An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on the Peasantry, pt 2

Notes on The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico: A Class Analysis by Ann Lucas de Rouffignac

Raises key question – how are we defining peasantry? Only as those who do not sell their labor power? Based on land ownership? Etc. I can trace the debate b/t different thinkers on this question but ultimately must also lay out my own definition of who is the peasantry.

ALR is arguing that “survival” of the peasantry does not make it a relic of a past mode of production; nor a form which has outlived its usefulness, is backwards, etc. Rather she situates the survival of the peasantry as the result of their aspirations for (and victories towards) a different type of society. In other words, the peasantry hasn’t withered away to the extent that it has successfully fought off capitalist offensives against its social relations/existence.

She makes an important point in countering the ideas of Roger Bartra and Fernando Rello. Many thinkers define the peasantry based on whether it sells its labor power for a wage or not; in other words the presence of a wage is the defining factor. Yet if that’s the case, how can these thinkers make sense of the unemployed/lumpen, housewives, children or elderly (or other categories) who are habitually or permanently unwaged? This is part of ALR’s overall point – that the wage hides other forms of exploitation that are just as vital and central to capitalism as the actual wage which marks the sale of labor power.

Important to consider how peasantry has often overlapped with “Indian” in Marxist literature, and thus perspectives that omit the peasantry as agents of class struggle will implicitly (or explicitly) omit the “Indian” as an agent of history/class struggle. Hence the key contribution of Mariategui.

Question. Thus far ALR has not defined what she considers the proletariat or working class. If it is not the wage nor the ownership of land which defines the peasantry, rather it is the social relation, then what specifically does she consider the defining social relation of the proletariat proper?


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ALR divides debate into campesinistas and descampesinistas.

A) Descampesinistas

1) Class Structure

Roger Bartra, Fernando Rello

Bartra argues peasantry belongs to non-capitalist, “simple mercantile” mode of production – a mode constituted of small commodity producers who own their means of production – and as such are not formally subsumed to capital. Any layer of peasantry that even part-time sells its own labor power is no longer peasant but semi-proletariat or rural proletariat.

Rello disagrees, argues peasant economy not a separate mode of production. Forms of production can contain elements that contain pre-capitalist modes of production but coexist with capitalist mode of production. Yet both Rello and Bartra agree that revolutionary character of the peasantry is limited by their condition as owners of the means of production.

Francisco Gómez Jara identifies 3 major social classes in the Mexican countryside, defined primarily by whether the landowner hires wage labor or not. There is the bourgeoisie, agricultural proletariat and peasant class (defined as those who have land but hire no salaried labor and includes Indian communities with communal lands who use cooperative labor and also occasionally sell their labor power).

Luisa Paré distinguishes a similar class structure (bourgeoisie, peasantry and proletariat) broken down along a quantifiable criterion of what percentage of gross income is derived from the wage. Richard Pozas identifies the bourgeoisie and proletariat, and denies the presence of a peasantry.

2) Speed of Proletarianization

Broken up into two camps: proletaristas and non-proletaristas.

Proletaristas as those descampesinistas who believe the peasantry are being transformed into proletariat and are thus a disappearing class. There are differences over how rapidly this process will happen. They point to vast number of “semi-proletarians” (peasants who still work the land but also sell labor power part time) and the large migrant rural population (true rural proletariat) as evidence of eventual disappearance of peasantry as a class. Bartra argues advanced capitalism never developed in Mexico, therefore proletarianization of the peasantry has been retarded yet eventually capitalist mode of production will destroy the peasantry.

One counterargument that ALR consistently makes in this chapter is that if there is a process of proletarianization happening among the peasantry, then why do class struggles in the countryside continue to struggle for land rather than “proletarian” demands like forming unions or better working conditions. Some authors like Gomez Jara recognize this contradiction but then explain it by saying that such demands represent a petite-bourgeois consciousness and are only reinforced by the agrarian populist manipulations and repression by the state.

Nonproletaristas disagree that the destruction of the peasantry automatically translates into the creation of a rural proletariat. Some like Luisa Pare argue that capital cannot accommodate so much labor power. Most are pessimistic and forecast a disaster-type future for the peasantry.

