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Title: Beyond the Peasant International
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2007
Language: en
Topics: agriculture, Brazil, China, class, communist, EZLN, Honduras, India, Latin America, marxist, neoliberalism
Source: Retrieved on 16 October 2010 from http://libcom.org/library/the-ecological-challenge-three-revolutions-are-necessary
Notes: From Wildcat (Germany), #82

Anonymous

Beyond the Peasant International

As ongoing struggles confront new conditions in the escalating crisis,

fighting will be concentrated along two main frontlines. Once the

struggles along these two lines merge and communicate things will heat

up: it could be the precondition for finally putting an end to this

system and starting something new and better! At one frontline the urban

working class of the highly productive web of factories, offices and

informal economy will have to smash the increased polarisation between

over-exploitation and unemployment. At the second frontline all those

will fight who were subjected to and subjects in the silent and

invisible revolution of the last decades: the rural proletariat of the

global south. The main division of any previous revolution has been

dissolved, the division between the urban working class and the

peasantry. During the last decades the personal relations of

exploitation of the soil and village life have been replaced by a mass

existence of semi-proletarianisation: more than two billion people on

this planet live under this condition, depending both on wage work and

small-scale agricultural activities. Many of those on this ‘second

frontline’ frequently migrate back and forth across the boundaries

between countryside and town, boundaries which are themselves

increasingly blurred by this labour mobility and by the spread of

infrastructure. Current mass lay-offs in the Chinese and Indian export

zones on one hand, and the increasing push of the rural poor towards the

promises of urban life on the other will engender huge social waves in

both directions. When the anger and desire of these two sections of the

proletariat meet, the end of this system will become visible. And those

in power know about this: the main concern of the Chinese and Indian

ruling class was to prevent a situation in which the overproduction

crisis of the global north and the ensuing flow of cheap agricultural

products would increase the turmoil in the countryside. The WTO summit

in July 2008 failed’ at least in propaganda terms’ when it came to the

question of the poor Indian peasants. Currently the Indian and Chinese

states are coming up with history’s largest ‘land-reforms’ (China) and

work schemes (NREGA in India), in order to control the reproduction and

movements of the rural poor. They need a calm hinterland for these times

of crisis, and they have to make sure that the urban/rural divide will

remain as their last steady pillar of power. the food riots this summer

all major think-tanks, ranging from agribusiness to the French

government to the UN, warned that too quick a demise of the small

peasantry could cause even heavier trouble in future. They helplessly

suggested a revival of the small rural petty producer, who would exist

at starvation level, but at least in a stable, isolated and controllable

starvation. While those in power are engaged in an existential battle

with global proletarian mobility, large sections of the left still

haven’t abandoned the ideological notions of the long-gone world. They

still ponder in Maoist and Leninist terms about possible alliances

between workers and peasants, or they create new ideologies of

small-scale subsistence as a social alternative.

On these two front-lines, merely ‘anti-neoliberal’ ideologies and the

‘peasant romanticism’ of the left will do the most harm to prospects of

radical change. In the current social turmoil these ideologies will

become handy tools in the capitalist rescue-kit rather than helping us

to grasp the potential for liberation within the ongoing developments.

With the following text on the ‘agrarian question and peasant

movements’, published this summer in issue 82 of the German magazine

Wildcat, we want to contribute to the debate for a revolutionary change

and to help make the waves meet. Let’s spill!

The WTO summit in July 2008 failed — at least in propaganda terms — when

it came to the question of ‘the poor Indian peasants’. In the supplement

to this issue of Wildcat [n.82] we emphasise that the situation in the

new industrial centres in India and the dynamics of the local class

struggle can only be understood against the background of the situation

in the rural parts of the country. Furthermore in recent years the ‘New

Peasant Movements’ have repeatedly been the focal point of global

campaigns. Their struggles raise the really fundamental questions — the

conditions of the majority of the (poor) global population,

environmental problems, the question of how we produce our food — and

they give answers! By appropriating means of production and livelihood,

e.g. by occupying land, the possibility of ‘another world’ seems to

manifest itself in a direct manner. Within the experience of ‘centuries’

