed to co-opt the peasantry politically (in contrast to Mexico, for example) or to satisfy the latter’s demands for land and appropriate investment in produc­ tion. The SAIS largely failed because of lack of investment and adverse national food policy, the peasantry was reluctant to commit to such collective co-operative ventures because of this poor economic performance, and was thus left by the regime to undergo a progressive process of differentiation that favoured wealthier peasants. The majority of the peasantry saw its demands for more land go unanswered, and set the scene for further unrest as land reform fell off the agenda with the advent of neoliberalism during the 1980s. Where does the Peruvian agrarian reform stand in our typology of transi­ tions? Kay (1982) suggests that the Peruvian case is notable for the multi­ plicity of interacting transitions it represents, in which, unlike other transitions where either the ‘Junker’ or ‘farmer’ roads predominated, no one path seems very applicable. Rather, ‘it is the complex combination of paths of transition which makes up Peru’s specificity’ (Kay 1982: 166). With respect to the coastal sugar plantation collectives and the Sierra livestock collectives, it may be said that the agrarian reform ushered in a new form of transition to agrarian capitalism: the ‘State capitalist road’ (Kay 1982). Elsewhere, the

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process of peasant differentiation within the reform sector and the sale of land outside the reform sector provoked the appearance of a large number of middle-sized, commercial farms through subdivision of the haciendas (Tran­ sition Types 1 and 4). Thus, ‘the agrarian reform had the effect of promoting capitalism along a farmer road under strong dependency of the state, while the vast majority of agricultural producers are concentrated on plots of land of less than five hectares’ (de Janvry 1981: 139), with the result that Peruvian peasants became increasingly semi-proletarianized and transformed into a labour reserve (Transition Type 3). The agrarian reform, as noted, resolved neither the food crisis nor the country’s massive rural poverty. The serious crisis in Peru’s balance of payments, exacerbated considerably by the mili­ tary’s expenditure on arms, led to fiscal measures to stimulate exports, while domestic food prices were suppressed in response to massive urban popular pressure. A reallocation of land in the reform and capitalist sectors to the production of agro-exports was induced, dependence on food imports increased, and a massive crisis in peasant production was created (Caballero 1977; de Janvry 1981). Caballero (1977) indicates that the land reform accel­ erated social differentiation within the peasantry and the process of semiproletarianization and landlessness. The decrease in employment opportu­ nities on the reform co-operatives and on the divided estates implied a dete­ rioration in the status of the 700,000 families without land, together with the great majority of poor peasants. Given that the agrarian reform was initiated ‘from above’ rather than ‘from below’, and the military regimes failed by and large to incorporate the pea­ santry into their project, especially after 1975, agrarian policy became parti­ cularly susceptible to changes in government economic orientation. As agricultural output levels continued to decline in the years following the reform, pressure mounted to change the model, such that, from 1980, the agrarian reform was abandoned and the process of dividing up the reform cooperatives was initiated (Crabtree 2003). The organizational efforts of the Velasco regime had included the attempted co-optation of the peasant move­ ment within the state-corporatist institutions, in particular SINAMOS (Sistema Nacional de Movilización Social) (Cant 2021). SINAMOS was designed to link vertically rural and urban popular mobilization to the state (Mallon 1992, 1995; Apel 1996; Rice 2012) and by structuring group representation and regulating official channels for demand making, the state corporativism of the Velasco era attempted to assimilate indigenous peoples, who comprised the majority in the Sierra, into the dominant mestizo culture by reconstituting them as national peasants. Symptomatically, Velasco decreed that the date of 24th June, formerly known as the ‘Day of the Indian’, would henceforth be nominated the ‘Day of the Peasant’ to underline the incorporation (or intended incorporation) of the rural masses into the national polity (García and Lucero 2004; Rice 2012). The Law of Native Communities of 1974 was also promulgated by the Velasco regime, establishing the legal existence and status of indigenous groups but only with respect to the Amazonian selva (Rice 2012).

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This period of partial peasant incorporation concluded with the assump­ tion of power by the more conservative Bermúdez regime, and this failure of thoroughgoing incorporation (in contrast to the example of Mexico under the PRI) afforded ample opportunity for the emergence of an array of organiza­ tions, each purporting to speak for rural or sectoral interests with the aim of influencing or subverting state actions and policies (Crabtree 2003). Some organizations were quasi-official, such as the Confederación Nacional Agraria (CNA), established by the Velasco government to develop and consolidate support for the military regime among the new cooperatives. Others, such as the Confederación Campesina del Perú (CCP), adopted a critical stance in relation to the agrarian reform and sought to radicalize the process in order to stimulate deeper agrarian transformation. The CCP was strongly linked to some of the more radical parties which, in 1980, entered into coalition to become the United Left (Izquierda Unida) (Crabtree 2003). Part of this com­ prised the Maoist Revolutionary Vanguard (Vanguardia Revolucionaria) which took control of the CCP during the late 1970s (Roberts 1998). By 1984, the Unified Mariateguista Party (Partido Unido Mariateguista), constituted through the merger of diverse left-wing groups including the Revolutionary Vanguard, had come to dominate the CCP, and this, throughout the 1980s, became the principal ally of highland peasant organizations through its grassroots work (Van Cott 2005).

Post-Reform, Neoliberalism, and Neo-Extractivism The new, post-military, Belaúnde regime of the early 1980s abandoned sup­ port for agrarian reform with its support for incipient neoliberal policies and reduction in the role of the state in agriculture, and this served to circum­ scribe the influence of some of these organizations, especially the quasi-official CAN (Crabtree 2003). The subsequent APRA regime of Alan García (1985– 1990) adopted a rhetoric of support for peasant agriculture, but in practice did little to privilege relations with representative organizations such as the CNA or the CCP, and only temporarily relieved the impacts of IMF stipu­ lated neoliberalism. The return to neoliberal stabilization policies in the late 1980s induced a devastating impact on agricultural prices and rural incomes, while, simultaneously, rural lobbies and pressure groups underwent a diminution in their capacity to influence government policy. The hyperinfla­ tion and deep recession of this period saw a severe reduction in the capacity of all popular organizations to mobilize and a commensurate decline in the influence of the parties to which they were affiliated (Crabtree 2003). Under such circumstances, these parties and organizations found themselves debili­ tated and unable to resist the draconian neoliberal policies unleashed by the regime of Alberto Fujimori in 1990 which, consequently, met with remark­ ably little coordinated opposition (Crabtree and Thomas 1998). Rural organizations, particularly those in the Sierra, came to be further debilitated by the influence of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) and, to a

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lesser extent, the Movimiento Revolucionario Túpac Amaru (MRTA) during the course of the 1980s. Sendero was originally a splinter group from the Vanguardia Revolucionaria with its origins in the department of Ayacucho, and launched its armed struggle in 1980 to coincide with the presidential elections (from which Belaúnde emerged as president). It took advantage of the weakness of state institutions in the Sierra to pursue armed struggle against the state, and, by the late 1980s, had spread sufficiently to constitute a considerable threat to the stability of the García regime (Crabtree 2003). Inter alia, the particularly poor performance of the agrarian reform in Ayacucho seems to have been a significant factor in the rise of Sendero, with impacts of the reform being more limited here than in almost any other part of the country (McClintock 2001). The impacts of the reform were slight here pri­ marily because there were very few prosperous estates in the department and the number of haciendas that could be transformed into viable peasant coop­ eratives was small. Those falling into this category had been more or less expropriated and restructured by 1976, but the number was smaller in Aya­ cucho than anywhere else in the Sierra. Additionally, the number of bene­ ficiaries was small, representing less than ten per cent of the rural population (ibid.). While the economic impact of the agrarian reform was slight, its political repercussions were significant, however. The traditional hacendados had been able to maintain political hegemony in the region and to control access to much of the countryside, effectively excluding political organizers of the left. The reform, however, induced the hacendados and their staff to leave the area, and with their departure the semi-feudal relations imposed on feu­ datarios and peasant communities came to an end. As a consequence, many peasants felt autonomous for the first time and, from a potential resistance perspective, their ‘tactical mobility’ as Wolf (1973) termed it, was con­ siderably increased. The central determinant of the rise of Sendero Luminoso appears, as inti­ mated, to have been persistent poverty as the outcome of land reform that largely failed to alleviate the desperate conditions of the majority of the pea­ santry in the southern Peruvian Andes, centred on Ayacucho. The relation­ ship between regions of abysmal poverty and those of guerrilla popularity and strength was closer in Peru than in any other Latin American state, while the departments which saw the greatest concentration of activity and support for Sendero (Ayacucho, Apurímac, and Huancavelica) were more deprived in respect of almost all criteria than any others in the country. During the 1970s and 1980s, income, in absolute terms, declined for the peasant families of these departments, while even the subsistence basis of the peasantry was threatened by the late 1970s (McClintock 2001). Other, adjacent departments with less severe indices of poverty offered little support to Sendero. Poverty coincided with increased politicization during the 1960s and 70s, whereby education expanded at every level in the Sierra during these decades. As a consequence, peasants, students, and teachers became increasingly aware of the huge economic and social inequalities in Peru, together with the causes of

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those inequalities and the persistent abuse and neglect of the highlands par­ ticularly in development policy. In departments such as Cusco and Puno, leftist organizations with links to nationwide movements and parties secured the affiliation of the peasantry, and the latter became increasingly disinclined to lend support to groups, such as Sendero, which espoused violence in pursuit of their ends. In Ayacucho, however, Sendero appeared to secure an almost complete political monopoly in the 1970s, largely due to the political acuity of their leader Abimael Guzmán in his recruitment of support initially within the University of Aya­ cucho, where he was a professor of philosophy. Having galvanized cadres among students at the university, he and members of Sendero became, to their credit, more dedicated to grassroots activities in remote areas than any other Peruvian guerrilla group. Additionally, Sendero went to great lengths to pro­ tect its cadres, developing a clandestine cell structure that was extremely dif­ ficult for the state counter-insurgency forces to infiltrate (McClintock 2001). Sadly, with the advent of the state’s determined counter-insurgency offensive of 1983, Sendero’s tactics became increasingly fanatical and violent, involving the assassination of any member of opposing organizations whether of the left or right. ‘Apparently, Sendero refused to accept the fact that most citizens were now more afraid for their lives than they were eager for revolution’ (McClintock 2001: 96). Despite attempts to mitigate the impacts of these violent tactics through public-relations initiatives such as the publication of a newspaper (El Diario), Sendero in fact reinforced its recourse to terror throughout the 1980s in pursuit of its goals. As a result, many young revolu­ tionaries increasingly eschewed Sendero in favour of other, less violent groups, such as the MRTA. Sendero’s frontal assault on the local institutions of the state, in addition to that on parties and other grassroots organizations that dared to oppose it, generated seriously deleterious effects on autonomous serrano peasant initia­ tives. These were compounded by the militarization of much of the country during the 1980s, generating a sorry legacy of killings, intimidation, and human rights abuses in which peasant communities were caught in the cross­ fire between the military and Sendero (Crabtree 2003). Autonomous peasant protest became well-nigh impossible where dissent was perceived by the mili­ tary to indicate support for Sendero, while Sendero itself saw autonomy as a direct affront to its influence. Defence, in fact, became a priority for many communities, this need being met, at the behest of the military, by the for­ mation of rondas campesinas, or peasant militias. In the core areas of Sendero activity (Ayacucho, Apurímac, and Huancavelica), the severe disruption to the rural economy and the mass flight of peasants to the relative safety of urban centres, generated a major adverse impact on rural organizations of all types (Crabtree 2003). The regime of Alan García was replaced by that of the ‘outsider’ Alberto Fujimori in 1990. By this time, the sources of potential rural opposition to what turned out to be Fujimori’s radical neoliberal programme had become

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severely debilitated. Such opposition as existed was weakened still further by the policies adopted by the new regime (Crabtree 2003). Firstly, Fujimori pursued a programme of parcelación, the atomization of land ownership in much of rural Peru, rendering it increasingly difficult for peasants to organize themselves on a collective basis. This entailed the further and systematic dis­ mantling of the associative structures put in place by the agrarian reform, creating a large number of minifundistas, many of whom eked out a living on plots at the very margins of economic viability. Secondly, the state withdrew many of the interventionist and supportive mechanisms such as credit provi­ sion, extension and marketing support that had formerly been characteristic, even if inadequate. This both hit peasant production hard and reduced the importance of collective action in relation to many activities. Overall, the ministry of agriculture now played a much-reduced role in rural areas, further limiting opportunities for negotiation between producers and the state. Thirdly, Fujimori succeeded in forging a new, but distinctly neoliberal, rela­ tionship with the peasantry, particularly in the Sierra. This comprised the diversion of large sums of public money into poverty relief programmes which, by means of patronage and clientelism, pre-empted open opposition to government neoliberal policies. Aware that the flow of state funding was contingent on their support for the regime, local officials became increasingly subordinated to the centre, a process exacerbated by the demise of the estab­ lished political parties. In this way, the expansion of social spending, espe­ cially in the last six years of the Fujimori regime (1994–2000), both reinforced control from the centre at the expense of alternative interest representation (Rice 2012), and mitigated the negative impacts of neoliberal policies on the peasantry, while doing nothing, of course, to address the structural contra­ dictions that gave rise to rural poverty and marginalization. With the intentionally reduced influence of the agriculture ministry, the principal state agencies implementing these social welfare policies were the ministries of health and education, together with a newly created ministry of the presidency, the most important programme within which was the Fondo de Compensación Social (Foncodes or The Social Compensation Fund). Foncodes was complemented by PRONAA (Programa Nacional de Asistencia Alimentaria or the National Food Assistance Programme, a subsidized food programme for the poor) and other schemes, established the direct presence of the central state in rural areas, both to manage the symptoms of peasant poverty and to legitimize Fujimori’s government (Crabtree 2003). This strat­ egy of containment conforms to a conservative mode of response to protest in our typology presented in Chapter 2. In contrast to a similar mode of response in Bolivia at the same time in the form of the programme of Parti­ cipación Popular (see case study of Bolivia), Fujimori sought to enhance centralized control rather than seeking to devolve power to local levels. This key difference between Peru and Bolivia may be accounted for, at least in part, by strength of ethnically defined, rather than class-defined, interest representation in the latter, while, in the case of the former, non-class-based

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interest representation was much weaker, such that the immanent basis for anti-neoliberal resistance along peasant (rather than indigenous) lines remained unabated (Rice 2012). Overall, Fujimori’s neoliberal policies had the greatest adverse impact upon those agricultural producers whose enterprises were geared predominantly, or entirely, towards supplying the market, but which were integrated into it on the least preferential terms. Those peasants whose livelihoods were largely subsistence-based probably suffered least since they were insulated from the fall in food prices and the impacts of increased imports, while also being less exposed to the withdrawal of subsidized credit and marketing supports quite simply because they had never been prior recipients. This parallels trends elsewhere in Latin America, where the impossibility of generating decent income through agricultural sales, and the lack of consistent alternative employment, have led to a refocus on self-subsistence, at least for those who have access to land. Thus, small-scale producers dependent on the market and competing directly with (subsidized) imports were most at risk of failure. Under such circumstances, a return to subsistence agriculture emerged as an alternative strategy, frequently in combination with entry into the informal economy. The neoliberal policies of the Fujimori decade indeed saw a truly massive failure of small-scale, market-oriented agricultural enterprises (Crab­ tree 2003). The collapse of the Fujimori regime in 2000 amidst a corruption scandal afforded an opportunity for opposition movements to regroup and mobilize against further reforms (Burt 2000; Arce 2008; Rice 2012). Given that orga­ nized labour organizations had been decimated by Fujimori’s neoliberal poli­ cies, the vacuum was filled by non-institutionalized forms of social mobilization. Such mobilization, however, lacked consistency and coordina­ tion, comprising a ‘barrage of isolated but intense conflicts’ (Degregori 2008: 274) against the new regime of Alejandro Toledo (2001–2006), tending to confront local, district, or provincial authorities rather than the national government. As Arce suggests, collective action in neoliberal Peru has become increasingly ‘geographically segmented or territorialized’ (Arce 2008: 37). Protests during the Toledo regime focused on the continuing programme of neoliberal privatization, exemplified by the ‘Arequipazo’ in 2002, compris­ ing a violent uprising in the town of Arequipa against proposals to sell off two public utility providers. While the protests did succeed in postponing the pri­ vatization, their localization did little to stem the more general tide of neoli­ beralization. The succeeding regime of Alan García (his second term) in 2006 saw a reinforcement of the programme of primary resource extractivism undertaken by transnational capital primarily to supply the imperium and sub-imperium (China) (Petras and Veltmeyer 2014; Veltmeyer and Petras 2014). In this context, protest, while remaining a feature of the Sierra but now refocused around open-cast mining, became increasingly concentrated in the Oriente or selva, the centre of oil drilling, mining, and logging on lands occupied by ‘tribal’ indigenous people. Thus, violent confrontations between

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indigenous people and government security forces occurred in 2009 in the town of Bagua in the northern Peruvian Amazon over plans to allow foreign corporations to open vast tracts of indigenous territory to extractivism. The confrontation led to the deaths of twenty-two civilians and nine police officers (Rice 2012), leading to the resignation of the Prime Minister, but not to any change in government policy. In response, indigenous groups vowed to con­ tinue the protests until Congress revoked the legislative decrees issued by Alan García promoting foreign direct investment in the region (Rice 2012). Sadly, such anti-neoliberal and anti-extractive protests in Peru failed in this objective due to their largely isolated and reactionary character, so that, while opposi­ tion groups (and especially indigenous groups in the Oriente) became increasingly radicalized, none attained the power and integrative capacity to coordinate wider popular mobilizations. This stands in marked contrast to the situation in Bolivia and Ecuador (see above) where indigenous organizations became more influential, have been able to achieve greater coordination (especially in the case of Ecuador), and have demonstrated the strength that comes from combining, rather than dichotomizing, ethnic and class-based issues and identities. That this has failed largely to happen in Peru is attributable in considerable degree to the thoroughness of the agrarian reform era in re-defining indigenous rural pro­ ducers as ‘peasants’ and in denigrating indigeneity as something to be asso­ ciated with backwardness and marginalization. This was compounded by the counter-insurgency war against Sendero Luminoso which effectively closed off political associational space within which alternative organizations could develop, especially in the Sierra. While Sendero and the MRTA did organize indigenous communities and incorporated indigenous symbols into their rhetoric, they nonetheless elevated class at the expense of ethnic identities, rather than seeking a fruitful synergy between the two (Albó 2004) – in marked contrast, perhaps ironically, to the thinking of Tupac Amaru and the influential writings of the Peruvian Marxian theorist José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930), who in fact coined the phrase Sendero Luminoso al Futuro, the eponymous basis of the Shining Path movement (Mariátegui 2007). Addi­ tionally, as we have seen, Sendero pursued the deliberate and violent elim­ ination of trade unionists, community organizers, and indigenous and peasant leaders, with the intention of destroying any independent associations and networks that might challenge its authority (Yashar 2005). Thus, while synergies between class- and ethnically based opposition proved to be effective in ousting neoliberal regimes in Bolivia and Ecuador in the first decade of the new millennium, no such fusion has been apparent in Peru. Only the ‘tribal’ peoples of the Oriente are happy to self-identify as ‘indigenous’ while, in marked contrast, ethnic identification continues to be eschewed in the Sierra and the Coast (Rice 2012). Many peasant organizers find the term ‘indigenous’, or any appeal to ethnic identities, to be ‘racist’ and ‘offensive’ and much prefer to self-identify as campesinos. Thus, the decline in class-based collective action in rural Peru has not been compensated for by