3) Peasant Struggle

The descampesinistas discount any peasant role in constructing an alternative/socialist society. Struggle for land is peasant, not proletarian in character. Bartra asserts peasants have no class consciousness. The proletariat and the peasantry may ally under the tutelage of the former. Gomez Jara identifies peasant struggle as only useful to the capitalist class, b/c revitalizing the ejido and distributing land are simply state efforts at stabilizing the peasantry and extracting more surplus value from the peasant economy.

ALR acknowledges that land concessions often serve to coopt political struggle among the peasantry; yet at same time the land may also be used by the peasants as a basis for more struggle against capitalist accumulation. She points out that often wage concessions by capitalists to proletarians are moves to coopt struggle among workers and spur capital to reorganize production against workers; yet these thinkers wouldn’t consider wage struggles as only advantageous to capital.

ALR also critical of Gomez Jara for emphasizing need for revolutionary party to lead peasant struggle. No need to repeat arguments here.

B) Campesinistas

1) Class Structure

Arturo Warman, Armando Bartra

Warman argues the essence of being a peasant is found in the complexity of the social relations that govern them. Entering the labor market does not indicate proletarianization. It is simply one way the peasants seek to reinforce their existence as a peasant class by bringing resources and funds back to the community. Selling labor power is simply one strategy in the struggle to survive as peasants.

Bartra argues that peasants orient their life around their parcel of land and its requirements. Peasants will work for a salary only to make up a deficit in their subsistence from their parcel of land. They are still peasant; the presence or non-presence of a wage is secondary.

ALR cites other authors such as Palerm and Stavenhagen who debate the mode of production, who belongs to it, how it functions, etc. She says she’d rather not join that debate and is instead interested in how this social class interacts with the capitalist system. She attributes some of P and S’s ideas to Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital. She summarizes the argument raised there as that capitalism needs the peasant sector (which is “outside” of capitalism) for realization of surplus value and as a source of extra surplus value for accumulation. Therefore a special relationship has evolved that constantly recreates the peasant sector instead of destroying it. [52]

2) Proletarianization

The campesinistas argue that the peasantry as a class is etiher stable or growing. They point to faulty research, false govt reporting, etc., to prove that arguments to the contrary as without basis. Some like Gustavo Esteva point to a process of recampesinización. Peasants resist proletarianization and instead reinforce their forms of social existence in their communities. In some cases, peasants who left the land or did not have any use the wage to obtain land. Meanwhile they never interrupt their participation in the community. While many migrants end up in the cities seeking a wage (which Esteva sees as peasants trying to find better economic and social living conditions), there is a tendency for this process to reverse as migrants frequently leave the cities due to problems of capitalism like unemployment. They then return to the countryside and to the land once again.

3) SUbsumption to Capital

There is a debate among campesinistas over whether the peasantry is exploited by capital in the sphere of production.

Bartra argues that peasants are exploited as producers because of their non-capitalist methods of production. The exploitation of the peasant is based in production (peasant methods of production) but realized in the market (when the surplus changes hands). He says the difference b/t the peasant producer and the capitalists is that the former produces only for subsistence, not for profit. ALR interprets Bartra’s argument to mean that he thinks the cause of exploitation is rooted within the peasantry itself; he says they are not rational, not cognizant that they are exploited by the terms of trade.

Esteva characterizes the development and expansion of agrarian capitalism in Mexico as seeking the control of the productive processes instead of direct ownership of the land. He sees a tendency toward contract agriculture, where the direct operation and ownership of land remains in the hands of individuals such as peasants, while the control of the productive processes is acquired by agribusiness. Since the bulk of the risks associated with production and the work of managing or organizing production is left in the hands of the direct producers, the fiction of apeasant class possessing its own productive factors, operating as an autonomous unit and exploiting its own members of the community (via wage labor) is maintained.