of struggles led by ‘small factions’ of this movement, e.g. by the

Indigenas in Central and South America, the history of 500 years of

capitalism is condensed. By fact the global movements fighting against

agro-corporations, the WTO and World Bank are the new ‘International’ —

in contrast to the the globally fragmented situations of exploitation in

factories, call centres and offices. Juxtaposed to this view, the

historian Hobsbawn proclaimed the ‘demise of the peasantry’ in the mid

90s. For him the fact that the majority of humanity is not engaged in

direct production of means of subsistence any more constitutes the ‘most

significant transformation of class relations since the Neolithic [1] In

earlier phases of history humans used to produce their means of

subsistence in small communities and they were dependent on the natural

fluctuations of production. In contrast to that capitalism created the

world market right from its start, and its main productive force

(machinery) is itself a product of human labour. The general context of

a global society becomes the basic condition of our existence and

reproduction (’Second Nature’) and in this sense it is the real human

community. Only since humans’ livelihood started to depend on social

rather than on individual labour have we been able to raise the question

of collective appropriation of the means of production at all — and

nowadays actually on a global level! In contrast to the Russian

Revolution and to the phase of ‘National Liberation Movements’ after

1945, today the ‘alliance between peasants and workers’ is not the issue

anymore. We finally have to get the Leninist (’workers’ vanguards form

alliances with the peasants’) and Maoist (’surrounding of the towns by

the rural masses’) perspectives out of our heads; both perspectives were

ideologies justifying the development dictatorships of capitalist

catch-up. Today it’s not about capitalist development ‘from above’

anymore, but about re-composition as a global class from below. The

following article wants to contribute to the debate by trying to assess

the so-called ‘New Peasant Movements’.

The End of the ‘Peasant Question’

The global process of proletarianisation, meaning the separation of

producers and means of production and the transformation of the

producers into wage labourers, is a violent act. But the proletarians

themselves have been and still are driving force towards complete

proletarianisation: capitalists have often tried to avoid having to bear

the total reproduction cost of the labour force. It is in particular

this fact — the fact of the driving force behind proletarianisation —

which is neglected by those arguments presenting ‘subsistence’ as a

social formation opposed to capitalism. These arguments emerged, for

example, during the debates about the IMF riots in the 1980s, during the

romanticizing discussions concerning the ‘indigenous communities’ in

Chiapas and in the current theorisations of the ‘new commons’.

One reason why struggles of the ‘New Peasant Movements’ and/or the

‘subsistence perspective’ are politically presented as being opposed to

the thesis of proletarianisation is the common equation of ‘proletarian’

with ‘white, male, permanent factory worker’. This equation is a legacy

of the traditional labour movement and the communist parties, an

equation which has always been far from matching reality — today more

than ever!

We want to make five points arguing that the ‘peasant question’ has

ceased to exist today, as much as ‘peasants’ have disappeared as a

social class detached from ‘workers’ or ‘proletarians’.

small and medium-sized towns — in Chile, Brazil, and Venezuela about 20

per cent of the agricultural workers live in towns.

temporary wage labour, migration, farm work on their remaining land or

on land of others, and informal service work — this rural proletariat

can not be understood as ‘peasantry’ anymore.

shrinking — e.g. in Latin America only 10 to 20 per cent of the GDP

stems from agricultural production.

A superficial look at agricultural production suffices to show that the

equation of ‘food producers’ with ‘peasants’ is far from the truth.

Nowadays global grain production takes place in the metropolitan

countries and it is highly mechanised. In the US the annual productivity

of a agricultural workers is up to 2,000 tons per head; half of the

three billion small peasants worldwide produce less than one ton of

grain per head per year — which does not allow them to survive. In the

periphery peasants grow labour-intensive products like vegetables or

flowers — commodities which would not serve them for their own

nutrition. Industrialisation further aggravates the miserable conditions

of reproduction of the small peasants and agricultural workers: by

reducing the number of jobs available, by causing falling purchase

prices for agricultural products and by displacing people from good

soil.

Since the most remote rural regions are connected with the (world)

market, money has become the means which makes everything available:

everything which is necessary for survival, which makes work easier or

increases the crop, which allows mobility or access to the global

consumer goods (for example radios, bicycles, scooters, new food items

or other stimulants).

Given the connection to the market, wage labour becomes the precondition

for a life without hardship, independently from the vicissitudes of

nature.

After the crisis at the end of the 1960s to mid-1970s the process of

proletarianisation accelerated. Since then only in a few regions

proletarianisation has meant direct transformation into capitalist wage

labour. In the countryside itself ‘informal’ small and family

businesses, proletarianised agricultural work and wage labour become

increasingly significant. Or people leave and move directly to the

factories, which are concentrated in a few regions. The world market

factories and special economic zones are classical concentrations of

workers; in 2006 more than 60 million workers were employed in these

concentrations, 40 million in China alone (ten years ago there had been

only 27 million).

Migration is the most important mode of proletarianisation: globally

millions of proletarians are on the move, searching for a better life.

