MARGARITO MONTES PARRA The land question in Latin America
today The land question in Latin America and the Caribbean is of fundamental political importance. This is true both from the programmatic point of view and in terms of present political tasks in the class struggle. In our theory of permanent revolution the land question is situated within the dynamic of the revolution itself. In other words, it is not seen as a problem that must or can be resolved prior to the resolution of the basic problems of society, but rather as being intimately related to the settling of all the problems of the colonial and semi-colonial countries.
For Stalinist doctrine, which was dominant for many years in Latin America, it was fundamental to carry out a land reform as a basic democratic demand that would lead to capitalist industrialisation and then only in another stage would it be possible to deal with the question of the seizure of power and socialism. For the theory of permanent revolution, on the other hand, the land question is posed as a task closely linked to the proletariat's struggle for power. For example in Mexico the Stalinist, Lombardo Toledano!, put forward the following position:
We are not fighting for a socialist land reform, nor do we pose the land question as one of the tasks that has to be carried out for the achievement of socialism.
We want a national land reform which first of all facilitates industrialisation and makes possible the elimination of feudalism. Afterwards we will raise socialist tasks.
For Trotsky, the land question was clearly part of, and taken up within, the combination of democratic and socialist tasks. But one point worth emphasising is that at the time the theory of permanent revolution was formulated and when Trotsky was developing a series of theses about the backward countries, the land question was being posed in very undeveloped, backward societies. Today there has been big historical changes in the countryside. The penetration of capitalism in agriculture has been very deep-going.
62 International Marxist Review Capitalist penetration in the countryside Capitalist penetration has been going on for one hundred years in Latin America, so it is very difficult to assert today that sectors or aspects of exploitation take place within the framework of pre-capitalist modes of production. Capitalist development already dominates the exploitation of the peasant and the relations between the system of agricultural production (that can have pre-capitalist forms) and society as a whole.
This means that the struggle for land emerges in the majority of Latin American countries with a clearly anti-capitalist dynamic. Generally the struggle for land does not develop as a demand against a land-owning class opposed to the development of capitalism in the countryside, since the majority of the land-owning classes are now part of the most modern layers of the Latin American bourgeoisie. There are a series of countries where there has been radical land reforms and where a whole sector of the bourgeoisie has been expropriated. In Mexico, the struggle for land today is against the bourgeoisie of the major irrigated areas. In Bolivia, it is against the Oriente bourgeoisie based in the eastern region of oil/cocaine production, the most powerful sector of the rural bourgeoisie. In Central America it is against the big imperialist companies like those implanted in the most capitalist sectors in the Dominican Republic and throughout the Caribbean. In other words the national and imperialist landowners operate at the centre of the production processes of these countries ensuring that democratic demands concerned with resolving the land question will not come up in the context of two different revolutions—a democratic revolution settling the demands of a fight against pre-capitalist structures and then an anticapitalist socialist revolution once the working class is formed and strong enough. The dynamic of rural struggles will be both against capitalism and against the key sectors of the bourgeoisie in the vast majority of these countries.
It is obvious that the role of the working class has grown in most of the Latin American countries. The process of urbanisation and consolidation of the working class has advanced and has become a key element in the class struggle. The role of the working class is now not only strategic but it has greater numerical, economic and social weight. But this does not imply that industrial capitalist development left the countryside isolated from the impact of this development. On the contrary, there has been industrialisation, growth of capitalist relations in the cities, but at the same time a process of capitalisation and capitalist development in agriculture.
Generally most agrarian theorists (especially 'developmentalists') have put forward the idea that the countryside has been sacrificed to the city and have noted a sort of postponement of agricultural economic development. It is true in relative terms that there has been a real transfer of resources from the countryside to the cities, but one cannot ignore the fact that there has been an enormous capitalist penetration in the countryside. It is undeniable that the countryside has lost economic ground as a whole and
in all Latin American countries. Its weight in the economy has declined in many cases from 50% or 60% to an average of about 10% as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In some cases this latter figure varies
Clearly there has been a change in the ratio of rural population to urban population. In the majority of countries the rural population has declined from 70% of the total to only 30% today. But it is necessary to have a nonmechanical approach to such processes-concrete reality shows these figures still to have to be enriched with analysis. In Bolivia, according to United
Nations figures, the contribution of agriculture to the GDP went from 26% in 1960 to 18% in 1981, an 8% decline over twenty years. However the share of industrial production also decreased from 15% to 14% over the same period. Thus the fact that there is urbanisation does not necessarily mean there is also a process of industrialisation rapidly overtaking agricultural production. There was a stagnation in growth of industry's share in total production. Taking rural employment, it went from 52% in 1960 to 30% in 1980, while industrial employment only increased from 15%
So we can see that while in the majority of Latin American countries there has been a change in social processes, a change from rural society to urban society, this is not necessarily reflected in any fundamental industrial development substituting for agriculture's declining role in the economy. Instead there has been a growth in tertiary sectors and deformed
In Mexico today there are more than one hundred cities with between
100,000 and one million inhabitants. But if we look a little more closely at the existing relations of production in these cities we see they are not industrial cities but are still mainly dependent on commerce and agriculture.