Ultimately though, these peasants are working for capital in a particular relation of production. The entire peasant unit of production (via credit, contracts, inputs, etc.) is subsumed to capital. It appears to be an economic unit relating independently with the capitalist unit b/c capital uses this form of production relations to elude paying the social obligations and benefits historically won by the working class. [57]

4) Peasant Struggle

Campesinistas offer advances (albeit contradictory) over what decampesinistas have to say on role of peasant struggle. Bartra for example disagrees with typical characterization of pathetic peasants who are too weak to do anything about their exploitation. Instead he examines how actual peasant struggles have time and again forced concessions from the Mexican state. Bartra and Esteva both see land as the main goal of struggle for both peasants and rural workers. Yet Esteva adds that autonomy from capital is what the peasantry is really seeking when it demands land.

Bartra that peasant “acquires a socialist conscience only with difficulty and by himself cannot offer a strategic alternative to bourgeois society.” [58] Peasants only have revolutionary subjectivity insofar as they participate in a worker-peasant alliance.

Warman sees peasant struggle as a class movement. He recognizes that the peasantry is not just reclaiming the past but is demanding the conditions necessary to transform the future. Esteva agrees.

This leads to the vía campesina. This represents the variety of new options for the development of society resulting from the struggles of peasants. This path is the “alternative road to postcapitalist development in the countryside.” [59] Esteva argues that the peasantry as a class can adopt social organizations of their own to advance a process of modernization that adjusts to their necessities.

“Today the vía campesina is denied both by technocrats in the service of big business and the state and by Marxists in the service of socialist orthodoxy. Both are afraid of losing control over the process of development, of being excluded from a society that may have no room for capitalists or socialists, no room for those who think up ways to extract surplus value for either capitalist or socialist accumulation.” [60]

Sources to follow up on:

Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (1942)

Gustavo Esteva, La Batalla en el Mexico Rural

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An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on the Peasantry, pt 1

Notes on The Contemporary Peasantry in Mexico: A Class Analysis by Ann Lucas de Rouffignac

She is trying to develop a “social capital” perspective on the peasantry, based on thesis that the peasantry is an integral part of today’s working class.

How can I think about and relate that premise to the ideas on primitive accumulation as an ongoing feature of capitalism, developed by Goldner, Federici, et. al. ?

Counterpoint. ALR argues there is revolutionary nature to peasant struggle, and peasantry is part of working class (unwaged). Is this a helpful way to think of the peasantry? Or does it blur important lines of distinction to class experience of industrial proletariat? Or is her argument simply to say peasantry composes one layer of a multi-layered working class (defined broadly as oppressed laborers)? Plus this thesis doesn’t answer question of strategic positions of power within capitalism – that some layers of working class have more power due to their relation to production, their resistance is able to more directly and more quickly strike at the heart of capitalism than other layers. This is not a value judgment or meant to disregard those “less” strategic layers of the class.

Counterpoint. ALR quotes Selma James on how the wage or lack of wage comprises the basic division within the working-class hierarchy. [29] True but then we need to think strategically about how to overcome these divisions, how to bridge these gaps within class struggle. If unwaged peasantry fights isolated from waged proletariat, both are weakened in struggle. Related to isolation/lack of generalization of Zapatista struggle within Mexico. (need to see ALR’s perspective on this).

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Chapter 1

ALR on Marx:

Open to interpretation when it comes to the peasantry. At times wrote conflicting perspectives on peasantry. But key is to adapt Marx’s method when looking at the peasantry, maybe not so much his direct writings.

Two fates for the peasantry:

Dissolution of the peasantry (“natural”) – that as capitalism developed the peasantry was doomed to disintegrate. Small peasant production couldn’t compete with large scale modern agriculture and industry, so peasants sink gradually into the proletariat. Some peasants become capitalist farmers. This disintegration necessary because capitalism depended on “free” labor or separation of labor from the means of production; so peasants needed to be separated from the means (land) left with nothing to sell but their labor power.

Primitive Accumulation (“forced”) – forcible expropriation of the peasantry. Marx used example of England, where peasants were driven from feudal estates, enclosure of the commons in the 18th century, homes and villages burned and destroyed.

Marx on political role of peasantry: used example of French Revolution of 1848. French proletariat thru provisionsal republican govt imposed a new tax on peasantry, so the peasantry were alienated from proletariat and supported Louis Bonaparte. Yet Marx was clear that the peasants’ vote for Bonaparte was a vote against their own exploitation and higher taxes. Once Bonaparte started trampling on the peasants they turned against him and began siding with the proletariat.