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the politicization of indigenous identities. It would be a mistake, nonetheless, to suggest that Peru lacks indigenous movements, although, until quite recently, these have been concentrated largely in the ‘tribal’ Oriente where neither national leftist parties nor Sendero ever sustained a real presence. Lowland indigenous groups began to mobilize on the basis of their indigen­ ous identity as an organizational tool in defence of their territories in the late 1960s in response to the state’s colonization programmes in the Oriente (Yashar 2005). In 1969, the Amuesha peoples, with support from academics, missionaries, and NGOs, were the first to form their own ethnic federation, while numerous other groups, including the Ashaninkas, Shipibo-Conibos, and Aguaruna-Huambisos, followed this example shortly afterwards (Van Cott 2005). In 1979, AIDESEP (the Interethnic Association for the Develop­ ment of the Peruvian Amazon) was formed as the regional umbrella organi­ zation of the indigenous movement in the selva (Rice 2012). More recently, however, there have been growing attempts to engender ethnic identification among the predominantly Kichwa (Quechua) speaking populations of the Sierra in the form of a pan-indigenous movement in emu­ lation of CONAIE in Ecuador. In this way, COPPIP (the Permanent Coor­ dinator of the Indigenous Peoples of Peru) was constituted in 1997 as an organizational space to promote the discussion of indigenous issues and stra­ tegies (García and Lucero 2004; Van Cott 2005). Two main bodies comprise COPPIP, namely, AIDESEP and CONACAMI (Coordinadora Nacional de Comunidades Afectadas por la Minería). Although COPPIP has yet to attain the status of a confederation comparable to that of CONAIE, it has attracted a great deal of domestic and international attention over the last twenty years. According to its president Miguel Palacín and other organizers, the key to the success of the indigenous movement in Peru is to construct a collective iden­ tity that does not undermine existing ones, the objective being to convince all social movements to join the indigenous struggle (Rice 2012). One of the bestorganized and active social movements in Peru is the anti-mining coalition led by CONACAMI, constituted in 1999 to coordinate opposition by pea­ sant/indigenous communities affected adversely by mining operations and other extractive activities (Van Cott 2005). While indigenous identity and rights were not initially central to CONACAMI’s mandate (even though its membership was largely Kichwa-speaking), the organization subsequently adopted an ethnicist discourse, in part exploiting the increasing international and postcolonial turn to indigenous rights conventions. CONACAMI com­ prises the main indigenous organization in the Sierra, and the organizational counterpart of AIDESEP in the Oriente (García 2005; Rice 2012). The anti-mining movement has emerged in response to the massive expan­ sion of ‘neo-extractive’, transnational mining operations initiated by the Fujimori regime (De Echave 2009), compounded by Fujimori’s constitutional reform of 1993 that removed provisions for the protection of indigenous lands and paved the way for intensified mining activity within these territories (García 2005). As indicated earlier, Fujimori laid the foundations for the

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exploitation by transnational capital of cheap and socially unprotected labour by his systematic repression of workers’ rights and attacks on trades unions, thereby establishing the state legal and regulatory framework for imperial and Chinese capital to extract minerals at least cost (Lust 2014). Such a favourable framework, together with the rising price and demand for minerals in the imperium and sub-imperium and the effective defeat of Sendero Luminoso in the 1990s, account for the massive influx of transnational capital into the Peruvian mining sector (De Echave 2009). In 2011, the nationalist and former army captain Ollanta Humala replaced Alan García as President. Humala was supported by a spectrum of progressive and left-wing organizations, and drew support from a large popular base in rural Peru. Clearly drawing inspiration from Evo Morales in Bolivia, his election raised expectations for real change from these constituencies, comprising an end to neoliberal poli­ cies, and the prioritization of agricultural and rural development in preference to mining. According to Humala’s election programme, promulgated as La Gran Transformación (The Great Transformation), the state would, as in Bolivia, recuperate rather than nationalize its natural resources (water, land, forests, biodiversity, gas and minerals), thus bringing to an end transnational exploitation. ‘Once in power, Humala reversed his programme and embraced extractive capital as the panacea for Peruvian development’ (Lust 2014: 193). The Peruvian government thus transformed the fiscal contribution of extrac­ tive industries into the cornerstone of its social policies, deploying these funds to finance social and infrastructural projects in a manner not dissimilar to Bolivia and Ecuador. As in the case of the latter states, Humala wished to create an economic climate more favourable to medium and small-sized Per­ uvian companies, an aspiration that he nonetheless did not consider incom­ patible with the conclusion of a free-trade agreement with the USA, an effective death knell for nationally oriented capital. This uneasy alliance of neoliberal policies and ‘progressive’ reformism (that is, national-popular capitalism) lasted only a few months of the Humala regime, however. In December 2011, the government fell over the issue of how to manage the protests in the department of Cajamarca against the Conga Mining Project. Following the replacement of ‘progressive’ ministers and advisors by neo­ liberals, it became government policy to deploy outright repression as the ‘solution’ to protests related to extractivism (De Echave 2012). As in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador, the Humala government’s inclina­ tion to serve the interests of transnational mining capital was deployed to mitigate the impacts of extractivism through increased social welfare expen­ ditures (in other words, making poverty and precarity more bearable by recycling funds from the very extractivism underlying poverty and precarity). Thus, in the period 2010–2012, the public sector budget reserved for national government organization increased by ten per cent. The Ministry of Educa­ tion and the Ministry of Health saw significant budget increases, while Agri­ culture and Environmental Affairs saw theirs reduced, with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, responsible for the imposition of ‘law and order’ (in effect,

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internal repression) receiving an increase in budget (Lust 2014). In the face of protest, the modus operandi of the Humala regime became indistinguishable from its predecessors, that is, the declaration of a state of emergency in the area of persistent protest, the criminalization of protest, and the portrayal of social movement leaders as advocates of an ‘archaic’ ideology, one, in other words, that is progressive, left-wing, and ecologically sustainable (De Echave 2012; Lust 2014). Much protest in the neo-extractivist context, however, has assumed a localistic, ‘post-modern’ complexion, emphasizing indigeneity, community, and environmental concerns, rather than seeking to unify these as class-based issues within a wider subaltern counter-hegemonic struggle against capital and the capitalist state. These newly ‘reinvented’ ‘indigenous communities’ are not proving particularly effective in constraining capitalist extractivism, however, since their resistance is deliberately defensive, localistic, and focused upon specific ‘environmental’ issues. Here the presence of national and international NGOs is fairly pervasive, and while their presence has been important in initiating protest and disseminating greater awareness concerning the adverse ecological and social impacts of extractivism, they have nonetheless tended to exercise a restraining and reformist influence whenever social move­ ments exhibit any tendencies to radicalization. In their efforts to assist ‘commu­ nity members’ in adapting to the forces of capitalist development, rather than resisting them as social movements, NGOs play a significant role in deflecting subalterns away from a class analysis of these forces and in, consequently, encouraging demobilization of more comprehensive resistance (Lust 2014; Vel­ temeyer and Petras 2019). Thus, NGOs tend to employ a class collaborationist, or reformist, discourse, and emphasize a micro-project approach towards devel­ opment and change rather than the politics of subaltern class mobilization. Indeed, their primary preoccupation is for subalterns to eschew meaningful challenges to the structure and agencies of capitalist politico-economic power, and to seek improvements in their livelihood conditions within the parameters of such encompassing power. Thus, the cessation of mining concessions is not sought by NGOs, but, rather, the better management of extractive activities and the improved distribution of the proceeds among local people. It seems clear that current resistance can only succeed if it is transformed strategically and spatially: strategically into a struggle against capitalism and imperialism (Veltmeyer and Petras 2019; Tilzey 2020), and spatially from local and regional protest into generalized national struggle. It is a struggle that needs to be directed towards the social transformation of Peruvian society as ‘social relational change’ towards socially and ecologically respon­ sible common ownership and management of the means of production (Lust 2014; Tilzey 2018). The structural impediments to such an ambition are, needless to say, daunting. Firstly, some thirty years of neoliberalism has ato­ mized Peruvian society, materially and ideologically, to an unprecedented degree. Successful ‘entrepreneurialism’ and ‘petty capitalism’, such as that promulgated by well-known figures such Hernando de Soto, is now widely seen to be the only route out of marginalization and poverty, even though this

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path simply perpetuates and expands an already saturated informal sector, thereby generating greater market dependency and compromising further such autonomy as peasant/indigenous producers still possess. Secondly, the Peruvian bourgeoisie has a predominantly ‘comprador’ com­ plexion, comprises the hegemonic social class, is integrated fully with trans­ national and imperial capital, and has absolutely no interest in developing a ‘national’ character. Over the last three decades, it has both implemented large-scale privatization of state enterprises and property, and has been the driving force behind the free trade agreements that Peru has concluded with a number of, mainly imperial, countries. It is the principal defender and bene­ ficiary (domestically) of transnational extractive capital, having succeeded in evading an extra tax on the super-profits of mining capital. It is also the principal instigator of the repressive apparatus of the peripheral capitalist state in quelling opposition to neo-extractivism. Thirdly, the main left-wing organizations and political parties are either highly fragmented or have capitulated to the project of the Peruvian bourgeoisie. Thus, the ‘progressives’ who were forced out of the Humala government in 2011 decided to unify in preparation for the presidential elections in 2016. Yet, rather than questioning the foundations of the ‘develop­ ment model’, they proposed changes within the model as a reformism along the lines of Bolivia and Ecuador. Even such modest changes failed to secure popular support, however, and the Humala government, in 2016, was succeeded by a succession of explicitly neoliberal presidents most memorable for their embroil­ ment in a series of corruption scandals, and departure from office following impeachment proceedings (Lust 2014). Despite the unprecedentedly low reputation of the ‘political class’ in Peru, the current correlation of class forces makes the implementation of an alter­ native development model, even one of national-popular reformism, extre­ mely difficult. Neo-extractivism is envisaged to be the foundation stone of both neoliberal and reformist regimes, such that more radical, counter-hege­ monic struggles against imperial capital and the peripheral state assume an extraordinary importance in fomenting transformative change towards social and ecological sustainability. Although fervent anti-neoliberal sentiment is present in Peru, the fragmentation of opposition is undermining the capacity of any of the multiplicity of social groups to lead a broad-based national uprising against the orthodox development model. In contrast to Bolivia and Ecuador, indigenous groups remain relatively unimportant actors in Peru, such that ethnic identity still fails to resonate widely outside the selva. More­ over, and again in contrast to Bolivia and Ecuador, the articulation between indigenous and class interests has been weak, so that social actors have gen­ erally been unable to narrate a coherent ‘master frame’ of protest (Rice 2012). In June 2021, Pedro Castillo, a teacher and peasants’ son, narrowly won the presidency against the daughter of Alberto Fujimori, Keiko Fujimori. Cas­ tillo was a left-of-centre candidate whose proposed policies included, cen­ trally, the convocation of a constitutional referendum to decide whether the current constitution, adopted in 1993 under Fujimori and enshrining

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neoliberalism, should be redrafted. A proposed new constitution, eschewing the ‘prioritization of private interests over public interests, profit over life and dignity’, would: recognize and guarantee rights to health, education, food, housing, and internet access; guarantee the rights of indigenous peoples and Peru’s cultural diversity; redesign the state so as to ensure transparency and citizens’ participation; ensure a key role for the state in strategic planning to secure the precedence of public interest. Following the example of Bolivia and Ecuador, Castillo proposed to renegotiate contracts with extractive multi­ national companies so that more revenue would stay in the country and be available for the ‘compensatory state’. Castillo’s Perú Libre party also called for: a re-evaluation of agrarian reform; the expulsion of USAID and the closure of US military bases in the country; the withdrawal of Peru from the Lima Group of countries plotting regime change in Venezuela; a questioning of the role of the Organization of American States (the OAS, inter alia, endorsed the de facto coup that overthrew Evo Morales in Bolivia and tends to do the bidding of the USA) and a strengthening, as a counterweight, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) (Benjamin and Flores 2021). Castillo’s proposed policies thus followed closely the example of ‘pink tide’ states such as Bolivia and Ecuador, perpetuating neo-extractivism while seeking to capture a greater percentage of revenue for diversion to public spending pro­ grammes. While clearly preferable to the neoliberal model pursued by Peru almost continuously since the early 1980s, these policies were likely to encounter similar contradictions to those experienced by Bolivia and Ecuador in relation to ecological despoliation, displacement of peasant and indigenous populations, and the failure to address the still unresolved agrarian question of equitable access to, and sustainable use of, land for fundamental need satisfaction. Even these quite centrist and reformist (national developmentalist) policies faced daunting opposition from Peru’s comprador bourgeoisie, multinational compa­ nies, and urban consumers. This opposition became manifest in a hostile Con­ gress, a hostile business class, a hostile right-wing press in control of most of the popular media, and a potentially hostile USA. Castillo was urged on by millions of Peruvians who saw him as a beacon of hope for policies to address the needs of ‘the poorest and most abandoned sectors of Peruvian society’ (Benjamin and Flores 2021). Sadly, at the time of writing, the support of these subaltern mil­ lions has proven insufficient to forestall the premature removal from office of Pedro Castillo, the victim of the constellation of neo-imperial forces that con­ tinue to dominate Peru’s peripheral, extractive economy.

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Albertus, M. 2015. Autocracy and Redistribution: The Politics of Land Redistribution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Albó, X. 2004. Ethnic Identity and Politics in the Central Andes. In: Burt, J.-M. and Mauceri, P. (eds.) Politics in the Andes: Identity, Conflict, Reform. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Apel, K. 1996. De la Hacienda a la Comunidad: La Sierra de Piura, 1934–1990. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Arce, M. 2008. The Repoliticization of Collective Action after Neoliberalism in Peru. Latin American Politics and Society, 50, 37–62. Assies, W. 1987. The Agrarian Question in Peru: Some Observations on the Roads of Capital. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 14, 500–532. Barraclough, S. 1973. Agrarian Structure in Latin America. Lexington, KY: Lexington Books. Benjamin, M. and Flores, L. 2021. Rural Teacher Pedro Castillo Poised to Write a New Chapter in Peru’s History. NACLA, 8 June. Retrieved from https://nacla.org/p edro-castillo-peru-fujimori. Brass, T. 2003. Latin American Peasants – New Paradigms for Old? In: Brass, T. (ed.) Latin American Peasants. London: Routledge. Burt, J-M. 2000. The Re-Awakening of Civil Society in Peru. NACLA Report of the Americas, 34, 1–2. Caballero, J.M. 1977. Sobre el Caracter de la Reforma Agraria Peruana. Latin Amer­ ican Perspectives, 4, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X7700400307. Caballero, J.M. 1980. Agricultura, Reforma Agraria, y Pobreza Campesina. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Caballero, J.M. 1981. Economía Agraria de la Sierra Peruana antes de la Reforma Agraria de 1969. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Cant, A. 2021. Land Without Masters: Agrarian Reform and Political Change under Peru’s Military Government. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Cotler, J. 1970. Traditional Haciendas and Communities in a Context of Political Mobilization in Peru. In: Stavenhagen, R. (ed.) Agrarian Problems and Peasant Movements in Latin America. New York: Doubleday. Crabtree, J. 2003. The Impact of Neoliberal Economics on Peruvian Peasant Agriculture in the 1990s. In: Brass, T. (ed.) Latin American Peasants. London: Routledge. Crabtree, J. and Thomas, J. (eds.) 1998. Fujimori’s Peru: The Political Economy. London: Institute of Latin American Studies. De Echave, J. 2009. Minería y Conflictos Sociales en el Perú. In: De Echave, J., Hoetmer, R., and Palacios, M. (eds.) Minería y Territorio en el Perú: Conflictos, Resistencias, y Propuestas en Tiempos de Globalización. Lima: Programa Demo­ cracía y Transformación Global. De Echave, J. 2012. La Minería Peruana y los Escenarios de Transición. In: Alayza, A. and Gudynas, E. (eds.) Transiciones, Post-Extractivismo y Alternativas al Extra­ ctivismo en el Perú. Lima: Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales. Degregori, C.I. 2008. Peru: A Missed Opportunity. In: Domínguez, J.I. and Shifter, M. (eds.) Constructing Democratic Governance in Latin America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. de Janvry, A. 1981. The Agrarian Question and Reformism in Latin America. Balti­ more, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. de Janvry, A. and Garramón, C. 1977. The Dynamics of Poverty in Latin America. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 4, 206–216.

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Figueroa, A. 1978. La Economía de las Comunidades Campesinas: El Caso de la Sierra Sur del Perú. Serie Documentos de Trabajo CISEPA No. 36. Lima: Uni­ versidad Católica del Perú. Figueroa, A. 1979. La Economía Rural de la Sierra Peruana. In: Muñoz, O. (ed.) Distribución del Ingreso en America Latina. Buenos Aires: Edirorial El Cid. Flores Galindo, A. 1977. Movimientos Campesinos en el Perú: Balance y Esquema. Cuaderno Rural No 18. Lima: Taller de Investigación Rural, Programa de Ciencias Sociales, Pontifícia Universidad Católica del Perú. García, M.E. 2005. Making Indigenous Citizens: Identity, Education, and Multicultural Development in Peru. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford Press. García, M.E. and Lucero, J.A. 2004. Un País sin Indígenas? Rethinking Indigenous Politics in Peru. In: Postero, N.G. and Zamosc, L. (eds.) The Struggle for Indigenous Rights in Latin America. Portland: Sussex Academic Press. Gorman, S.M. (ed.) 2019. Post-Revolutionary Peru: The Politics of Transformation. New York: Routledge. Handelman, H. 1975. Struggle in the Andes. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Handelman, H. 1981. Peasants, Landlords, and Bureaucrats: The Politics of Agrarian Reform in Peru. In: Handelman, H. (ed.) The Politics of Agrarian Reform in Asia and Latin America. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Kapsoli Escudero, W. 1982. Los Movimientos Campesinos en el Perú, 1879–1965. Lima: Ediciones Atusparia. Kay, C. 1982. Achievements and Contradictions of the Peruvian Agrarian Reform. The Journal of Development Studies, 18, 141–170. Keith, R.G. 1976. Conquest and Agrarian Change: The Emergence of the Hacienda System on the Peruvian Coast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Klaren, P. 2000. Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Lockhart, J. and Schwartz, S.B. 1983. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Long, N. and Roberts, B.R. 1978. Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Peru. In: Long, N. and Roberts, B.R. (eds.) Peasant Cooperation and Capitalist Expansion in Central Peru. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Lust, J. 2014. Peru: Mining Capital and Social Resistance. In: Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. (eds.) The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Development Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century. London: Zed Books. Mallon, F.E. 1992. Indian Communities, Political Cultures, and the State in Latin America, 1780–1990. Journal of Latin American Studies, 24, 35–53. Mallon, F.E. 1995. Peasant and Nation: The Making of Post-Colonial Mexico and Peru. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Mariátegui, J.C. 2007. Siete Ensayos de Interpretación de la Realidad Peruana. Car­ acas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Marini, R.M. 1972. La Reforma Agraria en America Latina. In: CESO-CEREN (eds.) Transición al Socialismo y Experiencia Chilena. Santiago: Prensa Latinoamericana. Matos Mar, J. and Mejía, J.M. 1980. La Reforma Agraria en el Perú. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. McClintock, C. 2001. Peru’s Sendero Luminoso Rebellion: Origins and Trajectory. In: Eckstein, S. (ed.) Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

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Petras, J. and LaPorte, R. 1977. Perú: ¿Transformación revolucionaria o moderniza­ ción?Buenos Aires: Amorrortu Editores. Petras, J. and Veltmeyer, H. (eds.) 2014. Extractive Imperialism in the Americas: Capitalism’s New Frontier. Leiden: Brill. Peloso, V.C. and Tenenbaum, B.A. 1996. Liberals, Politics, and Power: State Forma­ tion in Nineteenth Century Latin America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press. Rice, R. 2012. The New Politics of Protest: Indigenous Mobilization in Latin America’s Neoliberal Era. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Roberts, K.M. 1998. Deepening Democracy? The Modern Left and Social Movements in Chile and Peru. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Smith, G. 1989. Livelihood and Resistance: Peasants and the Poltics of Land in Peru. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Tilzey, M. 2018. Political Ecology, Food Regimes, and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistence, Resilience. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tilzey, M. 2020. Capitalism, imperialism, nationalism: agrarian dynamics and resis­ tance as radical food sovereignty. Canadian Journal of Development Studies, 41(3), 381–398. https://doi.org/10.1080/02255189.2020.1767543. Tullis, L. 1970. Lord and Peasant in Peru. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Valderrama, M. 1978. Reforma Agraria y Acumulación en el Perú: El Modelo, sus Limítes y Contradicciones. Estudios Rurales Latinoamericanos, 1, 97–110. Van Cott, D.L. 2005. From Movements to Parties in Latin America: The Evolution of Ethnic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. 2014. The New Extractivism: A Post-Neoliberal Develop­ ment Model or Imperialism of the Twenty-First Century?London: Zed Books. Veltmeyer, H. and Petras, J. 2019. Latin America in the Vortex of Social Change: Development and Resistance Dynamics. London: Routledge. Wolf, E.R. 1973. Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century. London: Faber & Faber. Yashar, D.J. 2005. Contesting Citizenship in Latin America: The Rise of Indigenous Movements and the Post-Neoliberal Challenge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10 South Asia

Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to explore the Maoist movement in South Asia – focusing on India and Nepal. Over the last two to three decades Maoist movements have risen (and been suppressed) in countries as far afield as Peru and the Phi­ lippines, but it is perhaps in South Asia where they have remained the most influ­ ential and have become embedded within the political landscape, even in the present. The movement has largely been focussed on the so called ‘red corridor’ which encompasses the eastern Indian states of Bihar and extends into Adivasi dominated locales of Jharkhand, Odisha, Chattisgarh, and Telengana further south. By extension this corridor also includes Nepal which experienced what was likely the largest Maoist political mobilization in the twenty-first century. This chapter builds upon earlier extensive scholarship on agrarian violence in the red corridor (e.g., Shah 2013; Prasad 1987; Kunnath 2012; Bhatia 2015) – to understand the political economy of peasant revolt, and specifi­ cally, to analyse how it connects with ‘Transition Type 5’. As noted above, Transition Type 6 is characterized, firstly, by the structural underdevelopment of capitalism and the limited organic development of industry – a so called ‘semi-colonial’ social formation (Gupta 1977: 55). While to some extent this has been applied to much of India and Nepal outside of the major metropo­ lises (Kar 2018; Blaikie et al. 2001; Bhattarai 2003a), what is particularly significant in the case of Transition Type 6, which applies to much of the red corridor, is the second feature of this social formation. This is the interaction between the distorted development of capitalism at a national scale and feudal landlordism in the countryside – a legacy of the colonial era tax col­ lection apparatus which was unique to this tract of eastern India and Nepal (Sugden 2019). The ‘semi-colonial, semi-feudal’ thesis is itself largely associated with the Maoist political discourse in South Asia, as framed by the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the movement. This may not be the way in which peasantry itself understands its structural position. However, this chapter argues that the prox­ imate drivers which do propel the peasantry to revolt (agrarian distress and limited escape routes), can still be tracked back to the larger structural context associated with Transition Type 6. DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-14

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This chapter also argues that Transition Type 5 is, additionally, relevant in this tract – the gradual subordination to capitalism of the Adivasi, or tribal modes of production, which once dominated Nepal and large parts of central India. While this form of subjugation was not traditionally associated with Maoist mobilization, at least in the Chinese context, the processes through which South Asia’s Adivasi modes of production have been subjugated to capitalism can be linked to the same semi-colonial social formation which has perpetuated feudalism in rural areas under Transition Type 6, with many Adivasi formations even being subordinated to both feudalism as well as capitalism, a process particularly evident in Nepal.