In other words there continues to be an enormous interdependence with agrarian production relations. In reality there has been a transfer of the rural population to the cities without a radical transformation in its productive functions. Obviously we do not want to ignore the role of industrialisation, and of the processes generating poles of industrial development in many cities. But it is undeniable that the modification in rural production relations has not resulted in the predominance of a quantative growth of the industrial working class or of the rural population. Rather, these changes are accompanied by the emergence of another layer of the population-the neighbourhoods with very poor housing and service facilities. Capitalist development today in Latin America goes hand in hand with this 'marginalised' urbanisation. In these conditions the countryside is still of fundamental
Furthermore, over and beyond the picture we get from the percentages it needs to be pointed out that there has not been a quantitative decrease in peasant numbers. At the end of the Mexican revolution in 1920-21 the to 24%.
urbanisation.
urban dwellers, importance.
between 6% and 15.8% but no more.
The land question in Latin America today 63 the generation of the barrios, shantytowns and
64 International Marxist Review economically active population in the countryside represented about 70% to 80% of the total population. Mexico's population at the time was 14 millions. Today it is 76 millions. We live in a society which in social terms is more urban, but today there are more peasants than the total population at the end of the Mexican revolution. If we add in their families the peasant population rises to 35-36 millions. This gives an economic weight, a quantitative weight, to the unresolved land question in our society. This phenomenon is similar in the majority of Latin American countries, which does not mean that it exists in all of them or in the same way, but undoubtedly there is a general quantitative increase in peasant numbers.
Consequently we need to outline the characteristics of the land question today much more precisely. We have to understand that agrarian capitalism is today hegemonic. It has permeated and changed production relations in the countryside. The old agro-export capitalism of the 1880-1930 period has given way to a more complicated model of capitalist development than the industrial one. Today we see combined: the export of agricultural raw materials; a process of adaptation and expansion of the internal market; a process of subordination of the peasant economy to capitalism; a process of capitalist penetration subordinating the peasant economies in the majority of countries; the emergence in nearly all these countries of a very modern agro-industry which is not strictly oriented to the international market, but to the domestic one. This is a new phenomenon, because in the 1940s, 1950s, and even up to the 1960s most agro-industry in Latin America was concerned with processing raw materials for export only to the world market— refineries, slaughterhouses, coffee mills, wood mills, etc.
Since 1960, on the other hand, a whole series of branches in agriculture and agro-industry have developed that do not produce for the world market, but for the domestic market. The expansion of the food industry in Latin America, the development of food industry transnationals and the emergence of new agro-industrial products to meet rising demand in the domestic market due to the urbanisation process, involves the development of new, increasingly decisive, branches of agriculture. While in the past a certain group of crops predominated, like sugar, coffee and cotton, today in the majority of countries there is an enormous expansion of new types of crops like soya beans. Cultivation of these new crops is increasing rapidly, linked to the expansion of the agro-industry. Soya bean cultivation is connected with a development of the domestic market producing processed feed for cattle, chickens and also food for the urban masses. Agro-industry has also favoured the development of factory style stockrearing which absorbs a great deal of these processed feeds. Agro-industry is one of the key sectors of modern industry in Latin America and is largely controlled by various transnational companies. This is a common phenomenon in various Latin American countries. For example, in the Dominican Republic there are now about 150 modern agroindustries.
The land question in Latin America today 65
If we take Venezuela, 35 agro-industrial groups control 80% of the sector. In Mexico, the food industry is 92% controlled by transnational agroindustry. The latter dominates the domestic markets of all these countries.
This points to a change in agricultural production relations and leads us to look at the problem of the structure of the ruling classes in the countryside within a much more complicated framework than in the past. There has been a shift from the old model of territorial oligarchical bourgeoisies which combined the rural land-owning, national bourgeoisie proper and the indirect participation of foreign capital. This model predominated up to 1930. Afterwards there was a combination of national land-owning bourgeoisie and imperialist agro-industry which controlled exports. Today the territorial bourgeoisie still exists, especially in those cases where there has been no land reform and very severe defeats of the peasantry resulting in little change in these rural societies.
