Rise of Struggle in the by Esteban Morales he Coordinadora Campesina Revolucionaria Independient
CCRI - Independent Revolutionary Peasant Coordinatin Committee) was founded at a meeting in Mexico City on March 29, 1977. Leaders of the regional organizations that had led the most important struggles of the Mexican peasantry of the past fifty years participated in founding the CCRI. The organizations represented at the meeting were: the Independent Peasant Front of the state of Sonora (FCI), the Independent Peasant Union of Sierra Norte de Puebla and Centro de Veracruz, the "Plan de Ayala" Canecutters Union of the state of Morales, the September 28 Independent Peasant 1. The Mexican peasant movement During the 1960s the agrarian problem highlighted the historic and structural limitations of Mexican capitalism in all its sharpness. Two central problems dominated the attention of the Mexican state. First, the sharp economic crisis racking Mexican agriculture, a crisis in which structural and conjunctural factors were combined and which served as the backdrop for the sharpening of the class struggle in the Mexican countryside. Second, acute manifestations of this class struggle in the countryside alerted the ruling classes to the dangers inherent in an extension and deepening of mass struggles in the country. The violent features these struggles assumed were the best indicator of the real dangers that would 18
Mexican Countryside
Movement of the state of Veracruz, the Independent Peasant Movement of Sinaloa, the Popular Front of Zacatecas (Fresnillo region), and the Independent Peasant Movement of Colima. The meeting was also attended by comrades of a propaganda organization called Promotion of Rural Development as well as by members of the political leadership of the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT — Revolutionary Workers party), the Mexican section of the Fourth International. In the following article we will analyze and describe each of these organizations and indicate their im portance for the class struggle in the country. await the bourgeoisie and its state if such mass struggles were left with no solution, or at least with no outlet. It is thus no accident that the agricultural sector now constitutes the most important focus of the policy of President López Portillo. Mexico is a country which has succeeded in acquiring many of the features which bourgeois theorists consider indispensable for agricultural development. It has implemented one of the deepest and most extensive agrarian reforms of any semicolonial country. As of 1970 there were about 22,700 small farms with a total area of 60.5 million hectares, of which 11.7 million hectares were cultivated; the total number of small farmers was 2.5 million. This means that these farms held 50.6% of cultivated land, with an area pro-
FRENTE ZAPAT portionately equal to the total area of agricultural lands in the country. The extension and deepening of the agrarian reform, even with its imbalances, resulted from historical factors. In fact, the Mexican peasantry was the social class which participated most actively in the Mexican revolution at the beginning of this century, and although the peasant armies, symbolized by the liberating army of the south commanded by Emiliano Zapata and the Division of the North commanded by Francisco Villa, were defeated by the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois armies of Obregon and Carranza (more because of the lack of a working-class political leadership and a revolutionary party than for military reasons, the threat of mass peasant insurrections has hung over the country constantly. In this sense, the agrarian reform acted mainly as a preventive measure for the bonapartist state, which combined this reform with brutal and shameless repression of the peasant movements. Land distribution and repression have been the two most outstanding features of the state's policy toward the peasantry. The distribution of land profoundly weakened the country's big landlords and has placed even the agrarian bourgeoisie under the hegemony of the bonapartist state, which the landlords have relied on for protection against the peasant movement. Repression has enabled the state to exercise iron control over the peasants, who have been brought under state domination through the complementary policies of repression and agrarian reform, as well as through corruption of peasant leaders and the establishment of illegitimate and traitorous peasant organizations manipulated by the state itself. But the state has been unable to establish a permanent bureaucracy through which to dominate the peasants the way the bureaucracy dominates the workers movement. Thus, it has been compelled to control the peasants through direct collaboration with state functionaries. Another of the key mechanisms in controlling the peasants has been continuous state encouragement of regional bosses who serve the interests of the state and act as local powers over the peasants. Finally, state populism, combined with religion and patriotism, have been the crowning elements of the system of state control over the Mexican peasantry. In recent years the state has tried to rationalize and centralize its control of the peasants by unifying the official peasant organizations into a single structure centered around the state structure par excellence, the CNC (National Peasants' Confederation). In 1974, under the direct auspices of then president Luis Echeverria, the Pacto de Ocampo was created toward this end. The new organization included