Maoism and the Semi-feudal, Semi-colonial Social Formation The background to Maoism lies in differing interpretations of the political role to be played by the peasantry in revolutionary struggle. To Marx, trans­ formation in the forces of production under a nascent capitalism was neces­ sary if one was to achieve an equitable yet prosperous socialist system. Equally important however was the revolutionary potential of this new class of disenfranchised workers, who were separated from the means of production (i.e. their land) and were free to sell their labour power. This group would become a ‘proletariat’, who would be capable of class mobilization, and their emergence was critical to the overthrow of capitalism. With the workers being brought together in cities and in large enterprises, ties of solidarity would arise through, for example, trade unions. Such organizations would then have the potential to emerge into a revolutionary class capable of overthrowing class society itself and creating socialism. Maoism emerged in China when faced with the realization that emergence of a capitalist proletariat was ‘blocked’ in a social formation dominated by feudal relations internally, and semi-colonial relationships with other coun­ tries externally. Set against this political economic context, a central tenet of Maoism was that revolutionaries no longer needed to await the development of capitalism to build a socialist society, and set against this context, the peasantry should be the driving force of struggle. Peasant led struggle should be simultaneously against both feudal landed property in the countryside and comprador capitalism in the urban areas. This is based on the understanding that there was an ‘alliance’ of sorts between the landed gentry and the com­ prador class, backed up by the bureaucracy. This is in line with the concept of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, as discussed with regard to Transition Type 5. As Mao himself notes: In economically backward and semi-colonial China the landlord class and the comprador class are wholly appendages of the international bourgeoisie, depending upon imperialism for their survival and growth. These classes represent the most backward and most reactionary relations of production in China and hinder the development of her productive

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forces. Their existence is utterly incompatible with the aims of the Chinese revolution. The big landlord and big comprador classes in particular always side with imperialism and constitute an extreme counterrevolutionary group. (Mao, 1965 [1926]) The struggle is therefore simultaneously against imperialism which itself shaped the trajectory of capitalist development in urban areas, while perpe­ tuating feudalism in the countryside – conditions which were equally relevant in large parts of South Asia at the end of the colonial period, as well as in China. It is on this note that we turn to South Asia’s red corridor and seek to better understand the character of the semi-feudal, semi-colonial social forma­ tion within this tract, and how it has paved the way for differing iterations of the Maoist movement throughout the last half a century. The movement itself is not a singular entity, with considerable diversity in the focal points of struggle, the balance between armed and political struggle, and its geographical extent. While it is impossible to capture all of this complexity in subsequent pages, it is hoped that the discussion can offer some insights into the main branches of the moment over the decades, and how they have connected in time and space with the tra­ jectory of agrarian transition on the ground and the evolving relationship between the capitalist and pre-capitalist.

Semi-feudalism and the Birth of Maoism in India The Maoist Movement in South Asia The Maoist movement in South Asia is not a singular movement, but has several genealogies emerging from a fusion of regional peasant struggles which stretch back into the colonial period, and splits within the communist movement of India and Nepal, into pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese camps. Interestingly, the split in the communist movement also paralleled a diver­ gence in academic opinion in the 1960s and 70s over the mode of production in India after independence. Multiple large farm surveys sought to establish whether Indian agriculture was making the transition to capitalism (along the lines of Transition Type 1 or 2) or remained semi-feudal in character (Tran­ sition Type 6) (Thorner 1982; Nadkarni 1991). Unlike the mainstream par­ liamentary communist parties in the region such as the CPI (M) in India, the Maoist parties were more likely to align to the position that India was semifeudal and semi-colonial and could only make the transition to socialism through revolutionary peasant led struggle (Kunnath 2006). The Maoist movement traces its genealogy to peasant revolts in Telengana (then Andhra Pradesh) in the 1940s, yet the first large scale Maoist uprising was a series of revolts against landlords in North Bengal in 1967–1970, the so called Naxalbari uprising. The leaders of this movement, like in China,

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asserted that India was a semi-feudal society dominated by landlords and a comprador bourgeoisie subservient to US and also the revisionist Soviet Union. Capitalism in India could not be defended as a necessary stage in the development of socialism as it was itself subservient to imperialism. As Kanu Sanyal, one of the original leaders of the struggle notes: Ours is a semi-colonial and semi-feudal country, 80 per cent of whose population live in the villages. The contradiction between the people of our country and feudalism is the principal contradiction. The comprador­ bureaucrat bourgeoisie, the landlords and the jotedars have been carrying on their rule and exploitation through their political organization, the Congress Party, by protecting fully and developing imperialist interests and by covering up the basis of feudalism with legal coatings. So, the peasants are the basis and main force of the anti-imperialist and antifeudal struggle. Unless the peasants are liberated it is impossible to achieve the liberation of all other oppressed classes. (Sanyal 1968: 2) While we acknowledge that Indian economy remained largely semi-colonial after independence, as in many parts of the periphery, we also acknowledge that there was considerable diversity in the mode of production on the ground. Proto-capitalist development in agriculture was likely in some states such as Punjab, and may have shaped the trajectory of class struggle in these locales over the decades. However, it is clear that semi-feudalism was parti­ cularly pronounced in certain parts of South Asia in particular spatio-tem­ poral junctures. These include the plains of northern Telangana (the territory of the old Hyderabad Princely State), the Eastern Gangetic Plains of Bihar and Bengal,1 and much of Nepal. All these regions experienced exploitative tax collection hierarchies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which set the foundations for semi-feudal landlordism in the post-indepen­ dence era (Sugden 2019; Jakobsen 2016; Kunnath 2006). It was perhaps no coincidence, therefore, that these regions emerged as early heartlands of Maoism in South Asia. It was the Eastern Gangetic Plains, however, which is often accepted as the birthplace of the Maoist movement due to the Naxalbari struggle in 1967. As noted with reference to Transition Type 5, semi-feudalism in the Eastern Gangetic lowlands was characterized by a mode of production dominated by large landlords, whose estates were farmed by sharecropping peasants. The latter were bonded to the former via the interlinkage of land, credit and produce markets. Landlords themselves had few incentives to improve productivity in case this would improve the living standards of the tenant and reduce the demand for loans. Analyses of such a model by Bhaduri (1973) and Chandra (1974) were based upon the plains of West Bengal, while Prasad (1973) grounded his analysis on surveys from Bihar.

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The reason that semi-feudal relations were so widespread in Bihar and Bengal is likely down to the region being under the colonial zamindari system, which was adapted from the Mughal system, and propped up powerful, mostly upper-caste landowners as tax collectors. Over time the zamindars emerged as powerful landlords, accumulating land from debt or tax defaulting peasants (Sugden 2019). Critically, this system was perpe­ tuated by the larger semi-colonial social formation. The disarticulated development of industry due to imperialism meant that the capitalist sector only had the capacity to offer the lowest wage and most menial employment opportunities, and had no capacity to end the rural poor’s dependence on landlords. While this can be applied to many regions of the periphery experiencing disarticulated capitalist development, what is important in the South Asian case is the political alliance between the landed elite and the comprador bourgeoisie (Ghosh, 1988). The latter benefit from a share of imperialist profits and a peasantry who will only provide wage labour under distress for extreme low wages, while the former benefit from the failure of capitalism to draw the peasantry out of feudal bondage. This echoes earlier observation by Maoist leader Kanu Sanyal (1968), who emphasized that mobilization against the landlord class alone, of which there were several uprisings during the colonial era, was not sufficient on its own to overthrow feudalism given that landed and comprador interests are embedded within the very structures of the state. It was also for this reason that they believed reformism or accommodation with the state would be unfeasible. The Naxalbari uprising itself took place in Darjeeling district, on the North Bengal Tarai (sub-Himalayan lowlands). Interestingly, landlordtenant relations in this region were somewhat different from the caste heartlands of Bihar and southern Bengal where one would be more likely to encounter the archetypical semi-feudalism conceptualized by Bhaduri (1973) and Prasad (1973). It was an ethnically diverse former forested belt with a large ethnic Rajbanshi, rather than caste population2 (Mukherji 1987), and it was outside of the historic influence of the zamindari system. The region had an emerging capitalist sector, with the establishment of tea gardens during the colonial period, which employed indentured Adivasi (tribal) labourers brought from central India. Nevertheless, the mode of production in Naxalbari was still semi-feudal in character. Many of the large farmers or jotedars, like their zamindari counterparts elsewhere were tasked with revenue collection, and had emerged into powerful landlords under colonialism (see Chaudhuri 1995; Ray 2002). In Naxalbari, a majority of farmers were adhiars (sharecroppers) or fixed rate tenants working on the lands of the jotedar, from whom they took consumption loans in paddy, usually at usurious rates of interest (Mukherji 1987; Ken­ nedy and Purushotham 2012). While there were some landlords from out­ side the region, most landlords were from the indigenous Rajbanshi community initially, as were the tenants or adhiars. This helped maintain

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social stability within the peasantry. However, as central Indian Adivasi labourers (who had migrated to work on the plantations during the colonial era), began to take up tenancies and experienced social dis­ crimination by landlords, antagonism between adhiars and jotedars inten­ sified. There was also a rise in absentee landlordism, with estates being purchased by urban dwellers from other castes, and farming out to tenants (Mukherji 1987). Under the leadership of the CPI (ML), the revolt began in 1969 with violent retribution against landlords, alongside the cancellation of debts, and the seizing land and burning of land records, alongside the short-term establishment of peasant committees and parallel governments (Seth 2002). The Adivasi tenants, who had a long history of resistance to the state, formed an important support base for the movement (Mukherji 1987). While the leadership emphasized that peasant struggle was most important given the size of the peasantry and the centrality of feudalism as primary contradiction, the uprising took place in alliances with the proletariat, with tea garden workers also active in the struggle (Mukherji, 1987). The tea garden economy relied heavily on semi-proletarian labourers, many of whom were simultaneously sharecroppers for landlords, and thus epito­ mized the contradictions of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation. Sanyal (1968) himself, emphasized that tea garden labourers were better placed to join the peasants and jointly overthrow the comprador bureau­ crat bourgeoisie and the landlords, rather than through conventional mechanisms of proletarian struggle through trade unions linked to parlia­ mentary parties. It is important to note that while the justification for Maoism in South Asia by its leaders was driven in part by the connection between feudalism and a semi-colonial social formation, upheld by a state which represented both landed and comprador interests – at times throughout the move­ ments’ history there has been a mismatch between the ideological goals of the leadership and the goals of the peasant support base, which at times can be more local in scope (Kennedy and Purushotham 2012). Likewise, the initial mobilization of the Naxalbari peasants was likely linked more closely to proximate causes rooted in the feudal exploitation by the jote­ dars. Seth (2002) notes how for workers under capitalism, there is a ‘fit’ between the structure of class exploitation, and the oppositional con­ sciousness which emerges among the proletariat to fight for socialism. Under the context of a feudal society, the primary axis of struggle is by the peasants against the feudal lords seeking emancipation against exploi­ tation by landlords. The peasantry may not, however, be immediately conscious of the potential for this revolutionary struggle to overthrow a semi-colonial state and associated class alliances and pave the way for socialism. The ‘organic intellectuals’ who led the movement, however, were likely aware of the immediate grievances against which the sharecroppers and other

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tenants of Naxalbari would take up arms, but were able to articulate these within a larger goal of overthrowing the state which, they believed, upheld the semi-feudal landed classes and comprador bourgeoisie, with the two groups closely connected. Thus, while the movement’s leaders supported these proximate struggles of the peasants rooted in exploitation by land­ lords – and had themselves actively supported a succession of tenant and tea garden worker struggles throughout the 1950s and 1960s (Mukherji 1987) – they were clear that addressing these on their own would not succeed in the long run without directly overthrowing a state formation perpetuating landed interests (Seth 2002).3 Kanu Sanyal noted for example, that land redistribution or trade union activism alone would degenerate into bourgeois reformism in the context of the Indian political economic reality (Sanyal 1968). It was similarly asserted that institutions such as parliament could not be used to advance the interests of the peasants and workers. Sanyal (1968) notes that redistributing land will be futile without the capturing of state power, and terms land-based move­ ments ‘militant economism’ which will lead to a bourgeois reformist path. He notes that: By carrying out these ten great tasks the heroic peasants have taught us that the struggle of the peasants is not merely a struggle for land. On the contrary, in order to end the monopoly of land ownership and feudal exploitation by the landlords in the villages, which are being preserved by the Congress Party, the political party of the comprador-bureaucrat bourgeoisie and the landlords, with the help of the political, economic, social and cultural structure that serves the landlords, a new political, economic, social and cultural structure must be created by establishing a new political power. This political power can be established by arousing and arming the peasants, by organizing guerrilla groups, by creating lib­ erated areas, by building a regular armed force, and by protecting and expanding this force. Such a political power, no matter in how small an area it is established, is the embryo of the future people’s democratic state power in India. (Sanyal 1968: 8) The fact that it was purported that the urban bourgeoisie could not be allies in the initial stages of revolution in part shaped the, at times, excessively vio­ lent trajectory of this early Maoist revolt in South Asia – as there was con­ sidered to be an ‘antagonistic contradiction’ between the peasants and workers, and the entire ruling class. Seth (2002) in part interprets the excesses of the early revolt to the character of feudal subjugation – whereby sub­ ordination was not only restricted to control over land and surplus appro­ priation, but also took the form of political coercion and ideological power. It was no longer sufficient to just mobilize collectively to appropriate the land­ lords’ land, and instead violent retaliation was needed to not only create fear

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among other landlords, but instead dramatically ‘reverse’ feudal politicalideological power. Peasants, while part of a larger movement with political goals from above, were, at a local level, revolting to invert the same often violent (symbolic and real) power relations which underlie feudalism itself. Feudalism had conferred on the peasants a century of internalized inferiority. The violent attacks on landlords were a means through which they could assert a new political identity and sense of self (Seth 2002) by abolishing the political, economic and social authority of the feudal class. Also associated with these excesses was the violence associated with feudalism. As Kanu Sanyal notes: In every village we heard the words: ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’ This is because every single struggle, however small, whether for stopping usury or on any other issue, has been invariably met with lathis and guns. That is why this call worked like magic in organiz­ ing the peasants. (Sanyal 1968: 3) There was, however, later acknowledgement by sympathizers of the move­ ment that this ‘adventurism’, which had sought a shortcut to peasant emancipation, had brought the initial movement to a quick demise at the hands of the state, while alienating those for whom it sought to fight (Seth 2002; Banerjee 2006), and even the Chinese Communist Party denounced the excessive violence (Banaji 2010). The movement in West Bengal was short-lived, and was crushed by the state security apparatus only months after it was initiated. At the same time, the success of the land reform in West Bengal, had taken away some of the proximate causes of struggle in the former heartland. This was a realization of the fears of the early Maoist leaders such as Charu Mazumdar – who believed that concessions such as land redistribution would drive the peasant away from revolu­ tionary politics, supporting their identification as a ‘middle peasant’ (Banerjee 2006).

Maoist Movement in Bihar As noted above, West Bengal’s land reforms in the late 1970s by the main­ stream Communist Party of India (Marxist) undermined feudal landed prop­ erty in the state, and, following the regulation of rents and redistribution of plots, the immediate drivers of revolt were arguably softened. However, Bihar state to the west, which had yet to experience meaningful land reform, per­ sisted as the ‘heartland’ of semi-feudalism in India. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus of gravity for the Maoist movement in the Eastern Gangetic Plains shifted west to the plains of central Bihar, in a struggle which persisted well into the 1990s. The struggle in Bihar, was thus like its predecessor in Nax­ albari, directed against the feudal landed class. While it had declined during

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the Emergency years, it was revived in the late 1970s in the village of Ekwari, where Jagdish Mahato, a local teacher had developed links with the Naxalite leaders in West Bengal, and initiated a struggle against exploitative landlords of the region (Bhatia 2005). Over the years, however, it evolved into several factions, with different strategies in terms of their levels of collaboration in mainstream politics. Throughout these multiple struggles however, base support continued to be from landless and small peasants, to a lesser extent the middle peasantry, as well as lower and intermediate castes (Bhatia 2005; Prasad 1987). The cen­ trality of the landless labourers and tenants to the support base of the Maoist movement in India was significant, given that it departs from Wolf ’s analy­ sis – a point discussed in Chapter 1. As Kunnath (2012) notes, Wolf suggests that smallholders rather than landless households or those subordinate to landlords, are likely to revolt due to the weak material circumstances and vul­ nerability of the latter. However, revolt, rather than being ‘spontaneous’, was mediated by the party to create revolutionary consciousness (Kunnath 2012). As one would expect, the role of Maoist ideology of state capture in shaping the decision to join the movement was more common among those in leadership positions, whom Bhatia (2005) terms ‘instinctual revolutionaries’. However, like in Naxalbari, many local people without formal knowledge of these ideologies would be drawn to the movement, being primarily driven by the daily struggles against landlord-oppressors, in relation to land distribution and farm wages, and the perception that the movement would represent them in this struggle. The Dalit community of south Bihar in particular, represented an important support base for the movement, and their protection and support for the revolutionaries was critical for their success in the region (Kunnath 2012). Importantly, in terms of the outcomes, in spite of longer term goals of state capture, winning local level struggles also became ends in themselves (Bhatia 2005) – including the response to local threats such as the so called Ranbhir Sena, an upper caste anti-Maoist army formed in the mid-1990s. The move­ ment in Bihar had some successes in terms of uplifting marginalized castes at a local level, even if it did not result in any structural transformation (Kun­ nath 2012). Bhatia (2005) notes that unlike the early revolt in West Bengal, the Maoist movement in Bihar achieved material gains for the landless through mobilizing multiple means of struggles, a large part of which was non-violent, including strikes, roadblocks and gheraos (encirclement of a place of work to put pressure on employers). Achievements included claiming disputed or wrongly ‘claimed’ land from landowners, mobilization for rights to common property resources, and campaigns against caste prejudice (Bhatia 2005). It extended to include the implementation or protection of safeguards provided by the legal system such as the regulation of rents or minimum wages for farm workers – marking a shift from the early aim to avoid accommodation with the state. These were struggles which could be led by the mass ‘frontal’ organizations such as the CPI-ML, without the need to mobi­ lize the underground wings of the movement (Bhatia 2005). The movement

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had some successes in raising the voice of marginalized castes and under­ mining the ideological bonds between landlords and tenants, even if they remain in place on a material level today. Just as the movement in the Eastern Gangetic Plains had found a new lease of life in Bihar, a parallel Maoist struggle was underway in the plains of northern Andhra Pradesh, in what is now Telangana state. The plains of Telangana were once part of the princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by the Nizam, which was merged into the Indian union in 1948, and there had been a long history of com­ munist mobilization against the Nizam’s repressive state apparatus and large landlords, or deshmukhs, across the plains (Kennedy and Purushotham 2012). The post-colonial era and fall of the Nizam did little to ameliorate socio-economic conditions and rural areas faced severe inequalities in rural areas, which were still dominated by powerful landlords/money lenders, much like in Bihar (Jakobsen 2016; Kennedy and Purushotham 2012). The initial movement was oriented around ‘anti-feudal struggles’, and like in Bihar, was focussed on political mobi­ lization of the Dalits and landless against landlords, with direct action including the redistribution of land. However, police retribution, arguably in collusion with landed interests, contributed to a cycle of violence and an increase in armed mobilization (Jakobsen 2016). The movement in Telengana, like the parallel struggle in Bihar, made some localized achievements, even if these fell far short of structural change or state capture. This included an end to bonded labour and minimum wages (Balagopal 2017). However, by the 1990s the movement was in decline in both the plains of Bihar and Telengana. Jakobsen (2016) observes that many contemporary scho­ lars put the withdrawal of the Maoist movement in lowland Telengana down to counter-insurgency successes by the government – although in reality the situa­ tion is more complex. Balagopal (2006, 2017) does acknowledge that the move­ ment was easily suppressed by the state, and led to cycle of violence, which undermined local support for the movement. However, the partial achievements of the Maoists and marginal improvements in living standards, softened the immediate drivers of revolt. Jakobsen (2016) for instance, points to the migration of landlords to the towns and the decline in their local concentration of power after the 1990s, which was itself partially a consequence of the anti-feudal struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. This was accompanied by transition from heavily localized to more complex patterns of exploitation within the wider eco­ nomic system, and there was no longer a single ‘landed class’ to mobilize against (Jakobsen 2016). Kunnath (2012) suggests that the decline in Bihar, was rooted not just in police repression, but in part by alienation among the Dalit support base against excesses by the party, the lack of representation of Dalits in high level positions, and the emergence of new avenues of struggle.