[2] In relation to the general population the flux of transnational

migration is not higher than, e.g., one hundreds years ago. The national

borders and migration laws restrict transnational migration heavily, but

even more important is the fact that they regulate it: The illegal

status or legally worse status of the migrants results in them doing the

bad jobs while the local workers manage to keep their status (downward

rigidity of the division of labour).

The ability of capital to stratify another layer below the local working

classes in order to valorise them productively and control them

politically depends on a continuous influx of new labour power: contrary

to the view of migration as endless, I. Wallerstein assumes that the

global reserve of fresh labour power will be exhausted ‘by 2025’.

Already today ‘shortages of labour power’ point to this trend: the

limits of the ‘labour reservoir’ in Eastern Europe, in China and India

are becoming visible.

Karl and Vera today

The argument made above is only valid once proletarianisation is

understood as an irreversible process. Historically there are only a few

exceptional cases of reversion, e.g. the settler colonies. Proletarians

who have got to know the material potential of capitalism through

migration and wage labour will not accept being palmed off with less.

The struggles within the process of proletarianisation are not struggles

against proletarianisation, but rather about its conditions. In the

history of the capitalist world system the peasant/agrarian question has

been raised in a political sense four times, and each time it has also

been a debate about reform or revolution: first during the transition

from feudalism to capitalism (the French Revolution was an urban

revolution against the peasants); then after the end of the 19^(th)

century it emerged within the context of proletarian revolution ‘in the

west’ and in Russia; thirdly after World War II within the National

Liberation Movements; and now again since the ‘neoliberal crisis

attacks’ and the emergence of the ‘New Peasant Movements’.

The first three times the question was raised it was about how a

minority would be able to seize power by forming alliances with others.

The party of the minority (the urban workers) drew their claim for a

vanguard position upon their ‘historic mission’, which could only be

accomplished by entering in a temporary alliance with the majority (the

peasants). This is ‘classical Marxism’ — or namely what Kautsky and

Lenin turned Marx into. The current debate can not be led in that way.

In 1899 Karl Kautsky developed this ‘classical position’ in his works

‘The Agrarian Question’: the decomposition of peasantry, the primacy of

large-scale agriculture in socialism. Lenin focused on the struggling

industrial proletariat, which was in the position of a minority and only

had a chance to make the revolution by joining forces with the peasants:

‘We have to support the peasant insurrection in every way up to the

confiscation of the land, but never up to abstract petty-bourgeois

projects. We support the peasant movements to the extend to which it is

a democratic revolutionary movement. We prepare ourselves (immediately,

instantaneously) for the fight against it, in case that it takes on a

reactionary, anti-proletarian character. (Lenin, The assessment of the

Russian Revolution, The lessons of the revolution, 1908, 1910) [3] Loren

Goldner clarifies: Lenin wanted the ‘workers’ state’ to realize

consciously and humanely what, historically, the capitalist state had

realized blindly and bloodily: the transformation of the agrarian petty

producers into factory workers. (It was left to Stalin to realize this

transformation consciously and bloodily.) [4]

It is symptomatic that in any historical period or region once the

peasants become a minority the communist mass parties disappear as well

(or turn into social-democratic parties); they are (or were) the parties

of forced capitalist development and they had their main strongholds in

the countryside (e.g. as late as 1960 the majority of the CPI membership

was formed by agricultural labourers!) [5]

Marx himself focused on the revolutionary potential of the rapidly

growing, visible and struggling working class for a long time, but after

the defeats of 1848 and 1871 had destroyed the hope for a quick victory,

the center of his analysis shifted towards finding out what made

capitalism ‘unstable and stable’ at the same time. Once more he had a

close look at what was happening in the world. In the exchange of

letters with Vera Zasulich he wrote about a ‘specific historical

opportunity: When the crisis of the ‘Asiatic form of production in

Russia coincides with the crisis of capitalism in the countries of

western Europe there is a chance that the struggles of the workers come

together with those of the rural population. As a result of this,

something revolutionary and ‘new’ could develop. Marx had elaborated the

‘inherent dualism of the Russian village community: collective property

and the private production. A revolution in Russia could be able to stop

the demise of the village community, and once the collective moments in

the given ‘historical surroundings (the crisis of the western

capitalism) come together with the ‘workers’ revolution’ they might

become the starting point of a new form of communisation

[Vergemeinschaftung]. Usually these letters are taken as evidence that

Marx did not have a ‘deterministic view of history’ after all or that he

wanted to propagate the ‘direct leap’ out of the pre-capitalistic

communities [Gemeinwesen]. However, more important is the way how Marx

approached these concerns. Marx tackled the question through notions of

‘global recomposition’ — however, today we are able to, and must, debate

this question in a different manner, e.g. today it will be less about

‘the coming together of the best of two different worlds’...