the four largest peasant confederations, the CNC, CCI, CAM, and UGOCM-Jacinto López. Echeverria's project was to form a single national confederation, but the interests of the peasant bureaucracies which remained outside the CNC prevented him from doing so, since the existence of their own confederations guaranteed them direct access to state posts and The second element of the agrarian question in Mexico is that concurrent with the agrarian reform the state has concentrated on developing an extensive productive infrastructure for modern agriculture. This productive infrastructure, based mainly on the creation and equipping of wide irrigated districts, has been part of the strategy of dependent capitalist development of the postwar period and has enabled the bourgeoisie to respond to the growing needs of accumulation of private capital within the imperialist world economy. This is because Mexico has been such an excellent supplier of raw materials for industry and food manufacture in the United States as well as a captive market for the influx of North Americar products and technology. In the irrigation districts the state has encouraged the formation and strengthening of an agrarian, commercial, and financial bourgeoisie closely linked to imperialism. At the present time both fundamental elements, the agrarian reforms and the agricultural productive infrastructure, are suffering a severe structural crisis which highlights all the
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MEXICO limitations of the bonapartist political project and the project of the dependent capitalist development of the country. In fact, the Mexican agrarian reform is now caught in an impasse. It is consequently impossible for the state to maintain the pace of preventive land distribution to landless peasants, who now number more than the farmers (in 1970, when there were 2.5 million farmers, there were 3.5 million landless peasants). The levels of structural unemployment and underemployment in the country dre extremely high and are especially acute in the rural areas: some 68% of the work force in agriculture is openly or disguisedly unemployed. The disorganization provoked by the state, the extreme fragmentation of cultivated land among the peasants, and the concentration of productive wealth are some of the most important features of this structural crisis. 2. The agricultural crisis of the 1970s. Inequality and dependence Mexico is now experiencing a severe economic crisis whose obvious expressions are the decline in production, the growing foreign debt, inflation, the increase in unemployment, the increase in national migrations and immigration out of the country, etc. The agricultural crisis is part of this more general crisis. In a certain sense the agricultural crisis preceded the more general economic crisis and prepared its outbreak. The features of this agricultural crisis began to emerge after 1965, but its full magnitude became evident in 1972, the year in which agricultural exports ceased to rise. Massive grain imports were necessary and the economic exhaustion of broad areas of the irrigated districts became clear. The present agricultural crisis combines a series of conjunctural features and structural features of a dependent agriculture which is uneven socially and regionally (as is the general situation in the country in the last instance). The agrarian reform has been unable to resolve the problem of the country's social inequality. Official statistics speak eloquently on this point: In 1970 some 38.2% of the country's farms had annual production values of 1,000 pesos or less and accounted for only 2.3% of the value of total agricultural production. At the other extreme, 4.7% of farms had production values of more than 100,000 pesos and accounted for 30.3% of the value of total agricultural production. According to another classification, again as of 1970, 51.3% of farms generated less than one-sixth of the total value of agricultural production (15.3%). At the other extreme, 13.9% of farms generated more than two-thirds of the total value of production (69.7%). Inequality is also striking in the matter of agricultural infrastructure. As of 1970 some 46.5% of the total number of tractors in the country were located in the northern region. In 1974 only 15% of the land under cultivation in the northern irrigated districts was without fertilizer. The unfertilized areas in the south included about 55% of the land area. The figure for the center was 33%. An unequal situation also 20 prevails in the realm of irrigation. In 1975 some 64.1% of the farmers using irrigation owned only 20.5% of the area under cultivation (75.5% of them were small farmers), while 2.9% of users controlled 25.8% of the properties of more than 30 hectares and an agricultural area proportionally greater than one-third of the total. According to data compiled by the 1970 census, 12.2% of all farms classified as greater than 5 hectares accounted for 41.8% of cultivated land, 48.4% of irrigated land, 47.9% of total capital, 73.1% of agricultural machinery, and 61.2% of expenditure on agricultural technology; they produced 48.7% of the total value of agricultural production. These farms are also polarized internally, for only 13.9% of them are in the higher levels. Of the properties of less than 5 hectares, 95.3% (580,001 farms) are small subsistence plots. This overall situation shows that the division between ruling classes and dominated classes in the Mexican countryside is absolutely obvious. Social inequality is glaring wherever one