Shifting Geographical Focus of Struggle to the Uplands The geographical focus of the Maoist movement shifted in more recent years to the Adivasi domains of central India. Mobilization in the tribal or Adivasi

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domains of Odisha, Telengana and Jharkhand do have a long history, with mobilization there as early as the late 1960s and early 1970s comprising a strategy to build the movement from strategic, ‘defensible’, remote, hill country from where guerrilla zones could be created (Banerjee 2006). However, by the 2000s, as the movement lost momentum in the plains, the uplands of Odisha, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telengana emerged as the heartland for Maoist mobilization in India. The 1990s–2000s also saw the simultaneous rise of one of South Asia’s most successful Maoist mobilizations, centered on Nepal. Like the Adivasi belt of central India, Nepal had a long history of revolutionary movements such as the Maoist inspired Jhapa revolt in the 1960s (Seddon 2018), and a long history of peasant mobilization against an extractive feudal state and landlords in Rolpa, which emerged as a communist stronghold (Paudel 2019) throughout the second half of the twentieth century. It was from Rolpa that the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) rose to power, rapidly taking control of much of the country outside of the cities by 2004. The shift in the focus of gravity of the Maoist movement to Nepal and the Adivasi dominated uplands of central India represents an interesting transition – as these two regions have distinct differences from the traditional heartlands of feudal inequalities which drove the Naxalbari struggle and subsequent movements in Bihar and lowland Telengana. With regard to the central Indian uplands, Shah (2013) provides a fascinating analysis of Maoist zones in Jharkhand, and questions whether the relations of production correlate with those identified by Maoists of India as semi-feudal. She defines semi-feudalism, like Bhaduri (1973) and Prasad (1987), as the concentration of land; unfree labour and bondage; interlinkage of land, markets, labour, and credit to maximize surplus from tenants and labourers; production for subsistence not market, limited monetization or mechanization, limited credit advanced for agricultural purposes. Neither of these classical features of semifeudalism were present in the revolutionary heartlands of Jharkhand – whereby she notes that there was an absence of debt bondage, interlinked contracts, or landlordism, with most wealthier households being migrant traders. It is argued, therefore, that the proximate struggles of the peasantry against landlords, which were drawing the peasantry to join the movement, are not present (Shah 2013). The shift of the movement to the hills, it is suggested, was for tactical reasons, to move to a terrain more suitable for guerrilla warfare following the suppression of the movement in the plains: ‘This expansion into Jharkhand was not guided by some romantic ideals of mobilizing a tribal peasantry, but by the tactical needs of geographical terrain for their guerrilla warfare. Similar motives guided the retreat of the Andhra Pradesh branches of the Maoists into the forests and hills of Chhattisgarh’ (Shah 2013: 428). The limited rural differentiation which was emerging in this context took place via unequal access to state resources, with the local state facilitating the accumulation of surplus within the non-agricultural sector, including the enclosure for profit of natural resources such as forests. Thus, it was the state, including branches of

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the state such as the forest department, rather than landlords, which became the primary antagonist of the Maoist movement. Kennedy and Purushotham (2012), however, suggest that the genealogy of Adivasi struggle has been more central to the Maoist movement in India than is often thought – with tribal communities offering strong support for the early movement in Telengana, which predated the Naxalbari movement with its more explicit mobilization against ‘feudalism’. There are also critical proximate political-economic reasons why Adivasis continue to provide an important support base for the movement – other than just the fact that the terrain is more practical for insurgency. Colonial and post-colonial attempts to clear the forest frontier, enclosure of forests used for shifting cultivation, loss of land to non-Adivasi castes and debt, and the gradual undermining of the semi-autonomous modes of economic and political organization of the Adivasi – and has contributed to long running involvement of Adivasi com­ munities in the communist movement, particularly in Telangana (Kennedy and Purushotham 2012). One limitation of Shah’s interpretation is that it stops at the village itself. However, the proximate political-economic struggles of Adivasi communities are very much embedded within the class antagonisms of the larger semicolonial social formation. This includes an extractive relationship with the centre and enclosure of natural resources, alongside distorted development of industrial capitalism in a social formation dominated by comprador and landed classes. In other words, while feudalism in the countryside is bolstered by semi-colonial trajectory of capitalist development in the cities, supported in part by an alliance between a landed and comprador class, this does not mean that all regions are subjugated under archetypal ‘feudal’ agrarian rela­ tions. The struggles of the Adivasi peasantry in the uplands against the state, is therefore, not at odds with the mobilization against landlords in the lowlands. Importantly, these processes of gradual subordination of Adivasi modes of production which would have in the past have been lineage-based (Singh 2007), points to a link with Transition Type 6 alongside Transition Type 5. In South Asia, lineage-based modes of production of the tribal uplands have long history of being subjugated within feudal, and later semi-colonial capi­ talist, dominated social formations, either sequentially or in synergy. A sequential link exists whereby Adivasi modes of production make the transi­ tion to feudalism. In this case, previously autonomous tribal communities become tenants or small farmers working for either indigenous or outsider landlords, with semi-feudal production persisting alongside socially dis­ articulated capitalist development in the cities. This was the process which took place among lowland tribal communities in parts of Nepal (Sugden 2013) and the Bengal frontier (Ray 2013), which incidentally includes the Naxalbari region itself. However, the Transition Type 5 and 6 in South Asia in particular appear to frequently co-exist within a larger semi-colonial and semi-feudal social

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formation, and this appears to be the situation in the central Indian high­ lands. Adivasi modes of production are being restructured to supply surplus to capitalism under the same semi-colonial regime which is supporting the perpetuation of feudalism in the lowlands. This process of restructuring may include, for instance, the dissolution of redistributive mechanisms and priva­ tization of communal land (see Singh 2007). Importantly, Shah (2013) rightly notes the critical role of migrant seasonal casual wage labour, and the strug­ gle for Adivasi peasants to reproduce without it – noting that there was notable silence by the Maoist movement on this contradiction. While this may not have been engaged with specifically by Maoist ideologues, itinerant migrant labour, supported by an articulation between capitalist and pre-capi­ talist modes of production, clearly offers a source of substantial super-profits within South Asia’s semi-colonial, socially disarticulated social formations. Importantly, the ‘semi-feudal’ Eastern Gangetic Plains, which comprised the heartland of South Asian Maoism earlier in the twentieth century (Transition Type 6), along with the Adivasi belt of India which is the contemporary site of struggle (Transition Type 5), are today united in being the primary source of low wage migrant labour within India. As noted earlier in this book when discussing Transition Type 5, Singh’s (2007) study of Madhya Pradesh is highly pertinent. He observes the how articulation of modes of production among tribals within a larger semi-colonial social formation generates super-profits for capitalism (Singh 2007). The process through which central Indian Adivasi communities experience super-exploita­ tion via wage labour, is of a similar nature to that experienced by land poor tenants in the plains of Bihar, particularly in the post 1990s context, when labour migration from rural areas has risen considerably alongside a persistence of semi-feudal landlordism (Sugden 2019; Shah and Lerche 2020). For the Adivasi hill peasants, the decline of the indigenous mode of production, enclosure, and competition for land and natural resources have impeded their ability to subsist. For the land poor or tenant peasant of the lowlands, meanwhile, it is feudal surplus appropriation which has impeded their ability to meet their simple reproduction needs. In both cases, this has driven them into temporary migrant labour markets, where the pre-capitalist mode of production at home covers the cost of labour reproduction (Shah and Lerche 2020; Sugden 2019).

Maoist Movement in Nepal It is in this context that we turn to the case of Nepal. Here, both forms of subjugation facilitated the rise of a pan-national Maoist movement at a time when the movement in India was faltering. As with India, there was some­ times a disconnect between the proximate cause of rebellion and the larger political economic structures against which the revolutionary leadership sought to mobilize the masses. These included local level struggles against the state, such as corruption or elite capture of state institutions. Like in central Bihar, Paudel (2019) suggested that one reason why the Rapti region, and

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Thabang village in particular, emerged as a heartland of the struggle was its long history of locally embedded struggles against the state, which dated back to the 1950s. There was a long history of membership of a succession of communist parties as a consequence of these struggles. When Maoism was introduced in the 1970s, it was, as he terms it, an ‘ideological thread’ which brought together diverse struggles and patterns of resistance against the bureaucratic and political elites, extractive state taxation, and landlord–mon­ eylender class at a local level. Resistance also emerged, however, from more locally specific issues such as ban on hemp production and agricultural commercialization. While these local drivers of revolt were certainly significant, in terms of how the central leadership of the movement articulated where these struggles fitted within the larger political economy of Nepal, and thereby justified state capture, there were clear parallels with India in both the narratives promoted by the respective Maoist parties and on the ground realities. Nepal in many ways represents the archetypical semi-colonial, semi-feudal social formation. Feudalism was established as the dominant mode of production during the Rana era of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when the ruling elite distributed land grants to hill upper caste elites, while extracting revenue via land tax – a process which supported the emergence of a powerful landlord class (Regmi 1976). This period also saw the dissolution of many indigenous modes of production, whereby they were subordinated to feudalism, even before capitalist infiltration. The process of subjugation included the privati­ zation of communal land or kipat (Regmi 1965; Caplan 1970), as well as the clearing of the forest frontier and creation of an indigenous functionary class (Sugden 2013; Rai 2013). Classical forms of feudal landlord-tenant relations were well established across the country by the end of the Rana regime in the 1950s. Meanwhile the national social formation represented that of a classic semi-colony, whereby the comprador Ranas provided the British colonial powers to the south with raw materials, while providing a captive market for imported goods. The ruling class was enriched through import and export duties, while blocking any domestic industrialization (Blaikie et al. 2001; Bhattarai 2003a). During the 1960s Panchayat period and into the 1990s after the restoration of par­ liamentary democracy, landlordism persisted in the Tarai belt, much like the adjoining parts of Bihar, including both a unique form of bonded labour in the west under the kaamaiya system (Chhetri 2005), and more classical land­ lord-tenant relations in the east (Sugden 2019). When the People’s War was announced, land seizures garnered widespread support among landless tenants and former bonded labourers (Kattel 2003). Interestingly, however, the heartland of struggle, the middle hills, was home to a more complex social formation. There were still pockets of landlordism, although out-migration to the lowlands had eased some of the pressure on land resources – and large tracts of the hills were in fact dominated by small peasant production by small landholders (Sugden et al. 2018), and some

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Adivasi lineage based modes of production persisted in the more remote hill regions (Gurung 1996; Dahal 1981). Thus, while there were certainly greater inequalities in the hills than in the Adivasi belt of Jharkhand analysed by Shah (2013), inequalities were not as stark as in the plains of South Bihar or Naxalbari during the peak of the struggle there. The then CPN(M) leader, Baburam Bhattarai, writing in the early 2000s, was very much aware of this contradiction in his discussion of semi-feudalism when he states that: Here it is necessary to be clear that although numerically the small owner-cultivators are in the majority, since they are tied with various economic and non-economic exploitative chains to local landlords, usur­ ers and feudal landowners, they are not ‘free’. They do not have the ‘independent’ standing they outwardly appear to have, and they too are subject to the laws of the dominant semi-feudal relations of production. (Bhattarai 2003b: 137) He cites their subordination to feudal (landlord) or merchant money lenders, a critical axis of exploitation in Nepal today which is semi-feudal in char­ acter, even where landlord power has declined. Bhattarai also, however, draws clear links to the role of imperialism, and how the semi-feudal is intricately connected with the semi-colonial. For instance, he points out how imperialist finance capital was penetrating the agricultural sector alongside traditional ‘feudal’ money lending, through institutional credit. It was in the process driving farmers into the market, driving indebtedness without any meaningful investment in the productive forces. This was contributing to the same crisis of debt, suggesting that capitalist relations were gradually being ‘super­ imposed’ on older semi-feudal relations. He also points to a process whereby the feudal merchant-money lenders make a transition to becoming a com­ prador bourgeoisie (Bhattarai 2003b). Bhattarai’s interpretation, written at the height of the People’s War, still has resonance today, whereby research has shown that even where old landlords have lost some of their economic power, the landless poor remain heavily indebted to both ‘feudal’ money lenders as well as to institutional lenders, a process worsened by the financial stresses associated with growing articulations with capitalist markets (Sugden 2019). It is within this context that, like in the Adivasi belt of central India, migration has arisen as a core component of livelihoods – a process, which Bhattatarai also cited as an outcome of semi-feudalism in agriculture, as well as being a manifestation of a semi-colonial industrial structure at home. The question of indigenous modes of production and their historical sub­ ordination to capitalism is also significant in Nepal. Even more directly than their Indian counterparts, the Nepali Maoist parties emphasized that Nepal suffered oppression externally vis-à-vis imperialism, and internally between janajati (indigenous) peoples and upper castes who benefitted from state patronage (Ismail and Shah 2015). There was a conflation of ethnicity with caste during the Rana period – which supported a convergence of ethnicity­

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based discrimination and caste-based discrimination. This history of stateindigenous relations, combined with the CPN(M)’s effective articulation of the ‘national question’ in Nepal, mean that it was unsurprising that early support for the movement was particularly strong among ethnic communities such as the Magar community of the central hills (Paudel 2019) and Tharu of the western Tarai (Guneratne 2010; Hoffmann 2015). While centuries of ethnic discrimination were significant proximate drivers of revolt – this is matched materially also in terms of the mode of production. Indigenous groups in Nepal have a long history of subjugation to the central state, to either feudal or capitalist-comprador interests (Caplan 1970; Sugden et al. 2018). As noted above, their history of subjugation is somewhat different from the Adivasi uplands of central India, as many older lineage-based modes of production had already been fully subordinated to feudalism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, while elements of older lineage based modes of production persisted in the hills, these have been heavily restructured to supply surplus to capitalism through both migrant labour (Sugden et al. 2018) and commodity supply chains (Fitzpatrick 2011), like in the central Indian Maoist heartland. It is against this context, like in India, the Maoist movement has been driven predominantly by Transition Type 6, yet with elements of Transition Type 5 also – all within a socially disarticulated national level social formation dominated by a comprador bourgeoisie. The People’s War in Nepal ran from 1996 to 2006, and succeeded in cap­ turing much of the country outside of the cities, with territorial gains which were arguably more significant than their revolutionary counterparts in India. The success can perhaps be put down to the absence of ‘escape options’ for the peasantry throughout the 1990s, in a country which was locked into semicolonial relationships with another peripheral country, India, as well as with dominant imperial powers. Alongside persisting feudal inequalities, a rising ecological crisis, and growing financial distress in the wake of economic lib­ eralization, even migrant labour was insufficient to absorb the vast surplus labour force (Blaikie et al. 2001). The ‘peace deal’ of 2006 oversaw the abolition of the monarchy and put an end to the armed struggle. The CPN(M) joined mainstream politics and actually succeeded in winning the 2008 election to a constituent assembly, although their support base rapidly declined in later years, not helped by factionalism and a resurgent right. Given that landed and comprador inter­ ests are embedded within the Nepali state, the failure of their attempt at mainstream politics could have been interpreted as inevitable. Splinter groups which attempted to revive the armed struggle also largely failed to generate significant support at the grassroots. This can be explained by a number of processes. Firstly, the significant rise in ethnic politics after 2006, which took on both progressive and regressive forms (Jha 2014) also diverted attention away from class-based struggle. This was in part an unexpected consequence of the CPN

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(M)’s own effective championing of the national question – a phenomenon about which Lenin warned, whereby the National Question becomes an end in itself. Secondly, there have been some changes at a local level in the wake of the Maoist movement, which have undermined the proximate causes of revolt. Like in Telangana, the mobilization of marginalized groups by the Maoists had lasting impact on authority of the old landed elite in some locales (Adhikari 2014; Sugden 2017), even if the material situation of the peasantry has changed to a lesser extent. Many of the biggest landlords had sold off land (Sugden 2017), and the movement was also critical in trans­ forming the empowerment of marginalized groups such as the Dalit commu­ nity (Sunam 2014). Finally, the cessation of the struggle in recent years can also perhaps be explained by the change in the nature of migration after the mid-2000s. Labour migration from Nepal has risen considerably, and old destinations such as India are increasingly replaced by overseas destinations such as the Gulf states (Sharma et al. 2014). Out-migration and remittance dependence, while itself emblematic of a semi-colonial economy, has to some extent undermined the proximate drivers of struggle for large swathes of the countryside, by offering a viable ‘escape option’ which is not transforming livelihoods, yet is at least meeting households’ minimum subsistence needs (Gupta et al. 2022; Maharjan et al. 2013). Migration has, for example, delinked the Dalit community from traditional occupational castes, even if it has not transformed their livelihoods and supported accumulation of wealth (Sunam 2014).

Conclusions This chapter has shown how the Maoist movement in South Asia, like the peasant revolts already discussed, is a response to contradictions generated by the existing (in this case feudal) modes of production – which have resulted in an inability for the peasantry to meet its minimum subsistence needs at an acceptable level. This includes in particular, the contradictions associated with Transition Type 6 – which entail a persistence of feudalism alongside a dis­ torted semi-colonial capitalist sector. Across the lowlands of North Bengal in the 1960s, followed by Bihar and Telengana in the 1970s–1990s, exploitation by landed elite through rent and usury have pushed subsistence down to the physiological minimum. A distorted and socially disarticulated capitalist sector leaves the rural peasantry with few exit options from agriculture – and notably the land-poor tenant class – not the middle peasantry, have provided a significant support base for the movement. The later shift in the geographical focus of the movement to the Adivasi domains of central India, represented not only a change of focus for strategic reasons due to the rapid suppression by the state in the plains. Instead, the struggle of the Adivasi communities against an extractive state, and superexploitation through itinerant migrant labour – cannot be separated from the same semi-colonial conditions which support the perpetuation of semi­

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feudalism in the lowlands. Given the history of ethnic and caste-based oppression in the region by the state and incomers, it also offers a reminder that the drivers of peasant struggle are frequently ‘over-determined’ by the suppression of socio-cultural facets in the form ethnicity and caste. In the case of Nepal, the peasantry was subject to an archetypical semi-feudal, semi-colonial social formation, with a long history of ethnic and caste-based suppression, particularly of Adivasi as well as Dalit community. In the context of the limited exit options in the 1990s, particularly following the pressures of economic liberalization, the rapid rise in the Maoist movement was unsurprising. It has also been noted in this chapter that the immediate proximate drivers of revolt were not, in South Asia’s red corridor, directly linked to the larger national level struggle for transformative change and transition to a socialist state as endorsed by the movements’ organic intellectuals. However, it has been shown how the immediate struggle against a landlord-money lending class and an extractive state can still be understood within the larger context of a semi-colonial, semi-feudal social formation at a national scale. The decline in the movement in the lowlands of India, and later across Nepal, does, however, show how social change brought about by revolt itself, such as declining landlord and caste authority, can undermine the immediate drivers for the rural poor. Likewise, the emergence of new escape valves through, for instance, overseas migrant labour, offering more reliable sources of employment than itinerant work in cities, play a similar role, even though these patterns of work remain exploitative. Consequently, the fundamental relations of production remain in place and the overall class composition of the ruling elite remains unchanged.