Since the 1990s the ‘New Peasant Movements’ have been conceived as being

the global vanguard of the struggle against ‘neoliberalism’ and as being

an important part of the anti-globalisation movement. Their forms of

struggle are diverse and spread out into all corners of the planet:

peasant unrest in China, Vietnam and Egypt, land occupation in Brazil or

elsewhere, blockades, actions against ‘large-scale development projects’

to the point of armed struggle in Latin America, Mexico, India and in

the Philippines. Within this movement organisations comprising hundred

or a thousand members (e.g. like the rural labourers’ union SOC in

Andalusia) are active along with mass organisations like the MST in

Brazil or the Indian peasant/farmers’ organisations whose membership

touches a million. Since 1993 Via Campesina, an umbrella organisation,

coordinates the global peasant movement and the actions of its

affiliated organisations, including participation in World Social Forum

and the presence at/against the G8 summits. In terms of power politics

the ‘shift towards the political left’ in Latin America (Brazil,

Bolivia) is attributed to these movements.

The uprising in Chiapas was decisive in this development. The EZLN did

not place their emphasis and hope on the potential and realities of

proletarianisation, the experiences of rural and urban wage labour, the

experiences of migration. [6] Despite the fact that their own base is

composed of (re-migrated) rural proletarians, the Zapatistas right from

the start emphasised the values of indigenous communities and looked for

alliances with the global political movements. This attempt to defend

themselves against the permanent encirclement by the Mexican army and

‘against neo-liberalism’ remained weak. The subsequent effort to rely

less on an ominous civil society and left-wing parties, but to create a

net-work with independent and more radical groups instead — the Other

Campaign — was not able to prevent the intensification of repression. In

December 2007 Subcomandante Marcos announced the preliminary withdrawal

from the public, referring to the ‘lacking social response of the

International Civil Society’ and the ‘smell of war’. Particularly the

examples of Brazil and Bolivia show that the ‘move to the political

left’ happens at the expenses of the movement which had helped the new

governments to seize power (see below) — the movements had focused on

the political arena disregarding the possibility of taking more radical

steps due to the current social turmoil and transformation [UmwÀlzung].

Proletarianisation and Semi-Proletarianisation

Classical Marxism and Maoism categorised the rural population according

to their land-property: big, medium and small farmers and rural

labourers. This made sense for the so-called ‘centre’, for those

countries which were industrialised between the end of the 19^(th) and

the mid-20^(th) century. In the US and in Europe the share of workers

employed in industries touched 40 per cent as early as before World War

I. In the period between 1870 and 1970 the numbers working in

agriculture shrunk to five to ten per cent or even lower (in the US

today the proportion is below two per cent). In England, the US, Germany

and France the agricultural sector has been transformed into

capitalistic relations — a process which was still happening up to the

1960s! — with the result that ‘in the west’ the peasant question has

ceased to exist. In the so-called Third World the rural population is

sucked in by a process of dependent industrialisation: agricultural

production for the world market. In some regions strong labour movements

emerged in the course of this process (e.g. in South Korea in the

1980s). Unlike in the countries of the ‘centre’, in those of the

‘periphery’ the trichotomy of big, medium and small peasants/rural

workers makes little sense. In these regions the social strata are

polarised between big farmers and small peasants/rural workers; the

process of semi-proletarianisation of the small peasants and rural

labourers described above is the material background for the ‘New

Peasant Movements’.

The new farmers’ movements

In the following we narrow our focus to India, Brazil and parts of

Central and South America, anything else would go beyond the scope of

one article.

India

India is the country of villages harbouring the contradictions between

landed peasants, big farmers and a class of the landless. Many

households became small peasants no earlier then during the time of land

reforms 30 years ago — a process of ‘peasantisation’ taking place on

little and bad land which results in a continuous flow back and forth

between agricultural production and wage labour. The average size of

land per household has halved since the 1960s (1961: 2.6 hectares —

1992: 1.3 hectares) and the number of families holding less than 0.2

hectares has increased from 62 per cent in 1971 to 71 per cent in 1992.

About 42 per cent of the rural population does own land at all. The

approximately five per cent of big and middle-size farmers hold 42 per

cent of the land. 80 per cent of the Indian peasants are not able to

survive by plowing their land, only 35 per cent of the average landed

rural household’s income stems from agricultural production. The poorest

part of the population stays on the countryside, because moving to the

city requires a minimum of resources (a piece of land).