looks and in spite of the agrarian reform and the entire process of sixty years of an agricultural policy supposedly implemented in the interests of the peasantry, the sole reason for being of Mexican agriculture is to serve to accumulate capital in the hands of the industrial, agricultural, and financial bourgeoisie. And this is a bourgeoisie which is not strictly national or Mexican but is directly associated with imperialist capital. At first sight it could appear that imperialist capital has little importance in Mexican agriculture. In 1970 direct foreign investment in agriculture was only 1.1% and in 1975 it was reduced to only 0.55%. Nevertheless, the mechanisms of domination are much more complex than may appear from a superficial analysis. The dependency of the country has imposed specific features on Mexican agriculture. The latter may be divided into two spheres: 1) traditional export products, such as copra, coffee, sugar cane, henequen, etc. where backward methods of land exploitation and labor predominate; 2) the modern sector, where wage labor, modern technology, mechanization, and the use of industrial equipment predominates. The three important elements of the latter sector (technology, equipment, and machinery) are controlled by imperialist capital, primarily North American. In both sectors imperialist control of the Mexican agricultural economy finds its greatest expression in its control over the trade in agricultural products. And the direct effect of this control is that the cycles of ups and downs in Mexico are determined in accordance with the cycles of world trade. The agricultural crisis of the 1970s has been gestating for a long time. During a prolonged period Mexican agriculture registered one of the highest rates of economic growth anywhere in the world (exceeded only by Japan and Israel). This was based on the process of bringing new land under cultivation, constructing modern irrigation works, and most important, the boom in agricultural exports. During a thirty year period from 1930 to 1960 the value of agricultural production grew at an annual rate of 12.3% (at current prices), with a growth rate of 9.7% in profits and 2.3% in the area of land cultivated. Production of the basic agricultural products (corn, wheat, beans, and rice) grew at an annual rate of 3.9% during this period, although growth during the
best years of the postwar period (1945-55) averaged 5.8%. From 1940 to 1960 raw materials for export rose at an average annual rate of 8.7%, which generated currency for imports. During the 1960s agriculture grew at an annual rate of 3.8%. Nevertheless, during the second half of the decade (that is, 1965-70), the annual increase was only 1.6%. During the period 1970-74 agriculture fell into crisis, registering a negative yearly growth rate (-0.4%); exports ceased, agricultural imports rose, the total land area seeded declined, etc. According to the latest report of the Bank of Mexico, the growth rates of the major products were negative in 1976: cotton -1.1%; rice -28.9%; sugar cane -5.0%; tomatoes -19.0%. Although state emergency policies have reduced agricultural imports by 37.7%, agricultural exports have nevertheless been unable to increase and at least two products have fallen into crisis (henequen and sugar cane). In fact, the decline in the world market price of henequen from $1.50 a kilogram to $0.50 a kilogram has lowered sales of this fiber from 80 million metric tons to 30 million. In addition, a sugar crisis has recently broken out violently. In 1974 Mexico exported 3.5 million metric tons; in 1975 it exported only 1.64 million tons, and in 1975 exports were zero. Substantial imports are expected to be needed for 1977. Such is the panorama of the crisis of Mexican agriculture. It constitutes the backdrop of the peasant movements of the 1970s. Of course, the agricultural crisis has not had the same effects on everyone. The big agricultural bourgeoisie has made economic changes to respond to the crisis and has succeeded in coming through as well as possible. It has been able to substitute products, making changes according to the evolution of the crisis, and withdrew its capital from the country before the devaluation: of the peso. But the smallholding peasant and the agricultural proletarians and semiproletarians who have no land and are out of work have suffered radical cuts in their living standards and even their ability to survive. They have responded vigorously through land seizures, a new rise in their struggle for land, which in the last instance is a struggle for survival itself. This whole somber picture is topped off by the closing of the northern border (the border with the United States), which has made rural migration more difficult and rounds out the complete picture of the material basis for the Mexican peasant movement. Imperialism today cannot respond with a new stage in the industrialization of the "third world, " since it is precisely industry which is now in crisis. Nor can it turn the agricultural crisis around, for that would require altering the mechanisms of accumulation to the advantage of agriculture. The most that has been proposed is a rural policy based on small-scale irrigation works (not even big districts), the creation of seasonal farming districts, and finally a policy of unproductive and inflationary hiring of the peasant population, who the system is incapable of employing productively but who can be underemployed by using the financial surpluses of imperialism, which is ever increasingly subjecting the country to its will.