Capitalists do not always opt for direct ownership of land. In some countries, like Mexico, direct foreign investment in agriculture is only 1% whereas in Brazil transnational companies control, in many cases directly, 80,000 hectares. They do not have a strict preference to become land-owners and to locate their capital territorially. It depends on the pressure of the peasantry and the forms taken by the land reforms. But clearly the new agrarian bourgeoisie is more complex than in the past. It is possible to pin it down to a smaller territorial domain but with much more capital intensive investment than in the past. Super-intensive methods of drainage, abundant fertilisers/chemicals and over-mechanisation are used. In Mexico, there are irrigated areas where the number of tractors is greater than needed for rational farming. We are not talking here about a small district or a particular situation, but at least ten counties with more than 100,000 irrigated hectares. In the north-east of Mexico there are more than 1,600,000 irrigated hectares farmed with these super-intensive methods: over-use of fertilisers, mechanisation, rapid changes in crop systems and computerised participation in the international market.
This also causes very severe ecological deterioration due to overmechanisation and exaggerated use of fertilisers and chemicals. In some cases, and this is happening with cotton, there are so many fertilisers, pesticides and additives that the pests are becoming resistant, cannot be controlled and begin to affect other crops. There has already been cases of pesticides bringing about a degradation of the soil, of water, contaminating rivers and the sea.
There is a thorough-going modernisation of the production processes in many Latin American countries which produces a situation where the agrarian bourgeoisie is not simply seeking to buy up more territory or keep its land at all costs, but is continually changing its business. This is not a rural bourgeoisie totally separated from the rest of the productive processes. At the present time the majority of the key sectors of the agrarian bourgeoisie in Latin America are closely linked to the operations of the
66 International Marxist Review transnational agro-industries. This bourgeoisie is also tied up with commercial wholesale and retail companies, with fertiliser/farm machinery companies and with the control of big urban supermarket chains. A common case today in Latin America is for a big agricultural producer to be also an owner of a supermarket chain. In these conditions peasant struggles are not confronting a traditionally The role of the state backward, vulnerable sector of the Latin American bourgeoisie, but in many cases come up against the heart, the centre, of these bourgeoisies. They have to deal with the most hegemonic bourgeois sectors who have powerful alliances and this results in a dynamic of confrontation which is much more violent and deeper than in the past. Furthermore there has been a structural change in the relations of exploitation, in peasant-bourgeoisie relations, that is now mediated by the state. In Latin America the state has a fundamental role in the development of the productive process. In the past the imperialist bourgeoisies invested in infrastructure-they took on the job of levelling, clearing land, building roads, setting up irrigation projects, developing agro-industry and controlling credit.
Today it is the state, acting as a 'collective capitalist', that is responsible to a great extent for providing infrastructure and aid for agrarian capitalism. The state carries out large-scale hydro-electric projects, levels land, constructs dams and roads. In various countries it sets up banks for agriculture or mechanisms giving control of agricultural credit to the state. Prices too are regulated by the state. In other words a whole series of functions have been transferred on to a higher social level. The role of the state has become decisive. This has produced a change in the demands and the dynamic of peasant movements. To a large extent, peasant struggles take on the agrarian bourgeoisie, but it is also the case (and this is fundamental) that a significant number of rural struggles now focus on demands against the capitalist state. These demands take on the form of struggles for changing the conditions of production, of marketing, credit and distribution of agricultural products-a platform of demands for changing agrarian policies. This dynamic has changed the profile of peasant movements towards centralisation of the movement, towards the development of national peasant procomes a point in the maturing of the peasant movement when the need for test. Regional peasant movements may indeed continue to develop, but there a national blockade of the roads (as we saw in Bolivia), or of a national agricultural strike as in Peru and the Dominican Republic, or a national peasant march as in Mexico, begins to be raised as a demand, not just against one sector or another of the agrarian bourgeoisie, but as a demand for a change in the state's agricultural policies, for a change in the laws regulating this sector, a change in credit policy and in prices. A whole series of peasant demands become structured in a dynamic of centralisation and mobilisation.
The land question in Latin America today 67
This explains why there has been a change in the peasantry's forms of organisation; why on many occasions peasant movements choose to put off immediate regional struggles until links are established permitting them to centralise the protest and develop a process of direct and national confrontation against the state. So there is a change in the form of the rural class struggle directly related to the change that has taken place in agricultural production relations: the decisive weight of the state today; the dynamic of capitalist development in the countryside; and the form in which this new agrarian bourgeoisie appropriates the peasant-produced surplus.
The agrarian bourgeoisie is much more diversified although obviously the 'territorial' bourgeoisie and landowning capitalism continues to exist in Latin America. In many countries this sector is still hegemonic in the countryside. The struggle for land reform and for land remains a key element in peasant mobilisations. But at the same time we cannot lose sight of the fact that the agrarian bourgeoisie has gone through a process of diversification. There is a much more developed commercial bourgeoisie today. A transition is going on from the traditional agrarian bourgeoisie to a predominantly entrepreneurial, bureaucratic bourgeoisie and to layers of bureaucratic officials who have enriched themselves and play a key role in the exploitation of the peasantry.