The ‘New Farmers’ Movement’ (it is often called a ‘farmer’ instead of

‘peasant’ movement) which emerged at the end of the 1970s are a product

of the so-called Green Revolution [7]. The new layers of medium and big

farmers who produce for the market are its active core. They are held

together by populist ideologies (e.g. rural population against the urban

society) and their common interest in higher prices for agricultural

products. Since the 1980s these strata of farmers, who managed to

prosper during the Green Revolution, are confronted with decreasing

prices and profits: the climax of the movement happened in the mid-late

1980s in the states of the Green Revolution (Maharastra, Uttar Pradesh,

Punjab, Haryana). Back then hundreds of thousand people took part in the

mobilisations, thousands got arrested during actions, dozens got killed.

Shetkari Sangathana in Maharastra, the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU,

mainly Punjab and UP) and the KRRS in Karnataka are the biggest

organisations. These rural movements are titled ‘new’, because they

hardly ever address the question of land distribution, instead the

prices take center stage (fertilizer, electricity etc., and market and

state-guaranteed agricultural product prices). The forms of action are

‘of the activist type’: railroads are blocked, state officials are

denied access to the villages; agro-products are withdrawn from the

market, bills are boycotted... In parts of the movement women play a

decisive role, ‘women-specific’ demands are raised, amongst others

against the dowry-system, against alcohol abuse and for the same right

to land ownership. Shetkari has its own women’s organisation — in 1986

about 150,000 women gathered during a meeting — while the BKU represents

the rather patriarchal north.

In general the agrarian elite — the big and medium farmers, the upper

landowning castes — dominates the movement. Right from the beginning for

the majority of the rural proletariat these movements offered only

limited future promises. Shetkari regularly spoke positively about the

potential of the global trade agreement and during the founding

conference the issue of the ‘situation of the agrarian labourers’ was

dropped from the agenda. During the Bombay textile workers’ strike in

the 1980s Shetkari had better relations with the associations of the

small entrepreneurs of the trade and transport sector than with the

urban unions. The BKU didn’t even want to discuss the minimum wage for

agricultural labourers. During the end of the 1980s the more militant

actions were renounced more often given that it had become clear to the

leadership of the organisations that the leap into official politics was

about to happen (e.g. Shetkari-boss Joshi got the status of a minister

in 1989 and the chairman position of the permanent government council

for agricultural questions).

Brazil

Originating in the colonial plantation economy, an extreme polarisation

between large-scale land ownership and a class of landless workers

developed. Only in a few niches are small peasants able to sustain

themselves. Along with the doubling of the amount of land used for

agricultural production since the 1940s, the number of minifundias

(small family enterprises) doubled too. These enterprises are not a

‘product of disintegration’, but rather the outcome of a

latifundia-based economy (latifundia: large-scale landholding) and the

extension of agricultural industries. Out of a total population of 188

million nearly 5 million households are not able to live off their land,

and 4.5 million households don’t own land at all. Officially the number

of rural proletarians has halved since the 1970s. As a consequence of

mechanisation, wage-labour is on the increase in agricultural factories,

even in the form of permanent employment, while workers of small/family

businesses change employment between rural labour, wage labour in

agro-businesses or other kind of wage labour. At the same time the

increasing number of agro-factories and marginalised minifundias results

in forms of bonded labour becoming more common again. [8]

The MST was founded in 1984. The organisation has a membership of two

million, although there are sources which state significantly lower

numbers. In October 2007 17,000 people took part in its 5^(th) National

Congress.

The issue of land occupation was on the agenda right from the beginning.

The organisation refers to article 186 of the Brazilian constitution

according to which there is the legal right to occupy ‘unproductive

land’. The occupations are part of an effort to form a broad-based

organisation as part of the union movement. Three

political-organisational problems are at the centre of this effort: the

relation to the Brazilian Workers Party (PT), police/military repression

and the ‘education’ of the organisation’s own rank-and-file membership.

Parts of the MST membership are former rural labourers, children of

small peasants, migrants for whom the city ceased to be a destination.

They gather in camps pitched up alongside the central roads. It is an

intentional practice of the organisation that they are gathered,

educated and trained in the acampamentos, visibly at the road-side. They

live in simple huts made of plastic tarpaulin, and are known as ‘filhos

da lona prenta’ (children of the black tarpaulin). They grow food or

work in the surrounding areas, and their children go the school in the

nearby settlements or towns. In many cases a broad support-network is

built, with bus connections established. The camps are the starting

point for land occupations. The second part of the MST lives on the

actual occupied land, the settlements of agrarian reform. During the

first decade of its existence the MST tried to set up ‘production

cooperatives’ in those settlements. In most cases these efforts have

been stopped since the mid-1990s, given that differentiations along the

boundaries of family clans occurred and that many people didn’t see the

‘return’ to the land as being permanent. Mainly the younger folks leave

again, with about 30 per cent of the families leaving the settlements

after a few years.