3. The CCRI: a programmatic name The CCRI is a coordinating body of various regional peasant organizations whose structures were forged in the course of months and years of struggle in the various regions. The coordinating body is intended to overcome the limitations of the regional peasant struggles, to provide a national perspective for the struggle while at the same time making concerted actions by the peasant movement on a national scale possible. But it is precisely a coordinating group, because in this period we cannot go beyond the formation of a body with a national leadership recognized by the peasant masses as well as the leaderships of each region. This is our fundamental weakness. All the regional peasant leaders agree that a national organization is needed to confront the bourgeois state and the official bureaucracy on a national scale, but they know from many years' experience that the existing national organizations, which have been created officially, have betrayed their interests. They know, because direct experience has taught them, that a regional struggle is more effective than placing confidence in the leaders of the national organizations. This is the contradiction which the coordinating body seeks to overcome. On the one hand it aims at permitting direct collaboration among the genuine and authentic peasant leaderships while totally respecting the local autonomy of the leaderships that arise in concrete actions. Second, by permitting contact and common action among these leaderships, it should pave the way for construction of a genuine tested national leadership for the peasant movement. For political reasons which correspond to their own conception of the struggle, the peasant leaderships that make up the CCRI specified in its name that it is revolutionary and independent. All the regional leaders have gone through the long and oppressive experience of the legal proceedings of peasant applications and depositions. They all know the value of official promises. For years they have been manipulated and misled in one way or another. Their own experience has taught them that the road of legal application, of petitioning state functionaries, of placing confidence in their promises, is the longest and most costly road to winning satisfaction of their demands. They have thus come to rely on their own regional mobilizations, the method of direct revolutionary action. Such methods include the seizure of land and water supplies, peasant marches and meetings, armed self-defense against local bosses and the government, and so on. Thus, what is needed today is to act directly to compel the state to resolve the problems and to utilize other forms of struggle as complements to direct action. They proposed that the peasant coordinating body be independent because they know from experience how manipulative the government's policy is and they therefore want to stand independent and opposed to it. They also know the function of the Pacto de Ocampo and define themselves as independent of the official traitorous leaders and confederations, which have always bargained with the interests of the peasants.
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MEXICO 4. The organizations of the CCRI In what follows we will rapidly describe the importance of each of the regional organizations that make up the CCRI in order to demonstrate the significance of the attempt at peasant organization in which we are participating. Frente Campesino Independiente (FCI) The Independent Peasant Front (FCI) was formed in the heat of the agrarian struggles in Valle del Yaqui between October 1975 and September 1976. The Valle del Yaqui region is perhaps the most important agricultural zone of the country. Its irrigated areas total more than 260 million hectares. It is the most advanced region technologically, with the most modern processes of agricultural production and the best service infrastructure of any rural area of the country. It is located in the southern part of the state of Sonora, a key area of the northwest, Mexico's leading zone of capitalist agriculture. The agricultural economy of Valle del Yaqui fell into crisis in the 1970s. On the one hand, as of the mid- 1960s reductions began in the cotton-growing areas of the zone, which absorb great amounts of labor (111 working days a year per hectare), basically on the lands of the neo-latifundistas (at the end of the 1960s, 45% of cultivated land was owned by private plantations). On the other hand, the rise in the guaranteed price of wheat stimulated an increase in the land devoted to wheat production. In general, we have calculated that during the period 1970-75 between 30,000 and 40,000 jobs were lost in Valle del Yaqui as a result of the conversion of land from cotton production to wheat, soya, and other products which use less labor. Ever since the land distributions under the Cárdenas regime there has been a large number of land applicants in this region, with people submitting petitions year after year. In the areas where there are jobs, at least for a good part of the year, they were able to get by. Hence, these land applicants were actually agricultural proletarians who lacked, and still lack, class organizations and who are considered "landless peasants" by state policy. This is a historical phenomenon of total absence of class consciousness and of assumption of a different class character. Toward the end of 1975 this mass of unemployed agricultural workers - the land applicants - began to carry out desperate actions. The desperation was reflected in their seizures of large estates. The San Ignacio holdings in Valle del Yaqui, for example, were seized in the name of a four-year-old child. The repressive forces responded brutally, murdering the peasants, especially their leaders. In this situation two peasant leaders, Ramiro Castelo and Manuel Ruiz, decided to take a more radical road of struggle than that which had been followed in San Ignacio. Their idea was not to invade any estate at random but to seize a strategically located one. They selected farm "407, " which has a series of installations in the