In some countries the role of this bourgeoisie and the state bureaucratic layers becomes decisive. Over the last twenty years in Mexico-above all from the 1970s onwards—we have seen the structuring of a 'model' of state mediation between the peasantry and the transnational companies. In the case of tobacco cultivation we have on the one side the peasants, Tabamex in the middle as the main state enterprise, and the transnational cigarette companies on the other. It is the same thing if we take sugar production. There are the peasant sugar producers/workers, the 80% of sugar mills in the state's hands, and the transnational companies who take the refined sugar for food processing (chocolates, cakes, soft drinks, etc). This is the situation in most productive branches. We are beginning to see a process where the state is taking on more and more control of the development of agricultural raw materials processing while the transnational companies control the most developed and final parts of the agro-industrial chain-the production of the finished product for the consumer. This is also changing the role of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie and likewise the dynamic of the class struggle. The occupation of the mills and refineries is not so much carried out against imperialist agro-business as against state sectors which control pricing policy. This phenomenon generally happens in the most developed branches of agrarian capitalism.
The type of imperialist finance capital involvement in agriculture has also changed. There are still big imperialist latifundia (big landed estates) in most countries. However, today the foreign debt has more influence over the drawing up of agricultural policies and over state participation. International financial capital to a great extent determines credit for agriculture,
68 International Marxist Review infrastructure projects, the creation of irrigation areas, dams, etc. For example a great number of agreements have been reached between the IDB (Independent Development Bank), the BIRF (another international bank) and the Mexican government in which these bodies totally monitor infrastructure construction projects. International financial bodies dole out their loans only in instalments and assert the right' to decide how production relations should be developed inside these irrigation areas, which products should be produced and even specify that any changes in laws which they consider contrary to these projects would mean the suspension of the loans. Consequently we have a more subtle and complex imperialist intervention than in the past into agricultural development through research surveys, infrastructure construction projects and loans, related to the development of capitalism in these countries. The situation of the peasantry There has also been changes among the exploited masses in Latin American rural society. Leaving aside the possible exception of Haiti, forced labour in Latin America has in practice mostly disappeared. The different ways in which peasants were tightly oppressed inside the big estates has ended. This has not been replaced by the formation of a modern agricultural proletariat, but by two different processes. There is a 're-forming' of peasant layers—a shift from being strictly subordinated inside the landed estate (the latifundist economy) to becoming independent peasants with some land. The other process is the development of a seasonal agricultural proletariat.
It is not the complete proletarianisation of the labour force. The agricultural labourers are not 'freed'—they remain tied directly and permanently to capitalist companies in many countries. Some writers call this 'semi-proletarianisation' or 'semi-peasantisation'. The big capitalist companies use large amounts of seasonal labour-generally in the harvest period-and not at other times. So reproduction of this labour is not strictly determined by the cycle inside the modern capitalist companies. The reproduction of this labour partly takes place as a phenomenon only linked to a phase (a season) in the process of production. The rest of this labour force's reproduction takes place inside the peasant economy or in more complicated situations in the productive process. It produces internal currents of migration in our continent, workers who migrate from one region to another throughout the year. There are also international flows of migration; from Guatemala to Venezuela, from Mexico to the USA and so on. The reproduction of this labour power is divided up according to the season-partly reproduced in waged work and partly through work in the peasant economy.
This has had a great consequence on the structuring of the agricultural proletariat. An agricultural proletariat in the classic, exact sense of the term, completely separated from the means of production and thereby objectively open to trade union organisation, is not created. In Mexico the revolution
The land question in Latin America today 69 ended forced labour in a series of regions leading to the formation of large agricultural workers' trade unions which were able to organise massive strikes. This was related to the fact that these farm companies employed this labour throughout the year. But with the land reform this workforce was transformed into a migratory agricultural proletariat which moved about the country at different times of the year. So whilst these rural workers could participate in very explosive struggles at particular times-land occupations, week-long stoppages —it is practically impossible, from a structural point of view, to organise agricultural workers' unions. Such unions only exist in certain Latin American countries, for example in Costa Rica where the big banana plantations with their fixed labour forces provide the basis for trade unions. But elsewhere it is much more difficult because the bosses confronting the agricultural proletariat are also diversified.
