Gilly and Bookchin on the Peasantry

Adolfo Gilly’s work on the Mexican Revolution (MR) is generally revered in both academic and left circles as one of the best histories, informed by a Marxist analysis with an eye towards from below social forces. Gilly is (was?) a Trot and so I find he comes with a bit of Trot baggage, and is best read alongside other accounts of the Revolution that have a more left-libertarian leaning. Since Gilly’s book is considered the sort of pre-eminent “people’s history” of the Revolution, I see my thesis as needing to be in conversation/debate with his work, pulling in some key thinkers like Bookchin, Mariátegui, and Gramsci to aid me in my battle against Gilly.

One of the areas in Gilly’s book I’ve been trying to confront is his perspective on the role, character and activity of the Mexican peasantry in the revolution. He lays out some key ideas in Chapter 3 where he explains the origins of Zapatismo and the rebellions that marked the early years of the Revolution among the southern peasantry. Gilly raises a number of important points for consideration as to why the MR failed, or at least failed to accomplish what the Russian Revolution did. Among those points, he argues that a key flaw of the MR was that it was “peasant-led”; that the industrial working class failed to assert itself as the vanguard of struggle and that there was no revolutionary vanguard (I assume he means something akin to the Bolshevik party) present to cohere that proletarian vanguard which could then lead the peasantry to socialism. To put it simply, there was no Mexican Lenin (which there couldn’t be because there was no Mexican Bolshevik Party).

I will have to take up the question of revolutionary organization within the MR at some point. Some did indeed exist (mostly anarchist or anarcho-syndicalist; there was no official CP in Mexico until the 1920s and even that was in part built by anarchists) and it’s important to go thru what role they played in relationship to the revolting working class and peasants. But for now I want to focus more broadly on Gilly’s portrayal of the peasantry because through my readings of Bookchin and others I’ve come to draw very different conclusions about what role they played in the Revolution, and what that meant for what was or was not possible in the MR overall.

Here are some notes & quotes from Gilly to situate his perspective:

- Morelos state was the stronghold of Zapatismo. It was there that many free villages (basically indigenous communities that had maintained control of their land) had retained or sought to recover their lands from the surrounding haciendas, while a concentrated agricultural proletariat had grown up on the sugar plantations. Zapatismo had its roots in that dense population of peasants and agricultural workers.

- Morelos had long been dominated by sugar plantations. In the late 19th century the haciendas had swallowed up many of the communal lands, reducing free villages to islands surrounded by a sea of haciendas. In the first decade of the 20th century the Morelos plantation owners made large investments in machinery and Morelos became the most modern industrial region in the country.

- Many uprooted peasants still held the deeds to their stolen land, and those communal deeds played an important role in the early stages of the revolution. The deeds legitimized recourse to armed insurrection and acted as a unifying point around which countless communities could unite. Gilly says “The Mexican peasant revolution began without a prior theory or program. The first objective of nationwide struggle was to recover communal lands. It appeared then as a natural continuation of the long struggle to enforce the legality of the peasants’ historical claim.” [62-63]

- “The southern peasantry initially rose up in political support of a wing of the ruling elite.” – b/c at first they gathered together behind Madero’s San Luis Potosí Plan which Gilly situates as their main link with the national revolution – “It then rapidly shifted to a de facto alliance, insofar as the revolution developed an independent leadership and an awareness of the conflict of class interests with Maderism. Finally this alliance turned into an open break through the emergence of a distinct program.” – the Ayala Plan written by Zapata et. al. [67]

- The Ayala Plan “proposes to nationalize all the property of enemies of the revolution—that is, all the landowners and capitalists of Mexico. Secondly, it goes beyond the Jacobin wing in stating that dispossessed peasants should immediately take over the land and that ‘such property will be resolutely defended with arms in hand.’” [72]

- “Emiliano Zapata did not set out to destroy the capitalist system: his ideas sprang from the peasantry, not from a socialist program. However, implementation of the Ayala Plan would have effectively smashed the living roots of capitalism. For it would have involved nationalization of all the property of the ruling classes. More important still…was the principle that the people themselves should decide, ‘arms in hand’…The peasants of southern Mexico, however, were unable to carry this logic to its conclusion. The Ayala Plan, like the actions of the peasantry, only went so far as to counterpose popular initiative to capitalist power. It effectively created dual power…but it did not raise the prospect of another state power…Taken as a whole, it encapsulated the contradiction between peasant ideology and the revolutionary action of the armed peasantry. The methods were revolutionary…but the peasantry could not rise to a nationwide social perspective or offer a revolutionary solution for the insurgent nation.” [73]

- For Gilly the decisive factor was not revolutionary land seizures but control of the centralized state power.