Notes 1 The term ‘Eastern India Syndrome’ was coined to describe the phenomenon (Thorner 1982) 2 Mukherji (1987) describes the relationship between tenants and landlords as patri­ monial-feudal, as they were both were often from the same ethnic community, unlike in other parts of the plains whereby one’s position in the semi-feudal agrar­ ian structure aligned with caste divisions. 3 Sometimes this subjective consciousness to overthrow the larger bourgeois-feudal­ imperialist nexus is ‘assigned’ to the peasant by revolutionary movements, even if they may be mobilising for more immediate proximate forms of oppression con­ nected to the feudal relations of production on the ground (Seth 2002). He warns against reading backwards to interpret the outcomes of a peasant struggle as the actual intention of the subjects engaged in the struggle.

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Part IV

Whither the Peasantry?

11 Peasants, Politico-Ecological Crisis, and the End of Capitalism

Recapitulating and Elaborating our Argument for the Current Conjuncture: Imperialism, Surplus Extraction, Politico-ecological Contradictions, and the Peasantry Both in our companion volume and in this book, we have drawn upon Marxian theory as articulated by the Wolf of EPWH to help us to develop a basic ontology of social systems, especially his understanding of the ‘mode of production’ concept. Vitiating ‘orthodox Marxism’, this interpretation of the mode of production concept focuses non-reductively upon social relations of power, with class exploitation (including its gender, racial, ethnic, and reli­ gious dimensions) relying equally upon the deployment of material (alloca­ tive) and discursive (authoritative) resources in sustaining and reproducing subordinate and superordinate structures of control. Wolf ’s interpretation of the mode of production concept also helps us to build the foundations of a political ecology – political ecology, as articulated by us (see Tilzey 2018a for detail), and drawing directly on Wolf in EPWH, proposes a stratified ontolo­ gical relationship between the political, or ‘authoritative’ (exosomatic), logic underlying ‘mode of production’ dynamics, and the feasibility of realizing this logic through the ecological, or ‘allocative’ region, as surplus generation, based on the socially mediated productive capacities flowing from the biophysi­ cal domain. In this model, causality in mode of production dynamics arises as a result of ‘internal’, or political, and spatio-temporally specific social-property relations, comprising inter- and intra-class power relations within a social for­ mation, together with power relations between social formations. As these socialproperty relations attempt to reproduce or expand surplus production on which they depend, there is an inevitable, direct political impact upon those classes from whom surplus is being extracted. Extraction of surplus beyond socially accepted ‘norms’ is likely to be met with resistance by these classes. In reference to such classes, the peasantry comprises the principal subordinate, exploited class within the ‘tributary’ mode of production, and remains today the prevailing subordinate, exploited class within the peripheral capitalism of the global South (together with articulations of such capitalism with persisting semifeudal, feudal, and lineage modes of production). Capitalism, as we have seen, DOI: 10.4324/9781003404408-16

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tends, in its ‘fullest’ form in the imperium, to entail the demise of the peasantry, while simultaneously tending to imply its perpetuation in the periphery as the basis for super-exploitation and surplus extraction as imperialist rent. The quin­ tessence of capitalism in its ‘fullest’ development is market dependency, or reli­ ance upon the need to sell labour power and/or purchase commodities on the basis of exchange value, enforced by the state-capital nexus in varying forms of intervention. Where fully implanted, as in the imperium, this entails the extir­ pation of the peasantry since market dependency is predicated on expropriation of surplus producers from their means of production, a process involving the dispossession of the peasantry and enclosure of common land, thus enforcing the sale of labour power to capital. Marx (1972) recognized that market dependence arose from what he termed ‘original’ or ‘primitive’ accumulation. This com­ prised a process of peasant dispossession culminating in the parliamentary enclosures of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, and subsequently extended on a global scale through imperialism and colonization, with the pro­ viso that capitalism assumed, and retains today, different, although dialectically related, forms between the imperium and the periphery, with a super-exploited peasantry persisting in the latter. This new relationship between capital and ‘free’ labour, and between competing capitalists themselves, emerging first in Britain, inscribed into capital’s ‘metabolism’ a growth imperative that became, over time, increasingly dysfunctional in relation to the sustainable reproduction of both ecological and social use values. Capital’s unerring focus upon maximizing the realization of exchange value arises from human labour power’s status as the sole source of surplus value, the means by which capital accumulation proceeds (Tilzey 2018a). This means that capital attempts to externalize, to the greatest degree possible, costs entailed in securing resources for production, in disposing of waste during and following production, and in the reproduction of the labour power necessary for such production. This singular focus upon the valorization of human labour power through exchange value thus implicates the exclusion of ecological and social considerations, to the maximum level politically feasible, from capital’s narrow metric of efficiency, and so defines the inherently contra­ dictory relation between accumulation and socio-ecological sustainability (Tilzey 2017). In other words, capital under-reproduces its own ecological and social conditions of production. This defines the relationship between the zone of exploitation/capitalization (the tip of the iceberg of socio-nature that capital ‘pays for’) and the zone of appropriation (the hidden mass of the iceberg that capital receives as a ‘free gift’ from socio-nature and which subsidizes capital accumulation by lowering the cost of labour power). Market dependence, entailing inter-class relations between capital and ‘free’ labour and intra-class competitive relations between capitalists, is thus the wellspring of socio-natural, or politico-ecological, contradiction under capitalism. Imperialism, or ‘combined and uneven development’ as we term it, acts as the basis for a fundamental differentiation in agrarian politics between imperium and periphery, pivoting on the extirpation of the peasantry in the former and its persistence in the latter. The imperium is the principal

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progenitor of politico-ecological contradiction, while the principal locus of these contradictions is the periphery, with the semi-proletarian peasantry, as a precariat, bearing the principal brunt of these contradictions (together with non-peasant indigenous populations). As we have explained in our compa­ nion volume, the fundamental basis of differentiation between imperium and periphery began with the development of particular capitalist social-property relations, founded on market dependence and primitive accumulation, that arose from specific class relations within the English polity, having the effect of subverting preceding feudal social relations (see Wolf 1982; Brenner 1985; Wood 2002). This process occurred in parallel with the modernization of the British state, reaching ‘maturity’ in the eighteenth century (following the socalled ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688), and then extending, through geopoli­ tical, ‘competitive emulation’, to other ‘core’, or imperial states in Western Europe and North America. While internal social-property relations were key to these developments, they were nonetheless conditioned by interactions between Britain and other polities in relations of combined and uneven development. Capitalism and the modern state co-evolved because the latter afforded, and continues to afford, essential accumulation and legitimation functions for the former without which it would implode under the weight of its political and ecological contradictions (Tilzey 2018a, 2019a). Once capitalism had emerged, its ‘laws of motion’, grounded in class struggle and bounded by the enabling and protective structure of the state, began to demand what we have termed here ‘combined and uneven develop­ ment’, or imperialism (Tilzey 2018a). As we have seen, this term is a deliber­ ate reversal of Trotsky’s (2008) ‘uneven and combined development’ since Trotsky ‘still defined capitalism as uniform in its “law of motion” and there­ fore uniform in its effects. What, however, if the capitalist mode generated variability and differentiation not only through its combination with other modes but also in the very course of its own operations?’ (Wolf 1982: 303). Like Wolf, we see the state and imperialism as a key basis for this differentiation. One crucial outcome was that, in articulation with their own internally driven ‘growth’ dynamic, the states of the imperium became ‘developed’ through a relationship of ‘combined and uneven development’ with a resultant ‘periphery’, the ‘development’ of which was, in turn, distorted in favour of the imperium and its peripheral collaborators, the comprador elites who managed and benefitted from extractive activities on behalf of the imperial powers. The periphery did not ‘develop’ in the same way as the imperium, therefore, precisely because of the former’s subordinate relation to the latter, a relation which often reinforced noncapitalist or only partially capitalist, relations of production and exploitation where these could deliver higher rates of surplus extraction (Bettelheim 1972; Marini 1972, 1974; Higginbottom 2014; Smith 2016; Tilzey 2018a). This included, tendentially, the persistence of the peasantry. From the perspective of the imperial state-capital nexus, it was, and remains, rational, for reasons of both accumulation and legitimation, to externalize political and ecological costs onto a periphery as a means to

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secure super-exploitation. The periphery is the site of imperialism and colo­ nialism (the formal annexation of territory by an imperial power), therefore, because it is here that the capitalist imperium attempts to maximize surplus accumulation and cost externalization through the minimization of wages, the deployment of non-capitalist forms of labour exploitation, the neglect of citi­ zenship and human rights, and the super-exploitation of nature. In the imperium, by contrast, higher wages, citizenship and human rights, environ­ mental legislation (typically following the exhaustion of exploitable resources and the severe degradation of ecosystems), can be enacted through the sub­ sidy afforded by such enhanced global accumulation, while simultaneously legitimating and mitigating capitalism’s contradictions at home. As Wolf (1973: 278–279) observed incisively in PWTC, ‘success in plundering the world offset the internal dislocations occasioned by the conversion of [people], land and money into commodities within the homeland and gave citizens a stake in overseas expansion’. An essential part of this capacity to ‘offset the internal dislocations’ within the imperium engendered by capitalism thus derives from the capitalist world system’s broadly bipolar (and probably tripolar) structure: the socially ‘articulated’ states of the global North and the socially ‘disarticulated’ states of the global South (Amin 1976, 1977; de Janvry 1981). Social articulation implies a complementarity between the role of the labour force as producers and consumers and a situation in which its role as a source of consumption outweighs its function as a workforce. As noted, this entails the co-optation of non-capitalist classes as ‘consumers’ within the hegemonic influence of capit­ alism, which we may term ‘integral hegemony’. However, as the ‘imperial mode of living’ (Brand and Wissen 2021), such integral hegemony is possible only through imperialistic relations with the global South, whence surplus value is appropriated to feed generalized consumerism in the global North (and, increasingly, the sub-imperium) (Tilzey 2018a, 2018b, 2020b; Hickel et al. 20211). Tendentially, therefore, oppositional relationships between capitalist and non-capitalist classes in ‘articulated’ states have been defused or ameliorated by ‘flanking’ measures based on material and discursive rewards based around redistributive, social welfare, nation-building, environmental, and other policies, together with the bestowal of ‘liberal’ citizenship rights (Moyo and Yeros 2011; Chibber 2013; Mooers 2014). This implies that opposition to capitalism under such circumstances amounts at most to ‘taming’ on E.O. Wright’s (2019) classi­ fication (see below for further discussion). In contrast, social disarticulation occurs when the state-capital nexus is interested in its labour force primarily from the perspective of production (its ability to generate surplus value) and not principally from the perspective of consumption (the realization of surplus value through the sale of commod­ ities). In other words, the labour force is significant as a source of surplus value, but not as a source of consumption (Bettelheim 1972; Marini 1974; de Janvry 1981). Typically, therefore, the global Southern state-capital nexus has only weakly developed ‘flanking’ measures, or modes of regulation, through

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which to embed capitalism materially and ideologically. Its producers, the subaltern classes, notably the semi-proletarian peasantry, are only weakly subsumed within capital’s hegemony as consumer beneficiaries, therefore, and the state-capital nexus has low or lower legitimacy by comparison to the imperial states (Tilzey 2018a, 2018b). This implies, in turn, that oppositional movements tend to deploy more radical anti-capitalist imaginaries, such as ‘smashing’ or ‘dismantling’ capitalism on Wright’s (2019) typology (see below). The peripheral state, where dominated by agrarian oligarchies and comprador bourgeoisies (Junker road) tends, therefore, to operate on the basis of what we have termed ‘minimal hegemony’. In those instances where indi­ genous (nationally oriented) bourgeoisies have allied with the peasantry to overturn oligarchic rule, reformism, via the ‘farmer road’, attempts to mimic the articulated capitalism of the imperium, but commonly encounters the contradictions attendant on striving to foment ‘balanced’ development without the additional surplus from a periphery that enabled similar efforts in the global North. Such reformism we have characterized as ‘medial hegemony’, and typically involves the co-optation of counter-hegemonic positions (such as ‘radical’ food sovereignty) into sub-hegemony (in the case of Bolivia and Ecuador, for example, the transmutation of counter-hegemonic anti-extractivism into sub-hegemonic ‘resource nationalism’; see Riofrancos 2020).2 The real subsumption of non-capitalist classes as a ‘labour aristocracy’ in the imperium, following the demise of the peasantry, reached its height during the post-war Fordist era. In the face of increased class exploitation since the advent of the neoliberal era in the 1980s, attempts to sustain this compact between capital and non-capitalist classes in the global North have been undertaken increasingly by means of (renewed) imperial relations with the global South. Surplus value from peripheral subaltern classes now flows from South to North, ‘subsidized’ by the destructive and massive haemorrhage of ecological surplus that lies behind this relationship (Exner et al. 2013; Moore 2015; Smith 2016; Tilzey 2018a, 2018b; Hickel et al. 2021). Burgeoning levels of social and ecological dislocation in the South increasingly characterize the consequences of this neo-extractive relationship. This has been, and continues increasingly to be, associated with resurgent neoliberal primitive accumulation and accumulation by dispossession, undermining the incipient legitimacy, employment, and welfare functions that had been, at least in some degree, undertaken by the peripheral state until the 1980s under conditions of the ‘medial hegemony’ of national developmentalism. The outcome of this ‘new imperial’ relationship between North and South (Biel 2000; Smith 2016; Tilzey 2018a, 2020a; Hickel et al. 2021) is that the citizens of the former, despite certain attenuation, continue to be accorded material, welfare, legal and other privileges largely denied to those in the capitalist periphery, espe­ cially under conditions of conservative ‘minimal hegemony’ (Mooers 2014). The ability of this exploitative relationship between imperium and periphery to support generalized consumerism (social articulation) may be termed the

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imperial mode of regulation or the imperial mode of living (Tilzey 2018a; Brand and Wissen 2021). The imperial mode of living in the imperium (and selectively in the subimperium, especially China) is sustained by the state-capital nexus on the basis of ‘imperialist rent’, that is, the above average or extra profits realized as a result of inequality between the North and South in the global capitalist system (or between the industrial and peasant sectors as in China) (Marini 1974; Biel 2000; Higginbottom 2014; Smith 2016). This is undertaken through three mechanisms: the super-exploitation of labour power (Surplus Extraction Mechanism 1) and the super-exploitation of resources, or ‘ecological surplus’ (Surplus Extraction Mechanism 2), from the periphery, and on the dis­ proportionate claim upon global ecological sinks, that is, the capacity of the environment to absorb waste (Surplus Extraction Mechanism 3). In respect of the first two forms Surplus Extraction 1 and 2, what we appear to witnessing is ‘disarticulated’ accumulation through two principal, juxtaposed, mechan­ isms: Surplus Extraction 1 comprises super-exploitation within the capitallabour relation, confined largely to the highly selective zones of industrializa­ tion, and to labour-intensive horticulture and fruit production, embodied in commodities exported to the imperium (or produced in the imperium using super-exploited labour from the periphery). In this case, although industry and agro-industry absorb significant quantities of labour power, super-exploi­ tation relies in key respects on that labour force’s continued status as a semiproletariat, thereby affording capital a ‘subsidy’ through unremunerated costs of individual and family reproduction (in other words, capital benefits, through ‘primitive accumulation’, from the partial expropriation of the means of peasant production, thereby capturing labour power below its value); Sur­ plus Extraction 2 takes place through what may be termed ‘accumulation by dispossession’, whereby surplus value is accumulated not principally through the super-exploitation of labour power (as in Surplus Extraction 1) but rather through the exploitation, by capital-intensive means, of socio-natural ‘capital’ built up by non-capitalist societies in conjunction with nature, for example, the fertility of the soil. Such land is typically expropriated from its former inhabitants, its ‘semi-natural’ vegetation destroyed, and (in the case of agro­ extractivism) its soils mined until exhausted. Such ‘neo-extractivism’, entail­ ing the extraction of mineral, fossil fuel, and agricultural commodities such as soya and palm oil, is predicated on expropriation of lands often covered only by informal use rights (frequently communally held by indigenous people), and then exploited on the basis of minimal investment (other than land lease/ purchase and capital-intensive equipment) and minimal labour absorption, and on the maximal externalization of ecological and social costs. This extractive model differs, then, from ‘primitive accumulation’ (Surplus Extraction 1) in that capital is interested, principally, not in the employment (super-exploitation) of the resulting expropriated labour, but rather in the land and resources occupied by those former inhabitants (typically, indigen­ ous/peasant people) from which commodities are now to be extracted and

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exported to the imperium (or sub-imperium), with little or no local manu­ facture/processing (and therefore employment) being entailed. The commod­ ities so produced are ‘cheap’ by token of reduced costs entailed in ‘land grabbing’, the low labour costs of production (in agro-extractivism) conferred by the ‘mining’ of accumulated socio-natural ‘capital’, and the externalization of costs entailed in extraction (fossil fuel powered mechanization, pollution, soil erosion, destruction of biodiverse, carbon sequestering, and climate sta­ bilizing natural vegetation), with further negative consequences for climate change (Haarstad 2012; Svampa 2015; McKay 2017; Tilzey 2019a). In short, Surplus Extraction 1 and 2, together, enable the imperium and sub-imperium to engage in the high consumption of ‘cheap’ commodities and resources on the basis of super-exploited labour power and nature in the global South, resulting in the imperium/sub-imperium’s massively differential contribution to waste production, including climate changing greenhouse gases (GHGs); Surplus Extraction 3 refers to the dependence of the imperium and subimperium upon ‘sinks’ for the absorption of their waste (including GHG emissions) located differentially, naturally or by design, in the global South. In the case of climate change mitigation, this is enabled through the differ­ ential intactness, and consequent huge sequestration capacity, of ecosystems, including more traditional agroecosystems managed by indigenous and pea­ sant populations, in the South (see WWF 2006); and through direct inter­ ventions by imperial, and sub-imperial capital, by means of ‘land grabs’, to establish carbon ‘offset’ and biofuel plantations (Fairhead et al. 2012; Wol­ ford et al. 2013; Lyons and Westoby 2014), the latter being, at best, neutral, and at worst, negative, in their impacts, since not only do they tend to dis­ place ‘natural’ ecosystems and sustainable agroecosystems, they also simply legitimate the continuation elsewhere of GHG emissions, specifically, and the imperial mode of living, more generally (Brand and Wissen 2021). Thus, in the multiple crises of late capitalism, political and ecological, the imperial mode of living helps to sustain social stability in the global North through the continuing supply of ‘cheap’ consumer rewards founded on the three surplus extractive mechanisms identified above, while also affording a hegemonic orientation (the aspiration to consume) on the part of those not yet on, or on the lower rungs of, the capitalist ‘career ladder’ (Tilzey 2021). It thus refers to the dominant patterns of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption that are deeply rooted in the everyday practices of the majority in the imperium (due to their earlier ‘development’ at the expense of the per­ iphery), and increasingly in the sub-imperium. It also comprises an aspiration for many millions of the global precariat, but one that cannot be realized within capitalism for ‘political’ reasons given the nature of imperialism (see Bettelheim 1972), and more generally, for ‘ecological’ reasons (see Tilzey 2018a). The imperial mode of living thus explains the relative political and social quiescence of workforces in the imperium in the face of increasing global turbulence (and the general absence of radical anti-capitalism), while simulta­ neously explaining the very basis of that turbulence in terms of capital’s