Laws govern working class wage relations in many countries. But in most cases rural wage relations are not regulated by a minimum wage and there is a general tendency for piece-work wage rates to prevail. In other words, the sugar cane or cotton worker toils for 12 or 13 hours a day, with no job security, no minimum fixed wage and no social security. This results in the workers being very vulnerable in every sense of the word. For instance, if excessive rain destroys or floods the crops then they are laid off for a whole period without pay. The workers have no job security, no social or public benefit payments enabling them to maintain themselves. For example in Venezuela in 1977 the minimum wage for the industrial working class was 900 bolivars and the average agricultural worker's wage was only 200 bolivars. In Mexico in 1984 there is a legal minimum wage for agricultural workers of 670 pesos, but the farms which exploit Guatemalan migrant workers pay only 300, 350 or 400 pesos and force the workers, if they want to earn more, to work on piece rates working a much longer day, sometimes with the whole family participating. From the examples I have given it is clear that a deep-going and significant transformation of production relations and of the reproduction of this labour has occurred It is necessary to grasp its significance fully if we want to work out the correct sociological and political conclusions. The success or failure of the action of political organisations depends on this. The struggle for land The PCM, the Mexican Communist Party (today part of the PSUM), decided in 1975 that the struggle for land in the countryside was no longer important, on the basis of its theory that 90% of the labour force was proletarian. It put forward the position that the task in the countryside was to form agricultural trade unions. The project was a big failure. Why?
In Mexico, there is no possibility of forming stable trade unions given the migratory character of rural labour and the state's brutal repression against anyone attempting to do so. The state is ready to tolerate the existence of peasant organisations, but not agricultural workers' unions. One
70 International Marxist Review of the most serious problems is that the industrial working class does not take up the defence of the agricultural workers in any way. It does not consider these workers part of the working class. Clearly the problems of the disorganisation and dispersal of the agricultural proletariat could be overcome if the big industrial federations or even the large industry-wide trade unions took up the probems of rural workers. But the reality is that these trade unions show little concern for the working conditions of the agricultural proletariat. Consequently it is very difficult to develop trade union organisation in the countryside.
We in the PRT (Revolutionary Workers Party, Mexican section of the Fourth International went through an experience in the Comarca Lagunera region of Mexico. We managed to play a role in organising stoppages and demonstrations with contingents of 1700 agricultural workers. This was in the harvest period. We paralysed the harvest and demanded an increase in wages to at least the minimum wage. This was won, but immediately after the harvest was finished we were left with ten or twenty agricultural workers out of the 1700 who had mobilised. It was possible to organise with this group of 'cadres', for the mobilisations of the next working season, but there was no possibility of developing a real structure of mobilisation and organisation enabling us to overcome the problem.
Historically the main demand advanced by the agricultural proletariat has been the right to land, much more than the demand for wages. Unemployment in the countryside tends to lead to a struggle for land and there is an acceleration of this dynamic in a series of countries. This results in the demands of the agricultural proletariat becoming combined with the call for land reform in a much more complicated way than in the past.
Various types of struggle develop around the concerns of the peasantry. On the one hand there are the struggles by those peasants who have got land and are trying to defend it against the power of the bigger capitalist forces. They try to improve their economic situation through basic economic demands; increases in farm prices, better rates of insurance, credit or changes in agricultural legislation. On the other hand there is the struggle of an important sector of the agricultural proletariat which is not looking to swell the ranks of the industrial proletariat, but rather wants to join the peasantry.
This is partly explained by a more general phenomenon in Latin America which is related to the working class. In its programme, manifestos and demands the working class does not take up the land question. Thus the agricultural proletariat does not see itself as a brother/sister to the industrial workers and so, given its traditions of rural struggles, it orients to the peasantry, to becoming a peasant landholder, because it appears to guarantee more complete reproduction for its labour and families than through becoming a worker.
In Latin America today there is a new rural bourgeoisie, a new type of agricultural proletariat and a new type of peasantry which are different
The land question in Latin America today 71 from those that existed in the period when Mariategui wrote his thesis about the land question or when imperialism first developed in the continent. The Indian question Generally the Latin American left, both the communists and the Trotskyists, have frequently had an incorrect position on the Indian movements--that they were part of the agricultural oligarchy. This boils down to denying the existence of the Indian question. The Indian question in Latin America is a specific question, but it also is fundamentally important when working out a programme for the countryside. We also need to drop the traditional left position which in the last analysis accuses the Indian masses of racism. This is on the pretext that many Indian movements explain that the problem of peasant exploitation is related to the question of race and consequently they put forward old traditions as valid demands. But once we have said the latter is not historically possible, we have to complete our sentence by recognising that, in absolute terms, there are more Indians still in Latin America than ever before and all integrationist policies have failed.
In Bolivia, for instance, the land reform claimed to deny the existence of the Indian through its decrees saying 'there are no Indians, only peasants'. Indians have been refused an identity-they were 'liberated' ', 'transformed' into peasants. But Quechua, Aymara and other Indians are in a majority and are taking up their identity as an arm of liberation.
In Peru, the land reform of the Velasco? period denied recognition of the communal lands in favour of new associative forms of organisation and also imposed the change in name of the Indian communities to peasant ones. But the Indians survive. Today in Mexico there are 56 Indian languages with more than 124 linguistic groups covering an Indian population of 13 million. When the problem of integration was first posed it was a case of assimilating 3 million Indians, today there are 13 million Indians who speak their own language.