Once Lula took over government the MST got under double pressure. The

MST always emphasised its independence from any political party, first

of all from Lula’s PT. Nevertheless the MST always received support from

the state, and agrarian and welfare policies are of major importance for

the MST’s ability to mobilise. The promised land reform did not take

place under Lula either: the government bets on production for export

and of agrofuels. In 2004 as many people were expelled from the land as

got hold of land through agrarian reform. Despite this fact the numbers

of land occupations have drastically shrunk since Lula took over

government in 2002: in 2003 there were still about 300, in 2004 there

were 150, in 2007 not even 50. The numbers of acampamentos have

alledgedly decreased by 60 per cent since 2003. Instead of carrying out

land reform Lula redistributed welfare money on a low level: today about

eleven million families receive the so-called Bolsa Familia, a kind of

‘family benefit’. As a result the life in the towns becomes more

attractive again, compared to the ‘hard life’ in the camps. ‘The people

from the urban areas have always been our target group, but now they

don’t want to return to the land and bear the hard life in the camps.

[9]

Bolivia

In Bolivia there is a landless movement, too. The Movimiento Sin Terra

(MST) was founded in 2000. Similarly to the MST in Brazil the

organisation comprises proletarians who ‘live in between countryside and

town’. Its strongholds are in the eastern provinces, where the

polarisation between agro-factories and landless/rural proletariat is

the most pronounced. Land occupations have been successful time and

again despite repression, and have resulted in the membership of the

movement increasing to 50,000. Shortly before Morales’ government took

over, the MST split: amongst other reasons over the question of whether

the movement should continue the land occupations in future. This

controversy was the entry point Morales’ government tried to use to get

a foot in the door: The movement’s participation in the governmental

debates concerning the constitutional assembly [verfassungsgebende

Versammlung] was only granted on the condition that the land occupations

would be suspended.

Central America: Honduras

There are two main reasons for the collapse of subsistence farming among

small peasants in Honduras: international agricultural regulation and

the proximity to the US. At the beginning of the 1990s rice — after corn

and beans the third most important food-stuff in Honduras — was produced

by 25,000 rice farmers; by 2005 their number had shrunken to 1,300. The

reason behind this development is the imports from the US. Between 1994

and 2000 the prices of the five leading rice importers decreased by 40

per cent while consumer prices increased by over ten per cent. For the

small peasants this meant that they are forced to eke out a living

changing between subsistence farming and work migration in a ‘double

sense’: some of them migrate to the US or to the industrial areas of the

Maquiladoras in Latin America; the survival of their relatives back home

is based on their money transfer. As a consequence more and more people

leave their soil, looking for different sources of income. The

production on their own patch of land just about covers the daily need

for food-stuffs.

La Via Campesina

...when it was founded in 1993 La Via Campesina was an expression of the

broad base and strength of the ‘New Peasant Movements’, but fifteen

years later the limitations concerning its political content (’the

peasants’) and organisational forms (’networking’) have become obvious.

It was not by chance that La Via Campesina was formed 1993 in Central

America and that between 1996 and 2003 the main office was situated in

Honduras. La Via Campesina was product of an initiative of peasant

organisations from North, Central and South America and Europe. The

1990s were ‘the decade of the NGOs’: many of the initial

member-organisations of Via Campesina were financially and

organisationally dependent on these NGOs. La Via Campesina learnt from

this and made an effort to become more independent. Since the 1990s the

‘global campaign for agrarian reform’ was a focal point of its

activities. Via Campesina criticised the impact of the land reforms

sponsored by the World Bank (’reforms determined by the market’) and

opposed these policies with demands for a ‘true land reform’: the

strategy of the organisation can be summed up as ‘expose and oppose’. A

strategic blend of media campaigns, well-publicised presence at big

global events and local support of peasant movements, but also meetings

with representatives of the FAO (the agrarian organisation of the UN)

and IFAD (International Fund for Agricultural Development, another UN

institution).

In the meantime the gains are evaluated according to self-defined

criteria: did we manage to impose the topic? Was it possible to put

pressure on political actors? Did they change their attitude? Did this

result in real changes? Criteria from the world of networking. But even

if we apply such criteria we can state as a matter of fact that

quantitatively not much has been achieved. Essentially there are two

reasons for this: Firstly, the form of the network too often replaces ‘a

political analysis of reality, often even impedes it (Riles, 2001,

Edelmann 2008). Secondly, the initial strength of the movement

(multi-faceted composition) has turned into a weakness (class

differentiations and political differences). In the Philippines and

India the situation is downright ‘blocked’, e.g. in India the KRRS and

the BKU (see above) are the main organisations of Via Campesina. These

two organisations often keep smaller, mostly proletarian groups ‘out’.