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unlimited call upon surplus labour, ‘ecological surplus’ through neo-extra­ ctivism, and ecological sinks, all now differentially located in the global South (Brand and Wissen 2021). The development of ‘social articulation’ in the imperium, and increasingly in the sub-imperium (manifested most particularly in the growth of ‘middle classes’ in China, for example) is thus premised on a world resource system biased hugely in favour of these centres of accumulation. Where Fordism was based on a form of intensive accumulation associated with an increase in relative surplus value secured through permanent intensification of the labour process and expansion in labour productivity through capitalization (based in turn on the ‘ecological surplus’ arising through intensified exploitation and consumption of fossil fuels), post-Fordism, since the 1980s, and particularly since the 1990s, has witnessed a refocus on extensive forms of accumulation. This involves a partial reorientation, in combination with relative surplus value, towards absolute surplus value such as the flexibilization and expansion of the working day, and the suppression of wages below the reproductive needs of the workforce, increasingly a precariat (Bettelheim 1972; Marini 1972, 1974; Higginbottom 2014; Smith 2016; Tilzey 2018a, 2018b). This has been accompanied by a massive increase in ‘neo-extractive’ activity, including extraction and consumption of climate-change inducing fossil fuels. It is the global South, however, that has borne the overwhelming brunt of this trend, while the North has differentially continued to focus on relative surplus value generation in ‘high value-added’ industries (those with higher organic com­ position of capital) and selective attempts to ‘green’ capital accumulation (Smith 2016; Brand and Wissen 2021; Carchedi and Roberts 2021). The latter, while reducing GHG emissions at the point of consumption (for example, electric vehicles) remain, as yet, centrally dependent on intensive fossil fuel use in production (this includes, for example, wind turbines embodying huge quantities of fossil energy use in steel and cement manufacture). Even were fossil fuels to be eliminated in production, many of the materials required for the capitalist ‘green’ economy derive from the Southern extractive fron­ tier (rare earth minerals for solar panels, lithium, cobalt, and nickel for electric car batteries, etc.), perpetuating neo-extractive and imperial relations between imperium, sub-imperium, and the periphery (Exner et al. 2013; Riofrancos 2020). This neo-imperial restructuring of the international division of labour has succeeded, therefore, in intensifying Northern access, not only to the labour power capacities of peripheral states (Surplus Extraction 1), but also to their resources (Surplus Extraction 2), and to their sinks (Surplus Extraction 3), the latter operating by means of reducing the cost of climate change mitigation for the main producers of GHGs through parasitic reliance on those parts of the world where people have retained their (agro-)ecosystems relatively intact. These three surplus extractive mechanisms generate the overall background turbulence manifest in ‘capitalogenic’ climate change, the adverse impacts of which are felt differentially by those most vulnerable and least culpable – the

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subaltern classes of the global South (see, for example, Covarrubias and Raju 2020). Surplus Extraction 1, as noted, is undertaken by ‘super-exploitation’ of the workforce, involving the deployment of absolute surplus value extraction, subsidized by non-commodified (unremunerated) family reproductive activ­ ities routinely conducted by women, while Surplus Extraction 2 is enacted through the unsustainable exploitation of previously uncommodified socio­ environments, generating an unrepeatable surge in ecological surplus. Such absolute surplus value extraction (Surplus Extraction 1) and the agrarian oli­ garchic appropriation of land for extraction (Surplus Extraction 2) are foun­ ded on the formal, rather than real, subsumption of labour within capital, and the perpetuation of a semi-proletarian peasantry with partial, but inadequate, access to land, in a functionally dualistic relation to capital (de Janvry 1981; Higginbottom 2014). This is key to the neo-imperial subordination of the periphery to the imperium and sub-imperium – by the same token, however, it represents the weakest link in the chain that comprises the imperial mode of living, spawning radical anti-capitalist practices and imaginaries largely absent in the global North (Tilzey 2021). Thus, not only is the relationship between imperium and periphery char­ acterized by the ‘political’ super-exploitation of labour power (Smith 2016; Tilzey 2018a), it is also typified by unequal ‘ecological’ exchange through Surplus Extraction Mechanisms 2 and 3 – resources are extracted from the South with minimum heed to ecological and social consequences for indi­ genous and peasant populations occupying the lands in question, the resour­ ces are then consumed overwhelmingly in the imperium and sub-imperium (Svampa 2015; McKay 2017), and the resulting waste from such consumption relies for absorption or mitigation on the ecological sinks located differen­ tially in the periphery, and especially (and tragically) in territories managed by the very indigenous and peasant peoples subject to plunder under Surplus Extraction Mechanism 2. An important aspect of the imperial mode of living at the consumption end of these extractive relations is the reproduction of the workforce in the imperium, and to a lesser degree in the sub-imperium, as a ‘labour aris­ tocracy’, the complex division of labour associated with post-agrarian and urban-dominated capitalism (the real subsumption within capital of the labour force as full proletarians), and the integral hegemonic legitimation of this material and ideological constellation. This constellation, again, is pre­ dicated on access to ‘cheap’ labour power and raw materials (Surplus Extraction Mechanisms 1 and 2), overwhelmingly located in the global South, together with the ability to use global ecological sinks for the absorption or mitigation of waste (including GHGs) (Surplus Extraction Mechanism 3) in a disproportionate way. The imperial mode of living thus explains why neo­ liberal policies in the imperium have not yet exhausted their legitimization potential, or are turning in ‘authoritarian populist’ or ‘national populist’ directions (Brexit, Trumpism), as citizens of the North demand their ‘right’ to continue high consumption lifestyles in the face of burgeoning threats

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(immigration, terrorism, climate change, etc.) induced by, but causally dis­ associated from, that very mode of living (Brand and Wissen 2021; Tilzey 2018b, 2021). In the periphery, by contrast, and as a direct consequence of the operation of the imperial mode of living, the majority differentially suffers the dis-ben­ efits of capitalist exploitation, receives few rewards either directly or via the state in terms of welfare and employment security, and is not, therefore, incorporated, on an integral hegemonic basis, into the project of consumerism (Tilzey 2018a, 2019a). Commonly, this assumes the form of ‘minimal hege­ mony’ and, at most, ‘medial hegemony’ under conditions of attempted, but structurally unachievable, developmentalism. Moreover, because of the semiproletarian (peasant) status of the majority in the periphery, the material and cultural/ideological links to non-capitalist alternatives, most significantly to land, remain strong (Vergara-Camus 2014) under conditions of systemic pre­ carity. In short, subaltern classes in the periphery have the least to lose and the most to gain from a transition to post-capitalism. This gives, therefore, strong intimations as to which classes and class fractions are most likely to constitute the forces of change in this transition.

Charting an Anti-Capitalist Course: Securing Autonomy and Livelihood Sovereignty through the ‘Peasant Way’? In the previous section we recapitulated and further elaborated our Marxianbased understanding of the relationship between capitalism/imperialism, politico-ecological contradiction, and the peasantry in the current con­ juncture. The purpose of the Marxian approach is not merely to understand, of course, but also, because of contradictory reality, to use that understanding to critique such reality. As we noted in the Introduction to this book, this is to understand capitalism, and especially imperialism, as an exploitative and class-riven system, and to point to its structural ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ contradictions. The logic of class-divided modes of production, in general, and capitalism/imperialism, in particular, is not the improvement in the lot of constituent populations as a whole, but rather the appropriation of greater levels of surplus from subaltern classes by superordinate classes, regardless of the consequential poverty, suffering, and ecological destruction. It was a concern to critique these contradictions, especially in their ‘political’ aspect, that stimulated Wolf to write PWTC as a narrative of resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, and EPWH as a focus on people on the receiving end of European expansion who did have their own histories and who did not passively submit to colonialism/imperialism as a putatively overweening force. A focus on the peasantry as a means of pointing up both the ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ contradictions of capitalism and imperialism, and resistances to them, is important not only historically, but is also of vital contemporary significance since fractions of the peasantry, as we have demonstrated in this

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book, constitute, actually or potentially, agents of what Tilzey (2018a) has termed ‘livelihood sovereignty’ – the subversion of market dependency and the state-capital nexus to secure ‘real’ autonomy as ecological and social sus­ tainability. This points to the characteristics of the ‘lower’ and ‘middle’ pea­ santry (together, tendentially, with indigenous people) – commitment to meeting fundamental needs (or use values) rather than capital accumulation through exchange value, commitment to communal values and social equity rather competition and individual advancement, respect for, and dependence on, ecological boundaries and functions in meeting those fundamental needs rather than their transgression and degradation through profit motivation – which embody those anti-capitalist principles key to addressing the unprece­ dented politico-ecological crisis of our age. This particular understanding of the peasantry (and, with certain caveats, indigenous people) as actual or potential agent of anti-capitalism along both ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ dimensions is not necessarily aligned, of course, with some widely promulgated theses concerning transitions to post-capital­ ism, such as that of Wright (2019), or that of van der Ploeg (2008, 2018) in his vision of ‘autonomy’ from ‘empire’. Here we address what we see as the merits of our position vis-à-vis, first, the ‘anti-capitalism’ of Wright, and, second, the ‘post-empire’ autonomy of van der Ploeg, in particular, and the ‘agrarian populists’ and ‘postcolonial’ advocates, more generally. E.O. Wright’s (2019) How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century has achieved widespread renown as a work inspiring a resurgent vision of a postcapitalist world built around ‘socialism’. Here we address directly how our analysis presented above might support, amend, or challenge the framework delineated by Wright in his book in its examination of the different logics and strategies of ‘anti-capitalist’ struggle. We attempt to draw linkages between our delineation of more or less oppositional movements and imaginaries, namely ‘sub-hegemonic’, ‘alter-hegemonic’ (reformist ‘medial hegemony’), and ‘counter­ hegemonic’ discourses, and those broadly ‘anti-capitalist’ constituencies and stra­ tegies identified by Wright. In this way, we suggest that Wright’s categories (‘smashing’, ‘dismantling’, ‘taming’, ‘resisting’, and ‘escaping’ capitalism) may be understood in terms of our definition of ‘class’ interest groupings identified, respectively, as ‘counter-hegemonic’ (broadly ‘smashing’, although we prefer the less violent and more persuasive term ‘subverting’), ‘sub-hegemonic’ (‘dismantling’ and ‘taming’), and ‘alter-hegemonic’ (‘escaping’). To elaborate, we consider ‘smashing’ to entail a rather outmoded, ‘van­ guardist’ (‘Blanquist’), and statist strategy that ought to have little presence in broad-based, democratic, participative, and non-violent ‘counter-hegemonic’ political action. We thus prefer, and advocate, the term ‘subverting’ capitalism to reflect the necessity for the removal and supersession of capitalism through ‘counter-hegemony’, but only by means of non-violent, mass, and democrati­ cally based, mobilization. In this regard, we consider Wright’s preferred term of ‘eroding’ capitalism to be rather too reformist and gradualist, with little prospect of actually subverting capitalist social-property relations, but rather

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simply replicating capitalism in rather more socially inclusive guises (very much in the manner of Polanyi 1957, see Tilzey 2017 for critique.). We justify this position below. ‘Dismantling’ and ‘taming’ capitalism we consider to equate, respectively, to Keynesian social democracy or national devel­ opmentalist reformism, and to neo-developmentalist, national-popular, and ‘compensatory state’ (as in the ‘pink tide’ Latin American states) regimes, both falling within our category of ‘sub-hegemonic’ discourse of more socially inclusive and state-centred capitalism (and not so far removed from Wright’s ‘eroding capitalism’ strategy). Finally, we consider ‘escaping’ capitalism to equate to our term ‘alter-hegemony’, a strategy largely confined to those who are sufficiently privileged to have inherited, or acquired, resources, typically from within the capitalist system, to aspire to an ‘alternative’ lifestyle of ‘localism’, ‘green production’, and ‘green consumption’. This may also apply in some degree to ‘indigenous’ strategies embodied in ‘defence of territory’ where this discourse elevates cultural distinction above class, and pursues a strategy of simple disengagement with respect to the state-capital nexus (the ‘alter-hegemonic’ strategy has, in fact, elements of conservatism and reaction in its makeup, and therefore does not always sit as comfortably within the ‘medial hegemonic’ category as implied in the previous paragraph). In view of the argument developed in our book, we wish to suggest that Wright’s discussion of ‘varieties of anti-capitalism’ and their ‘strategic logics’ has limitations in three important respects. First, Wright’s preferred strategy of ‘eroding’ capitalism appears to be based quite centrally on a ‘gradualist’ view of the appearance of capitalism from feudalism (Wright 2019: 61). In actuality, a change in social property relations can be quite abrupt and entail quite specific transformations in social relations of production around market dependency and access to the means of production/subsistence, thereby sub­ verting capitalist market relations in a relatively limited period of time. Such rapid shifts in social-property relations have occurred historically, as with the initial emergence of agrarian capitalism in fifteenth-century England (Brenner 1985), and with revolutionary change entailed in the ‘smashing’ of capitalism such as in Cuba and elsewhere in other ‘peasant wars’, some documented by Wolf in PWTC, and some others by ourselves in this book. Even if one takes exception normatively to the violence of such ‘smashing’, there is no reason why rapidity of change should not be induced by democratically based mass mobilization engendering a radical shift in the political complexion of, and social-property relations in, the state. Second, Wright tends to reify the complex divisions of labour of urban/ industrial capitalism typical of the global North, assuming that these can simply be replicated, on a more democratic and equitable basis, under the socialism that he envisages. He seems to assume that the material rewards that have accrued to the populations of the imperium and sub-imperium, both by over-exploitation of their own resources and by means of ‘imperialist rent’ and the imperial mode of living, will, under socialism, simply be more equitably distributed through state actions to ‘erode’ capitalism, and through

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democratization of the state. Aside from the issue of ‘imperialist rent’ (see below), this neglects two crucial dimensions: first is the ecological unsustain­ ability of the high levels of production, consumption, and affluence generated by capitalism (even when based purely or largely on domestic resource exploitation, or autocentric development), predicated invariably on the com­ bustion of fossil energy, together with commensurate doubts as to whether such levels of resource consumption can be perpetuated on a sustainable basis through recourse to renewables, and without recourse to ecological imperial­ ism; second, and relatedly, is the failure to realize that such affluence may not be the almost teleological endpoint of civilization that Wright implicitly seems to assume (if only it can be socialized), but rather an historical aberration wrought by a one-time, and fossil-fuel powered, agrarian transition from a predominantly rural society to one in which the great majority is detached from the land and dependent, directly or indirectly, on the industrial produc­ tion of commodities. The key issue, then, is whether this complex division of labour of industrial capitalism, even when ‘socialized’, can survive, materially and ethically, the ‘political unavailability’ (due to emission reduction com­ mitments) or exhaustion of fossil fuels (Exner et al. 2013). Contra the argu­ ments of Huber (2022), for example, there are strong reasons to suppose that this is not the case, even were it possible to supply substitute renewables ‘autocentrically’, and even stronger reasons to doubt it when the reality is that key constituents of non-fossil fuel technologies can be secured only through ecological imperialism, replicating the imperial mode of living (see, for example, Riofrancos 2020). It seems clear, then, that an equitable and sus­ tainable socialism can only be an ecological socialism and one, moreover, that requires a significant re-agrarianization of society. Such ‘agrarian democracy’ (Tilzey 2019b) as ‘radical’ food sovereignty implies not only equitable ‘degrowth’ and the adoption of agroecological food production, but, more particularly, the subversion of capitalist social-property relations through the abrogation of market dependency and primitive accumulation (Tilzey 2018a). These are issues neglected by Wright (and others such as Huber 2022) in his reification of ‘developed capitalism’ as the foundation for socialism. Third, and allied to the second limitation, Wright fails to appreciate fully the imperialistic and inherently combined and uneven developmental nature of capitalism. Given that any attempt under socialism to sustain the complex divisions of labour and high levels of affluence in the global North (which, to repeat, Wright seems to reify as the ‘natural’ endpoint of development), even when premised on ‘green new deal’ scenarios, will entail a continuation of extractive relations with the global South, this immediately undermines the claims of any ‘post-capitalist’ configuration of this kind to be truly ‘socialist’. Rather, any such ‘socialism’ will entail, in reality, the perpetuation of the imperial mode of living, effectively normalizing and ‘invisibilizing’ high con­ sumption lifestyles and their dependence on exploitation ‘elsewhere’. Ecolo­ gical sustainability implies that social equity and human development – as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI) – need to be fulfilled at

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far lower levels of resource consumption than are currently characteristic of the global North. This need to fulfil HDI criteria while keeping resource consumption to a minimum has been accurately defined by the WWF (2006). In its ‘Living Planet Report’, WWF indicates that the progress of states towards sustainable development can be assessed by using the UNDP’s HDI as an indicator of wellbeing, and the (ecological) footprint as a measure of demand on the biosphere. The HDI is calculated from life expectancy, literacy and education, and per capita GDP. The UNDP considers an HDI value of more than 0.8 to be ‘high human development’. Meanwhile, an (ecological) footprint lower than 1.8 global hectares per person, the average biocapacity available per person on the planet, could denote sustainability at the global level (ibid.: 19). Successful sustainable development requires that the world, on average, meets at a minimum these two criteria. The report goes on to note that ‘no region, nor the world as a whole, met both criteria for sustainable develop­ ment. Cuba alone did, based on the data it reports to the UN’ (ibid.). Cuba has achieved an HDI of over 0.8 while having an ecological footprint of only 1.8 global hectares per person. We should also note that Cuba, whatever the important shortcomings of its ‘statist’ tendencies, has nonetheless undergone both a ‘socialist’ and a (partial) agroecological transition, and not one that entailed the gradual ‘erosion’ of capitalism (Betancourt 2020). The USA, by contrast, has achieved its HDI of over 0.8 only by imposing a grotesque foot­ print of nearly 10 global hectares per person on the rest of the world, meaning that it lives beyond its means (by taking other nations’ resources) by a factor of over five (WWF 2006) (meaning, in turn, that were all the Earth’s inhabitants to consume and discard resources at the level of the USA, we would require more than five additional Earths to supply the goods and absorb the waste). Scaling back resource consumption in the global North by the required magnitude to meet the criterion of less than 1.8 global hectares per person will, however, be strongly resisted by the majority, due both to the ‘integral hegemony’ of the imperial mode of living and to the structural constraints (highly complex divisions of labour, urban/industrial orientation, lack of access to land, etc.) on the pursuit of such a de-growth strategy. Wright does not address the hegemony of capitalism as expressed in the hegemony of high consumption lifestyles and their structural underpinnings. Thus, even were the state to be truly democratized in the global North, there is still likely to be a strong consensus around the retention of the consumer ‘good life’, despite its dependence on imperial relations with an ‘outside’ in order to claim those additional global hectares through ‘imperialist rent’. In other words, the categories of ‘identity’ and ‘interest’ deployed by Wright (2019: 125, 129) are ‘really subsumed’ within capital, even if ‘values’ (ibid.: 131) show anti-capi­ talist tendencies. The former two categories tend to ‘trump’ the latter, since the complete severance of the great majority in the global North from the means of subsistence/production in land implies market dependence and/or reliance on complex divisions of labour that are in turn predicated on high levels of energy and resource consumption.