It is impossible to understand much of the processes of peasant reorganisation in our continent without grasping this demand for, and assertion of, Indian identity. We have to go back to Mariategui's Marxist tradition on this question and understand that the Indian question is a specific one, with specific demands and requiring a specific alternative. We have to support the Indians' right to land, to their autonomous popular organisation and to their democratic forms of community organisation and government. Within a perspective of democratic socialism we have to put forward, not the disappearance of the Indians, but their real integration in society as a whole. It is not possible to defend the rights of minorities in capitalist society and not to do so in a future socialist society. We must respect their traditions, languages and cultures.
Even in Mexico we can say that a part of the left is more backward than its own state and bourgeoisie. In the Guerrero highlands there is a radio station which broadcasts in the four Indian languages of the region. It has
72 International Marxist Review demonstrated it is possible to take up, through the radio, a series of cultural problems and an interpretation of the world based on Indian cultures. The same sort of project has worked in some regions in Bolivia. Such projects force the Indians to think differently, since all their lives they have been forced to read in a language which is not their own.
So for Marxists it is not a case of going back to the past, nor of learning one or two more languages—although that is important. The most important thing is to defend Indian culture, to develop it and facilitate its own dynamic integrated in society as a whole. This is even more vital if we take into account that in many countries these cultures are not minority traditions. In Bolivia and Guatemala the Indians are the majority of the population and the minority has imposed its language and culture over all society.
It is also essential to denounce the continuing massacres of the Indian population. There is anti-Indian violence by capitalist governments in Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala and Peru in particular. The genocide of Indians in Brazil and Guatemala is well known.
Many left organisations, even revolutionary organisations, have been slow to integrate the Indian question into their analysis and intervention. In many cases when this problem is not understood the consequences for the revolution can end up being fatal. In the case of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua they did not initially understand the Indian question and were confronted with the problem of the Miskito Indians who were in part won over to the counterrevolution. The Sandinistas have made great efforts since then to correct the situation, but despite this the political and social cost has been very high.
The Indian question is also a problem of intellectual colonialism and of non-recognition of reality insofar as certain Marxists try and talk about a country which does not exist. It is like those who speak in general terms about the working class, while not seeing there is the problem of a specific working class in relation to a given society. We can write thousands of pages about the world working class, but if we fail to see that a fundamental part of the working class is part of a race (black people for instance) and a national minority, suffering discrimination of all sorts, we would be talking about a world proletariat which does not exist. We need to incorporate the ethnic problem into our political line, our programme and demands. This is related to the form taken by the struggle for democratic rights in Latin America. Peasant organisation Clearly since 1970 there has been a cycle of big peasant mobilisations in Latin America. During the period of capitalist growth, especially between 1950 and the 1970s, there was a significant decline (albeit relative) in the development of peasant movements. But from 1970 to today there has been a continuity of peasant mobilisations, particularly at the end of the 1970s. Over the last ten years we have seen the emergence and extension of a whole series of new peasant formations in a number of Latin American countries.
The land question in Latin America today 73 They have very similar features. In the majority of countries there is a process of revitalisation of peasant organisations.
In Peru, a mass peasant organisation, the CCP (Peruvian Peasant Confederation) became rejuvenated and extended its influence through peasants breaking with the CNA, the peasant organisation created by 'Velasquismo' Even the latter finally broke with the present heirs of Velasco and joined in the mobilisation with the new organisations. In Bolivia in 1974-75 the military-peasant pact began to break up and the CSUTCB (United Peasant Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers) was formed in 1979. The MCI (Independent Peasant Movement) was set up in the Dominican Republic and the Coordinadora Nacional Plan de Ayala (Ayala Plan National Coordinating Body) in Mexico in the same year. The FENOC of Equador developed on a national scale during this decade and other organisations like ECUARUNARI and the old Ecuadorian Indian Federation (FEI) reemerged
In the majority of countries during the 1960s and 1970s, and even before, governments tried to strengthen or to create corporatist forms of peasant organisations, stable organisations controlled and led by government officials. In many cases these bodies were maintained just as superstructures, without any relation to rural problems. But in other cases peasant bureaucrats tried to make inroads into the communities through various mechanisms; rural taxes, technical aid, 'controlled' unrest and so on. In the final analysis they were seeking to convert these peasant organisations into clients of the bourgeois state. In Mexico where the land reform was carried out earlier, the government set up the CNC (National Peasant Confederation) in the 1935-1938 period. It was not a peasant organisation in the strict sense of the term, but was based on the then-existing peasant organisations and centralised them, forming an executive committee and an education committee which included representatives of the Department of Rural Affairs and Settlement, the director of the Credit Bank and the director of Indian Affairs—in other words converting it into what was clearly a government institution.