In consequence during the past years there have been various rows inside

the organisation.

Revolution instead of ‘Alliances’

The question of how workers and peasants would be able to get together

has been one of the questions of the 20^(th) century, perhaps the main

one. And for a long time the answer of a major part of the political

left was peasant revolution of one kind or the other. Even after the

global movement of 1968 Maoism seeped into the towns of the western

world — if only in the form of ridiculous attempts of party formation of

various self-proclaimed new CPs, but after all that was a global

phenomenon! In the long term however, ’1968’ was the final blow for

Maoism, as for any other developmental ideology. Today the peasants are

not pressed into service for catch-up capitalist development, today they

are called on as a force to check this development. In this sense, e.g.

James Petras assumes that the ‘New Peasant Movements’ are the vanguard

against imperialism in Latin America. And in this sense since Chiapas

and Seattle the anti-globalisation movement sees the ‘New Peasant

Movements’ at the front-line of the struggle ‘global south against

global north’.

Our short glimpse at the social composition of the various peasant

organisations sufficed to refute these assumptions. Disregarding all

theoretical-political differences the findings — be it of

left-wing/Marxist agro-experts or of ‘mainstream economists’ — are the

same: ‘semi-proletarianisation’ is the prevailing form of

proletarianisation, a situation which results in subsistence often not

being available as a ‘fall-back option’ any more. ‘Traditional farming’

[10] hardly exists anymore, and at the same time wage labour increases

on a global scale, including factory wage labour. [11]

Even the followers of an independent political representation of the

small peasantry criticise the ‘subsistence perspective’ as a view from

the ivory tower (e.g. Wienold 2007, Inkota letter 144). It has been the

strong point of the ‘peasant movements’ that they take the real

developments as their starting point instead of starting from ideologies

(’subsistence’) and romanticised pictures which are projected onto them.

During the last 35 years of crisis-attack the peasant movements have

seemed strong; firstly, because the workers’ movements have been weak;

secondly, because the ‘new peasant movements’ took as its starting point

the ‘uneven and nonuniform’ character of proletarianisation. Some

political approaches try to capture the relation between surplus value

production in the form of industrial commodity production on one side

and the production and reproduction of labour power — the precondition

for capitalist accumulation — on the other. In the 1980s some of them

seemed able to bring together these two poles (Fortunati, Caffentzis,

Meillassoux, Federici). Just like the factory as location for the

struggle of the producers, the labour market and family are places of

struggle over the production and reproduction of the commodity labour

force. In the meantime, based on this debate, G.Caffentzis from the

Midnight Notes has developed a ‘Labour-Power Production approach’. He

argues that the defence of ‘guarantees of subsistence’ against the

attacks of capital (expulsion from the land, cuts of welfare-state

benefits, the dismantling of the countries of the former real-socialism)

and the struggles over the ‘commons’ are the global front-line. This

seems to be an attractive approach given that it it doesn’t seem to be

too difficult to place oneself on the right side of the barricade, but

this idealising perspective is less and less able to clearly see and

understand the actual struggles. This perspective drifts towards a moral

denunciation of the working class in the north and by only focussing on

the ‘defence against the attacks of capital’ misses to notice the

potentials which emerge, e.g. in the class struggles in India or Egypt

(see related articles in the German issue of Wildcat). In China, as

well, the second generation of migrant workers, for whom the return to

the countryside is less and less of an option, indicates a political

re-composition of the working class.

Compared to such brand-new releases of ideology production, Marx’s

effort to relate the crisis of the Russian village community to the

crisis of capitalist production is way more up-to-date: today we

actually experience the formation of a global working class whose

conditions are immensely diverse, but who exist in direct relation to

each other. Against the background of an absoute and relative (to the

total world population) increase of wage labour in the north, south,

east and west, in the towns, in the country-side, in the factories, call

centres and agro-factories, we have to try to capture the global

perspective within forms of exploitation and work and of course within

the struggles against the subordination under the global capital

relation: how does a global working class constitutes itself within

global social cooperation as an acting subject?

At the beginning of this article we advocated finally getting rid off

Leninist and Maoist perspectives. We also have to get the perspective of

‘the struggle against neoliberalism’ out of the heads, the reformist

notion of wanting to ‘tame’ capitalism. [12]

Formulating his thesis of a ‘New Proletarity’ in 1994, K.H. Roth tried

to initiate a debate on the global ‘homogenisation’ under a global

capital relation. Given the formation of a global working class he posed

the question of ‘the tasks of the left’. The attempt failed, the thesis

of ‘homogenisation’ was misunderstood as a global alignment of living

conditions, the question concerning the formation of a global working

class was made defunct by petty theoretical quarrels. Now would be the

right time to restart from the ‘global patchwork’ of exploitation [13],

after fifteen years of experiences with and within the ‘new peasant

movements’, with ten years within various no-global movements, against

the background of the current food riots, the food crisis and the

so-called ‘climate-question’.