- “The final fate of the revolution would not be decided in the countryside, but in the cities. The mighty revolutionary impetus of the peasantry managed to reach the city, but once there it could do no more than leave power in the hands of a weak and terrified petty bourgeoisie which did, however, represent a viable option: that of the bourgeoisie.” [73-74] (why not the urban working class?)

- The peasantry is of a dual nature: “which tends toward the proletariat as an exploited class and toward the bourgeoisie as a class of property owners” which is especially so for Morelos peasants “which comprised both peons or agricultural laborers and peasants tilling village land or aspiring to till their own.” After the first stage of the revolution and the peasantry was “faced with basic political choices, they could either follow a socialist course or bow to bourgeois legality.” [74]

- Earlier Gilly takes up Marx’s analysis of “Asiatic modes of production.” He argues that indigenous civilization and social organization (Aztec, Mayan) could be included in that category, emphasizing their backwardness and immobility, their “intrinsic resistance to change.” He argues these old agrarian communities could rise and fall for centuries without altering the pattern of communal peasant life. Spanish conquest did not suppress those social relations but merely supplanted the Spanish throne at the top. It wasn’t until Porfirian capitalism that the decomposition of these social relations were hastened, though capitalism failed to introduce higher forms of social organization in the countryside. [43-45]

- Gilly also takes up Marx & Engels on the question of could the peasantry, rooted in forms of collectivist agrarian organization, leap directly into socialist collective forms without undergoing capitalist development of social forces. Gilly’s interpretation: that M & E said peasantry could leap ahead only after one or more countries had overthrown capitalism b/c peasantry could then model itself on socialist experience without going thru capitalism.

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Bookchin provides a useful counterpoint to Gilly’s depiction of the peasantry which, if we agree, has important consequences for how we think about the MR as a whole.

Bookchin writes of a self-active peasantry whose aspirations for a more liberatory, democratic society were routinely crushed by ruling social classes. He tells the history of the two main social forces in Russia in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries -- the Russian peasantry and the gentry – accordingly:

“The nobility was hierarchical in its outlook, holding a pyramidal view of society as a system of command and obedience. The peasantry, by contrast, had an egalitarian outlook and saw the world in terms of complementary relationships in which each household deserved to receive its fair share of land based on need rather than status. Thus, to the nobility, social ties were ‘held together by subordination’, while to the peasantry, they were ‘held together by mutual responsibility.’ Moreover, the nobility, with its new European ways and its appetite for city living, tended to be cosmopolitan, while the peasantry, virtually boxed into its scattered villages, was devoutly parochial. The gentry was ‘oriented to state service’, to the extent that it was oriented toward any form of service at all. The peasantry, by contrast, was ‘oriented to survival’, and viewed any external attempt to control the village as morally demonic. Finally, the gentry viewed land as private property, whether it had been acquired by inheritance, robbery, or as a gift from the tsar. The peasantry, in very sharp contrast, regarded land as a communal resource that ‘belonged to God’ …and could not be truly owned by any individual.” [Third Revolution V3, 8-9]

The ensemble of peasant ideas – egalitarianism, mutual responsibility, and communalism – were expressed in varying forms of village democracy such as chernyi peredel (‘black redistribution’, a periodic democratic redistribution of land within the village based on need) and the skhod (village assembly of all adult householders that administered the land redistribution).

The collectivism of the peasantry were the result not only of traditional ideals but also “unrelenting necessity.” [Third Revolution V3, 15] Material scarcity and wars plagued an inequitable society and thus made a well-knit collectivity indispensable for the survival of peasant communities. Bookchin emphasizes the organic abhorrence of most peasants to private property or using land as a form of capital. “Indeed, it was fervently believed that it was an affront to morality and godliness for the deserving and the needy to have too little land to satisfy the family’s needs, while the undeserving and affluent had too much. The Russian peasant, in effect, was an ingrained leveller.” [14]

This stands in stark contrast to Gilly whose own manner of discussing similar sentiments is to say that those were almost negative qualities; characteristics that belonged to a mode of production that needed to be surpassed and were in themselves acting as an obstacle to progress/development/advancement. For Bookchin, a freer and more enlightened Russia might well have emerged had its internal development not been trammeled by outside forces and aspiring ruling classes. [4] For Gilly, a freer and more enlightened Mexico was not at all possible at the hands of the peasantry.