This phenomenon of forming corporatist bodies is different to what happened inside the working class, where the process of bureaucratisation led to the formation of a degenerate, conciliatory trade union leadership. But the trade unions are still workers' organisations and in many cases it is enough to change the trade union leadership in order to bring the trade union back to an independent class line.
In the countryside the form this process of state-wide organisation takes is much more complicated. Today it is no longer possible to envisage the recuperation of the corporatist peasant organisations. Rather what is needed is their destruction and the creation of new organisations, although in some cases there can be a radicalisation of the old organisations' leaderships at the time new organisations are being formed
This complex process often involves local splits. This can be triggered
74 International Marxist Review off by massacres—as in Bolivia with the Tolata massacre in the Cochambamba valley-that break the peasants' illusions in the government. But the whole organisation does not generally break from the start from the government. Local splits occur and small regional or local bodies are established or perhaps currents emerge inside the organisation. It is interesting to note that most of this reorganisation starts from peasants coordinating meetings without clear objectives, aiming only to exchange experiences, for local leaderships to get to know each other. Then after a series of local and regional meetings there is an initiative for building a new peasants' organisation. Of course this does not mean that all these processes are absolutely outside of the old structures. For example, the Peruvian CCP was founded in 1947 and the Ecuadorian FENOC in 1963.
These splits and ruptures are often related to a shift in government policy which-given the structural capitalist crisis, the changes in the agrarian bourgeoisie and the development of agrarian capitalism with new production methods-dumps the previously implemented reformist policies. Generally this meant the end of their timid land reforms. This process was very clear in Colombia. The Llera Restrepo government tried to set up a 'clientalist' plementing a very limited land reform. This 'reform' ended at the beginn- peasant organisation linked to the Liberal Party through iming of the 1970s producing a radicalisation of the ANUC national peasants' confederation which led to 2,000 land occupations in 1971 in support of a new land reform. In fact such actions resulted in more land being distributed than in all the previous forty years. In the Dominican Republic, Pedro Lopez, leader of the MCI, has demonstrated that following the same rate of land distribution as that implemented in the official land reform it would take 240 years to give land to the 500,000 families who demand it. This straightforward basic demand is taken up by the MCI which recognises the necessity of developing the struggle for land in a precise way in advance of the dynamic of the development of reformist policies. If we take the case of Mexico, the government decision to declare the end of land distribution was of fundamental importance which, given the existence of rural unemployment, produced a widespread radicalisation of the peasant organisations. When examining the radicalisation of the peasant movement we must understand the relation between government policies and the crisis. In Latin America today three different phenomena are combined. One is the crisis of traditional agricultural crop production and concomitant with that the terrible unemployment in agriculture. Another element is the crisis of the traditional peasant economy with the emergence of the new agricultural system which I discussed in the first part of this report. The coming together of these two crises means that the overall problem has become more explosive because in the past there was a symbiosis between the peasant economy and the expansion in production of agricultural raw materials. With semi-proletarianisation the peasant worked six months on the big agricultural
The land question in Latin America today 75 enterprises and six months on his small family plot. But when irrigation and mechanisation developed, followed by the deepening of the crisis and the fall of raw material prices, the industrial zones and commercial agriculture were beginning to cut back on labour at a time when already higher levels of technology opened the possibility of eliminating a big percentage of the labour force. The result was that a great number of peasants abandoned the land and emigrated to the cities, but in general there was an upsurge of radical protests and struggles for land.
The third decisive feature of the crisis underlying the peasant mobilisation is the change in the overall relation of complementarity and symbiosis between the countryside and the city. In the majority of countries the relation between the rural crisis and the general crisis of capitalism produces an explosive combination which alters the conditions under which the exploitation of the peasant masses are maintained. One aspect which has to be integrated here is the inability of bourgeois governments to effectively carry through reforms in the agrarian structure and to maintain durable populist relations with the peasant masses. The tremendous failure of the corporatist policies of the Brazilian, Bolivian or Peruvian generals or Balaguer's reforms in the Dominican Republic, to take just a few examples, is explained in the last analysis by this combination of the agrarian crisis with the general crisis of world capitalism and above all that of semi-colonial capitalism.
One phenomenon we have to note if we want to establish a solid basis for an important part of our political approach is the process of formation of a new peasant vanguard which is radically different from that of the 1920s or 1930s in Latin America. Today's vanguard does not have the same illusions in bourgeois-liberal populism nor its ideology. This is seen clearly in Bolivia, Mexico, Peru and even Colombia. As we have already established there is a combination of phenomena, a shake-up inside the peasantry, an understanding that the bourgeois state cannot supply the goods and the arrival of new political currents active within the peasant movements.