center of the estate and is surrounded by a wooded area. They decided that they should not struggle through 22 seizing isolated estates from which they could be easily dislodged by the police but to seize land in a concentrated manner, with various nuclei of land applicants. Finally, they decided there was "no point in getting killed" and seized the land along with armed peasants. Their strategy of struggle was based on three points: 1) to use direct action against the state by seizing the land; 2) to carry out the seizures through a concentration and coordination of forces; 3) to organize the armed self-defense of the peasant masses. The overall result of this strategy was to create a crisis of great magnitude for the state, which was forced into confronting the determination of the peasants to obtain land or die trying. For several months the problem of Sonora became a national political issue occupying the front pages of the newspapers. An intense polemic arose within the state over how to resolve the problem. This polemic was most sharply expressed in two presidential decrees: to temporarily transfer the headquarters of the Secretariat of the Agrarian Reform to Obregon City in Sonora and to hold a meeting in Obregon of the entire cabinet, along with the state governors, to discuss the agrarian problem. The invasion of "407" triggered a severe crisis within the ruling class. The National Confederation of Small Property (CNPP) was divided, with the more petty-bourgeois wing supporting a reformist solution and the big neo-latifundista agrarian bourgeoisie calling for a repressive solution - or a commercial one (under which the state would buy their land for 1,500 million pesos, or 40,000 pesos per hectare). This faction split out of the CNPP and founded the National Agricultural Union (UNA). In the end Echeverria decided to take 100,000 hectares from the bourgeoisie, 37,000 of which was irrigated land, and distribute it among the peasants. Not among the peasants in struggle, who received a total of only 3,500 hectares, but among the peasants controlled by the Pacto de Ocampo, the aim being to destroy the struggle of the FCI. Because of this state maneuver the peasants were compelled to accept 5 hectares each instead of the 10 hectares due them by law. The FCI is now facing the threat of a counter agrarian reform that would return land to the landlords as well as a state offensive to impose a 3% tax on agricultural production in all the farms of Sonora. The FCI has been temporarily weakened by the state maneuver, but at the present time it still represents the only alternative pole to official policy in the region, and its political prestige among the peasant masses has risen, not only locally, but nationally as well. The "407" struggle also caused a clear line-up of the forces of the people against the bourgeoisie. The workers and peasants, the small farmers and agricultural workers, and even the low-ranking functionaries of the state and the official organizations sided with the FCI. The ultimate possibilities of a mobilization such as that of the FCI were demonstrated by the adherence of the Yaqui tribe, a historic opponent of the despotic Mexican regime, whose deputy chiefs announced the tribe's decision to stand permanently with the forces of the peasant movement, "arms in hand, " as the public declaration said. (To be continued in the next issue of INPRECOR.)
debating how to fight bureaucratic rule
Currents in the Polish Opposition by A. Dupain The article below presents an analysis of the present situation of the Polish opposition and the major tendencies within it. The article is followed by excerpts from some of the major documents referred to in the analysis. As far as we know, none of them has been published in the West before.
oppositionists bein taken in for questioning; a hunger strike by eleven people in a Warsaw church protesting against repression. The situation in Poland grows more tense day by day. The bureaucracy has decided to strike a heavy blow against the intellectual opposition, unconcerned that its "liberal" image may be tarnished. The massive response of the students of Cracow, thousands of whom turned the funeral procession of Stanislaw Pyjas, an oppositionist student who died under more than dubious conditions(1), into a political demonstration and the opposition's determined resistance to provocation and intimidation from the authorities have made the situation intolerable for a bureaucracy which is prepared to do anything to defend its "order." Events moved faster at the end of May. Although Gierek and company thought they had decapitated the movement by arresting nine of the most active members of the Workers Defense Committee (KOR), new sectors of the Polish intelligentsia joined in open action: Catholic progressives represented by Bohdan Cywinski, editor in chief of Znak and one of the eleven hunger strikers; active solidarity was proclaimed by many intellectuals. More than ever, the Polish opposition stands in urgent need of solidarity from the international workers movement. At stake is not merely the freedom of nine intellectuals, but also that of five workers who are still in prison, one of whom, Czeslaw Chomicki, serving a nine-year sentence, is now on hunger strike. Adam Michnik has addressed the German left from his prison cell. In reality, his appeal concerns the enfire workers movement, which must respond to "You find everything in their 'programs, ' utopia and Trotskyism, Social Democratic scraps and fragments of the NEP, the most recent anticommunist weapons, a pinch. of Zionism and a pinch of Christian Democracy." It was with this formula, tinted with irony and condescension, that the Polish daily Zycie Warszawy, speaking through the voice of its editor in chief, believed it could settle accounts, polemically of course, with the intellectual opposition in Poland. The Polish bureaucracy is trying to heap discredit on the oppositionists, ridiculing their lack of ideological uniformity, which contrasts so sharply with the reassuring monolithism of official ideology. Nevertheless, the question of what the ideological