Literature

WestfÀlisches Dampfboot 2007

www.geocities.com

Studies No.12

Africa, Asia and Latin America, 2000

Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America; Zed Books 2005

Movements, April/July 2008; Baletti, Marc Edelmann, Saturnio M. Borras,

Xochtil Bada/J.Fox

Theoretical Review. (Caffentzis 2002:

www.commoner.org.uk

, S.13ff).

1998–2004, in the web:

www.radicalpolytics.org

Civilization. London: Verso

petras.lahaine.org

 

[1] ’The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half

of this century, which has separated us from the world of the past for

ever, was the death of the peasantry... Once the countryside gets

deserted, the towns begin to grow. The world of the second half of the

20^(th) century was urbanised on an unprecedented scale.« (Eric

Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914 — 1991)

[2] Since 1960 the absolute volume of transnational migration has

doubled: in 2005 185 million migrants were on the move, this was three

per cent of the world population. The regional concentration of

migration corresponds to the increasing polarisation of the global

society: while in the 1970s only half of the total increase of migration

reached the metropolitan countries, in the 1990s nearly the total

increase of migration ended up in Asia, Europe or the USA. Most of the

Latin American countries have become ’deployment countries‘.

[3] This quote stems from the German version of Lenin‘s works, it does

not seem to appear in the English translation of the mentioned two

texts.

[4] ”Preobrazhensky posits that the ’workers‘ state can consciously and

realize what, historically, the capitalist state had realized blindly

and bloodily — the transformation of the agrarian petty producers into

factory workers. (It was left to Stalin to realize this transformation

consciously and bloodily.)” The article originally appeared in: Critique

23, 1991

[5] See: Wildcat article ’Which way to the revolution please?‘ or Loren

Goldner‘s article ’Communism is the material human community‘

www.wildcat-www.de

www.geocities.com

[6] For further reading about the intense debate about Chiapas:

flag.blackened.net

[7] The ’old peasant movement‘ which emerged in the 1930s under the

dominance of the Communist Party turned more and more into a mass

mobilisation for the political parties — up to the coming into power of

the CPs in West Bengal and Kerala. Once it got hold of state power the

CP turned against the more radical wings of the rural movements. The

Maoist movements which appeared in the late 1960s continue to exist to

this day. This movement was formed mainly by agricultural labourers,

students and urban proletariat, less by peasants. Today the Maoist

movement — for example in Orissa and Bihar — has more or less turned

into a militarised army or established itself as local administrations.

[8] In recent years in Brazil 4,000 to 6,000 cases of ’debt-bondage‘ or

’new slavery‘ are officially denounced each year, most of them in the

bigger agro-businesses during the peak period of the harvest. The

penalties can be paid from the petty cash. In contrast to the ’old

slavery‘ there is no legal owner-ship of the person in question. Labour

is enforced by violence and ’indebtedness‘ (e.g. ’advanced food-stuff‘

has to be paid, meaning worked off).

[9] Quotation from the MST, quoted in the German newsletter Inkota 144,

June 2008

[10] ’Traditional farming‘ is a heavily debated notion. In the ’west‘,

due to industrialisation, farming wasn‘t that ’traditional‘ any more

from very early on. The current modes of farming in the periphery are

products of colonialism. Today ’traditional farming‘ is commonly

understood as a unity which employs only little or no alien work-force,

which produces for itself or only sells a small surplus product (family

farming)

[11] ILO figures from 2007: in 2006 there was an official working

population of 2.9 billion, this is 16 per cent more than in 1996. In

2006 out of these 2.9 billion 22 per cent work in manufacturing

industries, in 1996 it has been 21.5 per cent. The number of people

working in agriculture has decreased from 43 per cent in 1996 to 38 per

cent in 2006. In the same period the share of service industries has

increased from 35 per cent to 40 per cent. (lot of ’industrial work‘ is

hidden behind the numbers for agricultural work and service)

[12] For further reading: Richard Greeman, Dangerous Shortcuts — can be

downloaded here:

www.lulu.com

[13] K.H. Roth compared the spread out centres of industrialisation, the

patches of development and underdevelopment with the spots of a leopard.

K.H.Roth: Die Wiederkehr der ProletaritÀt, Dokumentation einer Debatte,

ISP 1994