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In the global South, however, capitalism does not entail widespread ‘inte­ gral hegemony’, as we have demonstrated through our case studies in this book. Rather, ‘domination without hegemony’ and ‘minimal hegemony’ are the rule, while, at best, reformist ‘medial hegemony’ is secured within the constraints of capitalist and imperialist relations. Here, the use of the term ‘subaltern classes’ applies to the great majority, referring to populations lying (tendentially) outside the hegemonic influence of capitalism due to their con­ tinuing material and cultural attachment to an independent means of pro­ duction/subsistence, most especially land (Tilzey 2018a, 2020a). ‘Identity’ and ‘interest’, in Wright’s terms, are here weighted heavily towards ‘peasantness’, ‘indigeneity’, and self-provisioning, since subalterns are only ‘formally sub­ sumed’ within capitalism. ‘Peasantness’, ‘indigeneity’, and self-provisioning afford the tradition and normative aspiration that comprise the ‘values’ encapsulated in the pursuit of stable autonomy from capitalism (Wolf 1973). The result, as we substantiate further below, is that ‘anti-capitalism’ as a path to ‘post-capitalism’, pursued on an ecologically and socially equitable basis, is far more attainable in much of the South due to continuing high levels of ‘peasantness’ – the aspiration to secure autonomy from capitalism can still be achieved by ‘smashing’, or better, subverting, capitalism because of the latter’s narrow class and institutional basis. This, again, is not the case in the global North, where ‘real subsumption’ of the population within capitalism, materi­ ally and ideologically, making ‘smashing’ or subverting capitalism both actu­ ally and normatively much more problematical – hence Wright’s preferred option of ‘eroding’ capitalism. The New Peasantries by van der Ploeg (2008, 2018) has been seen widely, especially by alternative food system advocates in the global North, as pro­ pounding a means to secure ‘autonomy’ as ‘escape from empire’ (Popay 2022) by means of reducing or eliminating market dependency of family farms on the input (‘upstream’) side of production (while commonly remaining market dependent on the output [‘downstream’] side). Van der Ploeg sees ‘peasants’ as being defined both by market orientation and by concern to use production for the reproduction of the farm unit and the family, while seeking to mini­ mize market dependency on the input side. These ‘peasants’ he distinguishes from ‘entrepreneurs’ who are fully market dependent on both the input and output sides. He thus appears to regard all peasants, whom he sees as undif­ ferentiated by class fraction, as centrally dependent on petty commodity pro­ duction for family and farm survival, even if only on the output side. His basic assumption is that reducing dependency on upstream markets for inputs and greater reliance on ecological processes and local markets generates autonomy from capitalist markets. While the family farms attempting to reduce such upstream dependency may not be strictly capitalist (that is, not employing off-farm labour) and may thus be described as petty commodity producers, their central reliance on the sale of petty commodities into mar­ kets, even where local and ecologized, renders them subject to market dependency. This not only fails to differentiate reliance on petty commodity

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production for livelihood from peasant production of use values for self-sub­ sistence, it also fails to appreciate that such market dependency is actually a form of entrepreneurialism. Van der Ploeg thus conflates petty commodity production, and indeed ‘entrepreneurialism’, with peasant production in general. He conflates central reliance on petty commodity production, a condition of market dependency and the satisfaction of family reproduction through the sale of commodities (at least on the ‘downstream’ side), with the peasant production of use values by the family/community to meet simple reproduction needs combined, where desirable/feasible, with the sale of surplus on the market as an opportunity not as a compulsion. The key difference between peasant production (here refer­ ring to the middle and lower peasantry) and (market reliant) petty commod­ ity producers (the upper peasantry and family farms) is thus market dependency, the market as compulsion not as opportunity. Market dependent petty commodity producers are already small entrepreneurs producing to generate a surplus through the market in order to reproduce the family as economic unit. This has direct continuity with van der Ploeg’s ‘entrepreneur­ ial’ category, thus failing to differentiate between those who are market dependent and those who are not. As indicated, van der Ploeg (2008: 1) maintains that peasant ‘production is oriented towards the market as well as towards the reproduction of the farm unit and the family’ (in other words, all ‘peasants’ are fully oriented towards the market). This basically fails to appreciate, however, the desire of (lower and middle) peasants for pre­ dominantly non-commodified production of food staples as an ideal, and therefore fails to discern the difference between market ‘as opportunity’ and market ‘as compulsion’. Also, the differentiation between ‘orientation towards the market as well as towards the reproduction of the family unit’ is non­ sensical, because the latter is dependent on the former; the family unit may be reproduced on the basis of market-dependence or non-market-dependence. The key issue, however, is whether the peasant family unit can reproduce itself on the basis of non-commodified use value production, or whether it needs to sell commodities (including labour power) to reproduce itself (i.e. market dependency). This differentiation is not really discerned at all by van der Ploeg. That is why there is a conflation between his category of ‘entrepre­ neurs’ and his ‘peasants’, so that, in effect, all of van der Ploeg’s peasants could actually be market-dependent ‘upper peasants’. This is the fateful conflation that enables van der Ploeg to describe market dependent petty commodity producers as the ‘new peasantry’, a group which, he believes, has secured ‘autonomy’ from the ‘empire’ of neoliberalism. In fact, we would describe van der Ploeg’s ‘autonomy’ as an ‘alter-hegemonic’, rather than a ‘counter-hegemonic’, strategy. A much more useful and accurate definition of the ‘peasantry’ and, by implication, of autonomy, one which clearly differentiates use value producers (non-market dependent) from petty commodity producers (market-dependent), is that supplied by Eric Wolf (1973) in PWTC where ‘peasants’ conform to the former, and ‘farmers’ to the

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latter categories. This, of course, is not to suggest that non-market dependent peasants do not produce commodities to generate additional income to pur­ chase goods that they cannot produce on the farm – this, however, is under­ taken as an opportunity, not as a compulsion. Having identified clear shortcomings in Wright’s route to an anti-capitalist future and in van der Ploeg’s understanding of autonomy vis-à-vis neoliber­ alism, we now seek to articulate our own understanding of ‘autonomy’ in relation to capitalism and the state-capital nexus as a means to secure some­ thing akin to eco-socialism. Autonomy represents the demand for self-deter­ mination or self-definition against an entity (typically the state/market, or state-capital nexus) that appears to thwart, or to actively undermine through exploitation, the aspirations and livelihood sustainability of certain classes, ethnic groups, etc. which suffer increased ‘economic’, ‘political’, and ‘cultural’ marginalization as a consequence. ‘Economically’, ‘politically’, and ‘cultu­ rally/discursively/symbolically’, autonomy is presented as a political project which will address the grievances of subaltern class members who have been marginalized by capitalism and the colonial/post-colonial state by regaining collective control of their lives and attaining agency as historical subjects (Bretón et al. 2022). This means, essentially, that the state-capital nexus fails to fulfil, or actively ignores/suppresses, its putative vocation of satisfying the aspirations and needs of all its citizenry – in other words, it differentially satisfies the interests of some of its citizens to the neglect or detriment of others. This reflects the class-bound and culturally conformist character (a certain permissible latitude notwithstanding) of the state-capital nexus, and the concomitant difficulty of building national consensus and sustainable livelihoods for all (within the peripheral social formation especially) when the national project remains one of building ‘prosperity’ through consumer­ ism, economic growth, and capitalism (whether ‘market oriented’ or ‘state regulated’). Autonomy may be seen to have three primary dimensions, the first two involving the ‘political’ and ‘economic’ dimensions between classes in the state-capital nexus (typically, in the global South, between the class triad of the peasantry, landed oligarchy, and the domestic bourgeoisie), the third involving the relationship between the state-capital nexus and indigenous ‘lineage-mode’ societies, the latter typically occupying areas remote from the main power and economic centres of the state (again, most typically in the global South). Autonomy, reiterating the previous paragraph, may, in the global South, be understood as a political project, a practice, and utopian horizon of the agrarian subaltern classes and marginalized ethnic groups (Bretón et al. 2022). First, in its strictly ‘political’ dimension, it implies con­ trol of the decision-making process and active participation in policy-making affecting the nation, including agrarian issues. Closely related to this is the concept of autonomy as a social/political praxis of social movements which, although realized differentially from organization to organization, is founded on the principle of horizontal participatory decision-making, marking a

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distinct departure from the traditional hierarchical relationships between lea­ ders and membership of the ‘old left’. The latter acts as a template for parti­ cipatory and devolved governance of the state, once the state is subject to control by such organizations. Second, in its ‘economic’ dimension, autonomy refers to the control of the means of production and natural resources (land, water, forests, etc.), entail­ ing, inter alia, varying degrees of intervention in, regulation or transformation of, markets with a view, in many cases, to the defence, recovery, and reinfor­ cement of communitarian practices of solidarity, reciprocity, and redistribu­ tion, including through structural transformation measures such as egalitarian land reform. Depending upon the depth of critique of the ‘market’ and upon class positionality (see Tilzey 2017), movements may seek autonomy through basically three strategies: market avoidance, that is autonomy from the capi­ talist market through the enactment of non-capitalist forms of production and exchange (and structural changes in social-property relations such as land reform) – in other words, a counter-hegemonic strategy to abrogate marketdependency; market creation, that is autonomy within the market by creating new niches for ‘re-territorialized’, re-localized, and ‘ecologized’ food con­ sumption, while minimizing dependence on ‘green revolution’ inputs – in other words, an alter-hegemonic strategy principally for market-dependent petty commodity producers (upper peasantry, small family farms) as advo­ cated most notably by van der Ploeg (2008, 2018) (see discussion above); and market integration, that is integration into nationally defined, protected, and supported food production, distribution, and consumption using principally ‘green revolution’ technologies and insulated from neoliberalized overseas competition – in other words, a sub-hegemonic strategy, the principal bene­ ficiaries of which are the market-dependent upper peasantry and commercial family farms (as with the alter-hegemonic strategy above). Market integration may also of course entail integration into neoliberalized/globalized food cir­ cuits (a hegemonic strategy) – for smaller producers, however, longer-term survival in such a context can only be secured through sub-contracting arrangements with larger producers (in the absence of other strategies as per those above), since the economies of scale that undergird the logic of such market productivism sooner or later spell the demise of the smaller family farm. Indeed, the use of the word ‘autonomy’, in an oppositional sense rela­ tion to the market in this context, clearly loses any meaning. Third, in its cultural/nationalist dimension, autonomy is proposed by indi­ genous people claiming and exercising collective rights to self-determination in relation to a particular territory (Bretón et al. 2022). As we have seen in the case of Latin America, this search for autonomy has been carried out through mobilizations and negotiations to reform the nation-state and establish some form of cultural recognition and devolution of power towards indigenous peoples, in some measure ‘insulated from’ or ‘outside’ the state-capital nexus. While there may be strong overlaps here with agrarian issues pertaining to the peasantry in respect of the market avoidance strategy above, especially when

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the peasantry in question is largely indigenous (as in much of Mesoamerica and the Andes, with the Zapatistas in Chiapas perhaps being the archetype here), this form of autonomy may also be quite distinct from the ‘peasant question’ as ‘market avoidance’. This is principally because ‘cultural’ auton­ omy is invoked in the main by non-peasant and traditionally ‘lineage-mode’ indigenous peoples (from the Amazon Basin, for example) which have never been integrated on a class basis into the colonial and post-colonial state, in marked contrast to the indigenous and non-indigenous peasantry which has had the status of an exploited subaltern class within the state-capital nexus. While there can, and should be, complementarities between ‘peasant’ and ‘indigenous’ autonomy, in practice they have often been distinct and, not infrequently, antagonistic, as we have also seen in our case studies. This antagonism has been abetted by a postcolonial and post-modern problematic that suggests that the issue of indigenous autonomy is best studied and addressed through an ‘anthropological’ rather than a ‘political economy’ lens, focusing on questions of identity formation and cultural politics (Bretón et al. 2022). While there are certainly real differences between the two forms of autonomy as identified above, the postcolonial problematic reifies these divergencies as simply questions of ‘cultural politics’, failing to discern a ‘cultural political economy’ (Jessop and Sum 2013; Tilzey 2017, 2018a) that attaches equal importance to material and discursive dimensions in social dynamics and power (and of course Wolf, especially in EPWH, argued strongly for an anthropology that has the capacity to integrate the ‘cultural’ and ‘political economy’ dimensions). ‘Populist’ understandings of agrarian ‘anti-capitalism’, due to their failure to understand the capitalist market as a social relation exercising control through market-dependency (and instantiated in social-property relations upheld by the state-capital nexus) (Tilzey 2017), tend to place emphasis upon the above strategies of market creation (alter-hegemony) and, to some extent, market integration, as significant means to secure autonomy. ‘Postcolonial’ ‘anti-capitalism’, for its part, has tended to emphasize the third strategy of autonomy above, underlining the importance of cultural identity and terri­ torial integrity at the expense of social equity and equality of rights to land. As suggested above, this selective emphasis has tended to militate against coalescence between non-peasant indigenous groups and peasant movements (even when largely indigenous in character), the latter seeking to address the agrarian question of egalitarian land redistribution and the socialization of the market. Through these selective emphases and the failure to appreciate potential synergies between ‘peasant’ and ‘indigenous’ strategies of autonomy, ‘populist’ and ‘postcolonial’ approaches have tended both to thwart subver­ sion of, and to render movements vulnerable to co-optation by, the statecapital nexus, as we have demonstrated in several of our cases. Synergies between all subaltern classes and groups seem essential if there is to be any realistic prospect of subverting the neo-extractive state-capital nexus in order to build livelihood sovereignty.

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Imperialism and the Enduring Conditions for ‘Peasant Wars’ in the Global South The differential impacts in the global South of the imperial mode of living through exploitation enacted by the three Surplus Extraction Mechanisms delineated above, severe limitations on the peripheral state’s ability to deliver mitigating welfare, employment, and legitimacy functions, and the consequent ‘formal’ rather than ‘real’ subsumption of the semi-proletarian majority, all suggest a greater presence in the periphery of counter-hegemonic forces and a proclivity to disrupt, or even subvert, the status quo. The implication is one of attempted re-appropriation of the peripheral state, or establishment of autonomous zones ‘outside’ the state, by counter-hegemonic forces in the form of resurgent national, and new ‘post-national’, forms of sovereignty. The new extractivism of the imperial mode of living, together with increasing cli­ mate change impacts, are generating unprecedented levels of precarity for the majority in the South (Vergara-Camus 2014; Riofrancos 2020). In contrast to the global North, a rural to urban exodus has not occurred widely on a permanent basis, but is, rather, cyclical in nature – huge numbers of people in the global South are not full proletarians but rather semi-prole­ tarians, retaining links to land ‘at home’ (Tilzey 2021). Moreover, even for the landless, the city no longer represents the ideal ‘exit strategy’ from rural marginality precisely because of the extreme precarity of employment oppor­ tunity across large swathes of the urban South. In this context, access to land becomes a refuge from such precarity, with many semi-proletarians aspiring to secure their subsistence and the social reproduction of the family house­ hold through the direct production of food unmediated by the capitalist market (Vergara-Camus 2014). The aspiration, in other words, is to secure a relationship to the market that is one of opportunity, not of compulsion (Wood 2009). Since the alienation of land and labour constitute the quintes­ sence of capitalism, it is the re-appropriation of land by the dispossessed or partially dispossessed (and the retention of land by those fortunate enough to sustain customary access to it), for the production of use values for society as a whole, that comprise essential elements in the subversion of capitalism and the foundations of future sustainability (Wood 2002, 2009; Tilzey 2018a). Secure access to the means of subsistence sufficient to supply basic family needs, and the ability to sell any surplus onto a market as an opportunity to generate additional income, thus represent the abrogation of the foundations of capitalism as primitive accumulation and market dependence (Wood 2002, 2009; Vergara-Camus 2014; Tilzey 2018a; Wach 2021). Such a condition may be described as one of ‘radical’ food sovereignty, or livelihood sovereignty (Tilzey 2018a), or as we have defined it above, ‘economic autonomy’. Here the peripheral state, and its class supporters in the form of the ‘disarticulated alliance’ of agro-exporters and transnational capital will be key targets of anti-capitalist, subversive, political action. This may take the form of a ‘dual powers’ strategy (Tilzey 2019a), seizing opportunities for autonomous

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production at the local level while confronting wider oppressive social-prop­ erty relations by laying hold of the state, in order to effect the necessary legal and institutional changes (thoroughgoing land reform, participative and devolved democracy, for example) necessary for ‘radical’ food and livelihood sovereignty – in other words, ‘political autonomy’ as we have defined it above. For indigenous and non-peasant populations (that is, populations that retained ‘lineage’ or ‘kin-ordered’ modes of production), the concern, as we have seen, has been to ‘defend the territory’, along with cultural identity, against the incursions of the state and modernism – that is, to obviate the possibility of primitive accumulation occurring in the first place, rather than, as with the peasant claims, seeking to gain appropriate access to land. While it might seem that peasant and indigenous non-peasant resistance to the statecapital nexus would be aligned, this has not always been the case, as we have seen in the cases of Bolivia and Ecuador. While the former tends to demand land reforms in their favour through change to social-property relations within the context of the state (in other words, autonomy from market dependency enabled by an interventionist state), the latter frequently advocate territorial integrity ‘outside’ the state (albeit with the acquiescence of the state) with an emphasis above all upon cultural identity and self-governance (in other words, autonomy from the state). Despite these differences, con­ siderable potential for synthesis between the two does however exist, as articulated, for example, in the foundational rationale of CONAIE in Ecua­ dor discussed earlier in this book. Inter alia, this entails both resistance to, and reversal of, primitive accumulation in the form of egalitarian access to land and resources for sustainable living as buen vivir. Concurrently, this entails subversion of the state-capital nexus and termination of relations of subordination to the imperium and sub-imperium manifest in destructive programmes of neo-extractivism that undergird the perpetuation of the ‘imperial mode of living’ of the global North (Brand and Wissen 2018; Tilzey 2020a). In short, synergy between peasant and indigenous counter-hegemony has the capacity to take the form of the synthesis of the strategies of auton­ omy discussed earlier (viz. ‘political’, ‘economic’ as market avoidance, and ‘cultural/territorial’ autonomy), while cautioning against strategies of market creation and integration within a capitalist context. We thus consider the precariat of the global South, comprising the middle and lower peasantries, indigenous people, and the wider semi-proletariat, to constitute the main counter-hegemonic agent for emancipatory politics as livelihood sovereignty. This is because the precariat views access to noncommodified land, the escape from market dependence, and the equitable and ecologically sustainable production of use values to meet fundamental needs, as the key objectives of social relational transformation to secure ‘real’ autonomy. In this, the potential for mass mobilization by the precariat for an agrarian solution to the contradictions of capitalism, both ‘political’ and ‘ecological’, does not seem too quixotic – indeed, the history of ‘peasant wars’ and the subsequent wave of agrarian-based anti-neoliberal uprisings in

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Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, and elsewhere documented in this book and by others (for example, Moyo and Yeros 2005, 2011, 2016), appear to indicate ample precedent. Such mass mobilization does not appear unrealistic pre­ cisely because capitalism, whether neoliberal or national developmentalist, cannot, even were the burden of imperialist extraction to be removed, repre­ sent a solution to the agrarian question of the peasantry, either through the creation of a class of commercial farmers and/or through the ‘real’ subsump­ tion of the peasantry as proletarians, as in the global North. Only a fraction of the huge ‘peasant’ precariat can be absorbed within capitalism as either, for both ‘political’ and ‘ecological’ reasons (Tilzey 2018a). ‘Politically’, therefore, if UN recommended levels of HDI are to be secured, there has, necessarily, to be a ‘peasant’ (or ‘radical’ food sovereignty) resolution to the agrarian question, since this represents the only realistic, socially acceptable solution to burgeoning precarity. It is precisely because the peasantry and pre­ cariat are located overwhelmingly in the global South that a peasant ‘revolution’ (otherwise, ‘peasant war’) and resolution to the agrarian question appears likely to occur here. ‘Ecologically’, moreover, capitalism cannot represent a resolution due to the resource intensity of consumption and wastage which, sooner or later, generates the predatory behaviour, by some states and classes in relation to others, underlying the operation of ‘imperialist rent’ and combined/uneven development. Together, these capitalist tendencies have generated appalling inequalities in the midst of a spiralling ecological and climate crisis. We suggested earlier that securing high levels of human development (according to UN HDI criteria) must be secured, if sustainability and climate stabilization are to be assured, within a planetary ecological boundary defined by no more than 1.8 global hectares per person (WWF 2006). The only realistic way in which these dual objectives may be achieved is on the basis of agroecological production (see, for example, Rojas 2016) and ‘radical’ food sovereignty (Tilzey 2020a) as ‘poli­ tical agroecology’ (see de Molina et al. 2020). This implies an abrogation of capitalism, the imperial mode of living, and a drastic programme of de-growth with equity, especially in the global North. It seems unlikely that this will derive from the North itself, however. It seems more likely that this will arise through counter-hegemonic mobilization in the South. The ‘peasant way’ is, therefore, both a ‘political’ (human developmental) and an ‘ecological’ imperative if our survival in an age of planetary politico-ecological crisis is to be assured.

Notes 1 We should note, however, that this relation is established not so much through ‘unequal exchange’, as suggested by Emmanuel (1972) and Hickel et al. (2021), as between the establishment and perpetuation of ‘disarticulated’ social relations of production in the periphery, whereby peripheral oligarchic and comprador bour­ geois classes drive down the remuneration of subaltern labour power to below the cost of its reproduction (Bettelheim 1972; de Janvry 1981). 2 This broad differentiation between ‘integral hegemony’, ‘minimal hegemony’, and ‘medial hegemony’ (together with ‘counter-hegemony’) in the state–capital nexus

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forms the basis of, and justification for, our case studies in this book (Chapter 2), and relates in turn to the typology of agrarian transition types articulated in Chapter 1.