A number of currents have had a big role in this process: radical or socialist Christians who have formed organisations and cadres; student sectors of Maoist leanings who in many countries went to live in the countryside and played an important part in forming peasant leaderships; and the Trotskyists, with significant influence in Mexico and Peru. In Central America, the Sandinistas and the Guatemalan and Salvadorean leaderships have played this role of developing and consolidating this layer of peasant leaders, producing revolutionary cadres of extraordinary quality.
The majority of the peasant organisations that have emerged from this process have defined themselves as anti-capitalist, including in their platform of demands the struggle for power. In the case of the Peruvian CCP and the Mexican peasant organisations the central slogan is "Today we are fighting for land and also for power'
76 International Marxist Review The worker-peasant alliance and the revolutionary party Generally the worker-peasant alliance has been considered in a mechanical way as a sort of convergence of the workers' movement with the peasant movement: each side would develop separately and then, at a given moment, the revolution or the pre-revolutionary situation would arrive and automatically the workers and peasants would come together. Recent experience in Latin America suggests that the process is much more complex, requiring a very clear political mediation—the formation of socialist-minded peasant cadres. This is a key problem for building a revolutionary party. I am convinced that Lenin's theory of class consciousness as presented in What is to Be Done and Left-wing Communisman Infantile Disorder functions in respect to the peasantry. As the peasantry learns through mobilisation, identifying its class enemies, a sector becomes differentiated as its most conscious layer. Then transmission of a revolutionary programme operates through the party and its implantation in this sector. But this implies that the party is not, as some comrades seem to think, a sort of intelligent being talking to a mass of donkeys, who have to listen to the revolutionary programme being explained. The party has to participate in struggles and apply the method of the Transitional Programme. This means starting from the concrete struggles of the peasantry and deepening the peasantry's class consciousness and understanding of socialism on the basis of concrete experience. This poses a challenge to the revolutionary party itself, how to intervene in the peasant movement, how to develop independent forms of peasant organisation, how to tailor its programme and activity to the needs of the peasantry and so on.
I do not think that any revolutionary party in Latin America can today advance the idea that it is going to build exclusively inside the working class. The need to build the party simultaneously in the workers' movement, the urban non-working class poor and among the peasantry is, given the particular conditions of each country, part of our strategic conception of party development. If we do not do this we effectively leave the land question and the peasantry on one side, for later. It is not sufficient to have a layer of peasant supporters or "clients' as one might even put it. We have to form socialist peasant cadres who participate in the leadership and building of a revolutionary party. This obliges the party to have a programme for the countryside, including all the demands related to the land question and rural transformation within the specific framework of each country.
The party which is narrowly workerist in practice will be ineffective, including in rooting itself in the working class. A party which defines itself as a 'workers' party in a workerist sense is generally only linked to one sector of the working class. Consequently it will have tremendous difficulty in linking up with real popular movements, because it has not integrated the methods and dynamics of other sectors of the masses in the overall anticapitalist struggle.
The land question in Latin America today 77 Notes 1. Vincente Lombardo Toledano. Mexican lawyer, trade union leader and founder of the Confederation of Mexican Workers. Direct representative of the Stalinised Third International without being a member of the Mexican Communist Party. Later founded the Partido Popular Socialista, a Stalinist party linked to the
Kremlin. In 1968 justified the student massacre. Always an ally of the ruling PRI. 2. Jose Carlos Mariategui (1895-1930). Celebrated Peruvian Marxist. Though a founding member of the Peruvian Socialist Party (the Communist Party) he never adopted the Stalinist schema of revolution for Latin America. 3. In October 1968 the military, led by Juan Velasco Alvarado, overthrew the
Belaunde regime and established the 'revolutionary government of the armed forces'. It did carry out some limited reforms, including a 'land' reform, but its goals were to modernise the economy in favour of the national bourgeoisie.
Most left forces capitulated to the regime. A notable exception was Hugo Blanco, the Trotskyist peasant leader. History has shown that his denunciation of the limits of the government cooperatives and land redistribution have been justified
In his book, Land or Death. Peasant Struggle in Peru (New York: Pathfinder
1972), he passes judgement in the following way:
"The agrarian reform law, despite all its limitations, tends to destroy the latifundia, spur production, and create a layer of peasant petit-bourgeoisie with a purchasing power allowing them to be incorporated into the capitalist market' (page
146).
ANATOMY
In response to this challenge to the programmatic gains and perspectives of the movement, in a special issue of International Viewpoint,
Ernest Mandel restates the political foundations of the Fourth International as well as its views on the tasks and orientation of revolutionists
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On August 17 1985 the leaders of the
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Fourth International.
This decision came after several years of debate in which political and organisational differences continued to deepen.
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OF A SPLIT International VIEWPOINT ALLITANT In defence of the Fourth International - against the split of the Australian Socialist Workers Party
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