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Index

absolutism 139–140, 144, 146 abstraction 16, 53, 80 accumulation 51; articulated 15; capitalism and 69; contradictions of 79; differentiation and 29; disarticulated 24, 28, 63, 70; by dispossession 14, 20–23, 73; exchange value and 6; labour and 19; lineage mode of production and 31; peasantry and 14–15; periphery and 14–15, 145; precarity and 28; primitive 23, 29, 51–52, 78, 92, 95, 113, 147, 163, 171, 197, 201, 318–319, 321–322, 329, 336–337; proletarianization and 14; state and 79; surplus and 31 agrarian populists 4 agrarian question 1–2, 7–8, 13, 28, 44–48, 81, 126, 173–174, 201, 212, 214–215, 264, 289, 335, 338 agrarian reform 107–110, 122–126, 265–279 agrarian transitions: as basis for case studies 44–81; typology of 13–38 agriculture: capital formation and 35; capitalism and 2, 14, 36, 47–48; colonialism and 139; commercialized 61; corporate food regime and 28; in Cuba 122–134; diversification in 127; estate 94; export 104–105; extractivism and 113; feminization of 24; feudalism and 34, 36, 38; growth and 22; haciendas and 91, 141; imperialism and 37, 117; industry and 22; land ownership and 118; livestock and 30; market liberalization 17; in Mexico 102, 104–110; neoliberalism and 23; plantation systems 26, 140–141, 149–150, 248–249, 262–263, 265–266, 271–272; productivism and 8, 64; profit in 91; socialism and 126; subsistence 24, 109; surplus and 19,

92, 109; sustainable 130, 171; urban 130; welfare states and 77 agroecology 133–134 Akram-Lodhi, A.H. 19 Althusser, Louis 38n2 American road 17 anarchism 74 anthropology 31, 335 anti-capitalist movements 6, 19, 168, 183, 211, 253, 321, 325–327, 330, 333, 336 anti-imperialism 72–73 Arbenz, Jacobo 21 Argentina 139, 184, 233 aristocracy 33, 77, 321, 325 articulation 8, 13–16, 22, 25–26, 31–33, 37, 47–48, 50, 53, 65, 70–71, 74, 76–77, 97, 100–101, 153, 161, 172, 230, 255, 258, 288, 305, 308, 319–321, 324 articulation modes of production 48 autonomy 23, 28, 32, 51–52, 57, 63–64, 67, 71–72, 74, 77–79, 94, 96, 112, 116, 120, 131, 133, 146–148, 161–164, 167–169, 171, 181, 193, 197, 199, 223, 229, 243, 246, 252, 254–255, 288, 326–327, 331–337 Balagopal, K. 302 Banaji, J. 26 bananas 206–207 Barsky, O. 208 Bernstein, H. 58 Bhaduri, A. 34–35 Bhatia, B. 301 Blaikie, P. 30 Bolivia 20, 29, 56, 63–64, 67–71, 111, 121–122, 154–156, 158, 161–165, 168–173, 179–202, 219, 240, 249, 255, 258, 284, 286, 338 Brass. T. 35

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Index

Brazil 56, 63–64, 71, 73, 161–162, 164, 174 Brenner, Robert 6, 46 Brexit 66, 325 Byres, Terry 17–18, 20, 44–49 Caballero, J.M. 274, 278 Canada 113 capitalism: from above 18–19, 46; accumulation and 69; agriculture and 2, 14, 36, 47–48; articulation and 31–38, 153; centre-periphery structure of 44; compliance with 13; embedding of 78; end of 317–338; erosion of 330; expansionary tendencies of 1; feudalism and 33–38; imperialism and 15–16; incursion of 33; in India 296; industrial 139, 304, 328–329; landlordism and 62; in Mexico 92; periphery and 14–15, 50, 144–149; petty commodity production under 26–31; pre- 29–31; production and 47, 74; property relations and 112–113; reformist 64–65; social-property relations and 69–70; state modernization and 55; subsistence and 24; successful agrarian 48; surplus and 15, 30, 32, 305; transition to 15–16, 21, 27, 29–31 Capitalism from Above and Capitalism from Below (Byres) 45 Cardenismo 101–108 Caribbean 145, 241, 289 Chaco War 183–191 Chandra, N. K. 34 Change the World Without Taking Power (Holloway) 80 Chile 21, 68–69, 151, 160–161, 168, 274 China 24–25, 30, 59, 69, 71–72, 324; see also Maoism Chiriboga, M. 211, 215 class analysis 46, 80, 174, 211, 256–257, 287 class consciousness 60, 166, 193, 264, 269 class contradictions 50–54 class dynamics 49 class factions 3, 57–59 class formation 111 class mobilization 17 class positionality 59–64, 76–81 class relations 20 class struggle 46–47, 50, 53, 58, 79, 171, 173, 183, 195, 208, 296, 319 climate change 37, 75, 317–338 coffee 230 Cold War 80

Colombia 20, 56, 63, 67–68, 72–73, 81n2, 122, 156, 160, 170, 172–173, 182, 274 colonialism 31; agriculture and 139; in Bolivia 179–182; capitalism and 1; Cuba and 121; in Europe and the People Without History 6; in Latin America 139–144; modes of production and 34–35; social formation and 48; as term 4 commodity dumping 17, 105 commodity production 26–31 Congo-Brazzaville 31 consumption 15, 27–28, 33–34, 37, 47, 63, 75, 104, 107, 117, 129, 131, 139, 153, 159, 180, 233, 249, 276, 298, 320, 323–326, 328–330, 334, 338 counter-hegemonic 19, 67, 102, 172–173, 174n2, 207–208, 219–220, 250, 338n2 Cuba 6, 19, 53, 71, 116–134, 140, 144–145, 151, 156–158, 160–161, 187–188, 240 Davidson, N. 75–76 debt bondage 231 decentralization 133 de Janvry, A. 18, 48–49, 59, 61, 107, 109, 242, 278 democracy 53, 67, 76–81, 112, 121, 131, 156, 159, 169, 194, 202, 211, 216, 222, 234, 241, 245–259, 306, 328–329, 337 Dependency Theory 91 deregulation 17 developmentalism 28, 149–158, 166, 216–220 Development of Capitalism in Russia, The (Lenin) 24 dictatorship 191–197 differentiation 3–4, 13, 17–20, 24–25, 27–29, 46–48, 58, 76–81, 90, 105, 107, 109–110, 155–156 disarticulation 14–16, 22, 24, 28, 58–59, 61, 63, 70, 76, 120, 243, 320 dispossession 14, 20–23, 73, 172 Dobb, M. 33 Dominican Republic 151, 161 dualism 16, 24, 200 Dupré, G. 31 Eckstein, S. 55, 62, 170 ecological crisis 317–338 economism 5 eco-socialism 79 Ecuador 20, 29, 63–64, 68–70, 73, 111, 151, 154, 162, 164, 168, 171–172, 174,

Index 182, 206–224, 255, 258, 274, 284, 286, 337–338 El Salvador 122, 156 Emmanuel, Arghiri 338n1 Empire (Hardt and Negri) 80 employment precarity 2–3 enclosure 25 environmental movements 75 Europe and the People Without History (Wolf) 1; capitalism in 139; case studies in 44; colonialism in 6; Marxian theory in 317; Marxian turn in 5 exploitation 4–5, 14, 26, 28, 33–34, 51–54, 56, 59, 62, 64, 74–75, 89, 109, 139–140, 142–146, 148, 151–152, 163, 170, 182, 193, 230, 236, 257, 261–263, 286, 296, 298–299, 309, 317–329, 333, 336 extractivism 68–69, 113, 142, 166, 171–174, 201–202, 216–223, 250, 253–257, 259, 279–289, 317–326, 336–337 EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) 110–112, 160 family farms 23–26, 129 farms, family 23–26; see also agriculture Femia, J.V. 152 feudalism: articulation between, and capitalism 33–38; in conservative/ reactionary scenario 66–67; from, to peripheral capitalism 144–149; in India 61–62; labour extraction and 230; Maoism and 73–74, 294–300; in Mexico 89; radicalism and 70–71; revolt and 54–57; semi-proletarianism vs. 263–264 food as commons 77–78 food crisis, Mexican 107 food prices 22, 172–173 food regime, corporate 28 food security 117 food self-sufficiency 132 food sovereignty 78, 257 food surplus 17 France 32, 93, 141, 179 freehold 28 Friedmann, H. 79 gender 24, 67, 79–80, 160, 162, 165–166, 317 Germany 93 Gilly, A. 149 globalization 65–66, 72, 80–81, 249 gradualism 328

345

Gramsci, Antonio 53–54, 65, 151–152, 193, 232 Great Depression 149–150 Green Revolution 17, 20, 61 Guatemala 21, 63, 67, 72, 111, 122, 151, 155–156, 172, 228–259 Gudynas, E. 171, 174n2 Guerrero, A. 208 guerrilla movements 122, 157, 303 Guevara, Che 119–120 haciendas 91–93, 95–97, 102–105, 141–142, 146–148, 150, 188–189, 208–209, 214, 261–262, 266–267, 269–273, 276–277 Haiti 116 Hall, Stuart 32 Handelman, H. 274 Hardt, M. 72, 78, 80 Hart, G. 35 Harvey, D. 23 HDI see Human Development Index (HDI) hegemony 151–152; counter-hegemonic 19, 67, 102, 173, 174n2, 207–208, 219–220, 250, 338n2; Gramscian 193; integral 152, 331, 338n2; medial 15–16, 65, 68, 90, 153, 157, 210; minimal 15, 65, 152, 157, 214; sub-hegemonic 15–16, 89, 99–102, 207 Henderson, T. 218 Hickel, J. 338n1 Holloway, J. 72, 80 Huber, M. 329 hukou system 24–25 Human Development Index (HDI) 330–331 Hylton, F. 181 Icaza, J. 146 imperialism 72–73; agriculture and 37, 117; capitalism and 1, 15–16; commodity export and 147; Cuba and 121; land distribution and 117–118; peasant wars and 336–338; periphery and 326; surplus and 317–326; as term 4 import-substituting industrialization (ISI) 104–108, 110–111, 124, 150, 153–154, 270 India 17–18, 28, 32, 34–38, 48–49, 53, 61–64, 66, 70, 73, 94, 293, 295–305, 309–310 indigenous subordination 182–184

346

Index

indigineity movements 74–75 individualism 159, 229 industrial capitalism 139, 304, 328–329 industrialization 93–94, 100–101, 104, 150–151, 172; see also import-substituting industrialization (ISI) integral hegemony 152, 331, 338n2 irrigation 35, 265 ISI see import-substituting industrialization (ISI) Jakobsen, J. 302 Japan 154, 235 Jessop, B. 164 Junker road 20–23, 46, 66–67, 92, 106, 150, 159, 168, 214 Junkers 18 Kapsoli Escudero, W. 263 Kar, G. 37 Kautsky, Karl 2, 24, 27, 46 Kay, C. 20, 274 Kennedy, J. 304 kinship 32, 62 Kunnath, G. J. 301 labour, agricultural 107–108 labour exploitation 91, 142, 320 labour supply 23–26 land distribution 117–118 land grabs 25, 172 land grants 261, 275 landlord class 30–31 landlords 18, 62, 64, 66–67, 71, 91–92, 132, 147–148, 182, 184, 186, 189, 193, 206, 208, 229, 240, 266, 268–269, 293–310 land markets 17 land ownership 124, 127–128 land-owning peasants 17–18 land redistribution 155 land reforms, redistributive 18, 102–105, 206–211 land rights movements 72–73 land tenure 104, 117–119, 123, 127–129, 145, 186, 189, 209, 229, 235, 268, 273 Last Day of Oppression and the First Day of the Same, The (Webber) 174 latifundia 18–20, 91, 94, 120–121, 123, 125, 147, 166, 218, 261, 263 Latin America 18, 23–24, 28–29, 48, 53, 55–56, 62–63, 68, 73, 75, 139–174; see also specific countries

Lenin, Vladimir 17, 20, 24, 46, 57, 67, 309 Levins, R. 49 Lewontin, R. 49 Lockhart, J. 262 manufacturing 145 Maoism 48, 53, 55–56, 59, 64, 71, 73–74, 293–295, 300–302, 305–309 Mao Ze Dong 294 marginalization 18, 56, 60, 63, 67–68, 74, 110, 131, 163, 193, 222, 254–255, 258, 282, 284, 287–288 Marini, R.M. 60 Marx, Karl 4–5, 17, 26–27, 33–34, 318 Marxian approach 6 Marxian theory 4–5 Marxism 35, 45–47, 64, 79, 161–162, 183 Marxist theory 5 Maya 243 McMichael, P. 49, 58, 79–80, 81n1 medial hegemony 15–16, 65, 68, 90, 153, 157, 210 Meillassoux, Claude 31–32 mercantilism 139–140 Mexico 6, 23, 49, 53, 56, 63–64, 67, 72–73, 89–113, 148–150, 156, 158, 160–162, 170, 187–188, 335, 338 Migdal, J. 56, 62–63 migrant labour 23–24, 32, 73, 263, 305, 308–310 Miliband, R. 146 minimal hegemony 15, 65, 152, 157, 214 Mins, H. F. 33–34 mode of production 18–19, 26–27, 31–36, 47–48, 53, 74, 231–232, 296, 304, 317 modernism 126, 148 monetization 29 Moore, Barrington 44, 48–49, 57, 63 Morton, A.D. 90 Mukherji, P. 310n2 multiculturalism 163, 215–216 Myanmar 66 NAFTA see North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) nationalism 13, 66 Negri, A. 72, 78, 80 neoliberalism 21–24, 60, 63, 68, 104–113, 159–170, 191–197, 215–216, 221–224, 255, 279–289; post- 197–202 neoliberalization 17 Nepal 30, 36–37, 53, 61–64, 66, 70, 73, 293, 305–309 New Deal 233, 329

Index New Farmer Movements 66 Nicaragua 122, 151, 156–158 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 108–109, 111–112 oil companies 184 opportunism 130, 155, 235, 276 Otero, G. 22, 110–111 Paige, J.M. 63, 153 Paraguay 161, 169, 184 passive revolution 21, 49, 53–54, 65, 67–68, 70, 76, 89–90, 99, 101, 149–152, 155 pastoralists 75 Patnaik, Utsa 28 Paudel, J.M. 305–306 Pearse, A. 147 peasantists 4 peasants and peasantry: accumulation and 14–15; class consciousness of 264; as farmers 3; land-owning 17–18; middle 6, 57; mode of production 26–27; neoliberalism and 159–170; new 79; as proletarians 2; protests by, forms of 44–81; radicalism and 169; revolutionary potential of class fractions within 57–59 peasant wars 71, 76–78, 151, 257, 328, 336–338 Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (Wolf) 1; farmers in 3; Mexico in 90–91, 101; rebellion in 158 periphery 50; accumulation and 14–15, 145; capitalism and 144–149; class positionality and 76–81; differentiation in 17–20; imperialism and 326; neoliberalism and 22–23, 63; passive revolution and 152; revolution and 89; rural transformation in 13–38; semi-proletarian in 14–15 Peru 18–19, 56, 67, 73, 121–122, 155–156, 158, 161–162, 168, 170, 172, 174n1, 182–183, 188, 240, 261–289 Petras, J. 79, 168 petty commodity production 26–31 plantation systems 26, 140–141, 146, 149–150, 248–249, 262–263, 265–266, 271–272 Polanyi, Karl 4–5, 78 political ecology 317 Political Marxism 46–47 populism 4, 58, 61, 65–67, 70, 77, 79–81, 101, 112, 148, 164, 166–167, 169, 171,

347

173–174, 186, 198–202, 219–221, 223, 253–259, 269, 325, 327, 335 Portelli, H. 152 Portugal 139 post-developmental 79 post-neoliberalism 197–202 Poulantzas, N. 146 power, social relations of 5 Prasad, P.H. 34, 293 precarity 2–3, 28, 108–113 primitive accumulation 23, 29, 51, 78, 92, 95, 113, 147, 163, 171, 197, 201, 318–319, 321–322, 329, 336–337 production: export-oriented 17; petty commodity 26–31 production co-operatives 125–126 productivism 5, 71 productivity 19–20, 27, 33–34, 124, 126, 142, 154, 161, 217–219, 237, 272, 274, 297, 324 profit 20, 23, 26–28, 32, 36–37, 91, 105, 128, 142, 145, 187, 215, 229, 233, 235, 242, 266, 275, 289, 297, 303, 305, 322, 327 proletarianization 14, 17, 20, 23–26, 108–113 proletarians 2 property relations 47–48, 118–119, 143–144, 209 protectionism 108 Puerto Rico 144–145 Purushotham, S. 304 radicalism 65, 70–75, 102, 169 radicalization 64 rebellion 4, 55, 64, 158–170 reformism 29, 64–65, 67–70, 76, 102, 157, 163 rent 26, 33–34, 37, 91–92, 118, 125, 147, 200, 233, 238, 262, 266–267, 270, 309, 318, 322, 328–330, 338 revolution 4, 25, 54–57, 75–76, 89, 95–99, 116–122, 148–149, 157–158; passive 21, 49, 53–54, 65, 67–68, 70, 76, 89–90, 99, 101, 149–152, 155 Rey, P.P. 31 Romero-Vásquez, G. 132 Rudra, A. 35 rural movements 76–81 rural transformation 13–38 rural-urban migration 24–25 Russia 50, 71, 183 Santo Domingo 116 Sanyal, Kanu 299–300

348

Index

Schwartz, S.B. 262 Scott, James C. 57, 62–63, 147 Scully, T.R. 25 self-determination 74, 80, 249, 333–334 semi-proletarian 14–15, 20–26, 78–79, 102–103, 106, 108–113, 155–156, 165, 263–264 Senegal 17 Seth, S. 71 Shah, A. 293, 304, 307 sharecropping 34, 37, 55, 91, 94, 118, 123, 233, 266, 270, 297–299 Sharma, R. S. 34 Sikor, T. 19 Singh, K.S. 32 Skocpol, Theda 44, 49 slavery 116–117, 140, 144, 237, 263 social disarticulation 14–16, 22, 59, 61, 76, 320 social formation 8, 15–16, 30, 32–38, 45–48, 57, 89, 167, 265, 269, 294–295, 297–298, 304–306, 308, 310, 333 socialism 38n1, 79–81, 98, 126, 130–131, 133, 154–156, 158, 174, 181, 183, 185, 187, 190–191, 198, 241, 256, 271, 294–296, 298, 310, 327–330, 333 socialist radicalism 65 Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democ­ racy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Moore) 44–45 social property relations 69–70 social relations of power 5 Soper, R. 218 South Africa 32 South Korea 154, 235 Soviet Union 80, 125, 165 Spain 139–140, 142–143, 179, 228–229, 261 specialization 125–126 Sri Lanka 66 state-capital nexus 46–47 statism 5, 71 sub-hegemonic 15–16, 19, 89, 99–102, 207 subordination 28 subsistence 4, 24 surplus 33; accumulation of 31; agrarian transitions and 48; agriculture and 19, 92, 109; appropriation of 6, 14, 27, 33; capitalism and 15, 30, 32, 305; class struggle and 47; colonialism and 31; drain of 35; feudalism and 33; food 17, 22; imperialism and 317–326; imperium and 13; labour and 25–27,

38, 73; parasitism and 37; peasants and 30; redistribution of 32; sharing of 37; subaltern classes and 51; subordination and 299 Sweezy, P. 33 Taiwan 154, 235 Takahashi, K. 33–34 Thomson, S. 181 Tilly, C. 49 Tilzey, Mark 22, 49 totalitarianism 5 tributary mode of production 139, 317 United Kingdom 66, 93, 159 United States 93, 95, 117, 119, 121, 144–145, 159, 168, 234–237, 242–243 Uruguay 139 usury 62 van der Ploeg, J.D. 112, 331–334 vanguardism 5 van Lammeren, I. 78 Velasco, F. 208 Veltmeyer, H. 168 Venezuela 122, 156, 173, 274 Vergara-Camus, L. 49, 55, 62, 64 Vietnam 19–20, 71 wages 14, 22–23, 25–27, 30, 38, 58, 94, 109, 111, 118, 124, 130, 142, 153–154, 200, 240, 248, 263, 276, 297, 301–302, 320, 324 Washington Consensus 170 wealth 29, 32, 61, 67, 126, 131, 139, 144, 153, 157, 170, 207, 231–232, 246, 267, 272–273, 277, 303, 309 Webber, Jeffery 174 welfare states 77 welfarism 13 Wickham-Crowley, T. 58, 156 Wolpe, H. 32 World Systems Theory 91 World War I 183 World War II 50, 237 Wright, E.O. 321, 327–328, 330, 333 Zamosc, L. 208 Zapatistas 56, 68, 73–74, 89, 96–97, 110, 148–149, 335 Zhan, S. 25 Zibechi, R. 173