Moral of the story? Peasants, just like proletariat, learn through actual experience with whom their interests lie. Marx pointed out that exploitation of peasant is only different in form from exploitation of proletariat. The exploiter is the same capital. This becomes key to ALR’s thesis that peasantry is also exploited by capital and thus is part of working class. But for now she points out that Marx didn’t take this point to logical conclusion, instead he said French peasants were incapable of revolutionary initiative. [4]

ALR argues we should avoid trap that followers of Marx fall into of converting Marx’s analysis of capitalism in England into a general historical sequence that all countries must experience. Marx himself saw that the peasant society and communal property of Russia in mid 19th century was “the finest occasion that history has ever offered a people not to undergo all the sudden turns of fortune of the capitalist system.” [5] ALR quotes a letter Marx sent to Vera Zasulich who had requested his perspective on peasantry in Russia in 1881. In that passage Marx not only denies the unilineal development of all societies but brings forth the dynamism of the peasant village community – “the real possibilities of a postcapitalist society developing from the roots of the peasant community.” [6] It was not required that all societies go thru a capitalist stage of development nor that the peasantry be destroyed in the process.

ALR on Engels:

Engels takes a more static interpretation of Marx on the peasantry, advancing an interpretation of history as a linear sequence of modes of production. She takes up his The Peasant War in Germany wherein he seeks to explain that the 1848 revolution in Germany failed for the same reasons the 16th century peasant rebellions failed – because any revolutionary that had a strong petite-bourgeois element (i.e. peasants) without the leadership of a strong proletariat class would fail. Key!! Gilly makes a similar claim about Mexico.

ALR points out that Engels’ claim about peasant revolutions holds no water because proletarian struggles have failed to. Other factors have to be taken into consideration when determining why a revolution failed or succeeded (i.e. strategies employed, balance of power of each class at a given historical moment, etc.).

Engels believed the peasantry cannot contribute to revolution or to the transition to socialism because of their attachment to private property and their peculiar social relation. The peasant was a survivor of a past mode of production.

ALR on Lenin:

* Need to revisit Kevin Anderson book on Lenin b/c I thought Lenin’s perspective on peasantry was more complicated than ALR lays out.

Lenin argued peasantry would be destroyed thru process of “differentiation.” There existed various types of peasants – agricultural wage workers (ex-peasants), middle peasants (inevitable members of the proletariat) and “capitalist” peasants (who hired wage labor). Only the industrialized proletariat can wage mass struggle against autocracy. Peasants can struggle and overthrow feudalism but not capitalism. True proletarian struggle must be brought from the cities to the countryside. The task of the party was to explain to the rural workers that its interests are opposed to those of the peasant bourgeoisie.

Initially when Bolsheviks took power, state policy toward small peasant farming was to replace it by large state collective farms. Peasants resisted en masse, rejecting being forced into communes. In 1921 Lenin softened his policy toward the peasantry. ALR argues that Lenin relied almost exclusively on the category of the wage to identify social structure in the countryside. Peasants, unwaged, did not form a class-for-itself. Rural proletariat was an ally but revolution would be organized and directed by the urban industrial proletariat.

ALR on Mao:

For Mao revolution was brought from countryside to the cities, though he retained the belief that overall strategy and direction be entrusted to the urban industrial proletariat and intellectuals.

Mao recognized that peasants were capable of autonomous struggle and coordinated revolutionary action. Yet the peasantry was not making a proletarian socialist revolution, rather they were making a bourgeois democratic revolution. The peasant revolution was a stage of transition – a “new democratic revolution” – b/t the abolition of colonial, semi-colonial, and semi-feudal society and the establishment of a socialist society. The new democratic revolution would clear the way for capitalism (by destroying colonialism and feudalism), and then the establishment of capitalism would create the prereqs for socialism thru a growing proletariat accompanied by its vanguard in the CCP.

ALR on Stalin:

USSR defined by the state as socialist. Since in socialism the relations of production are in harmony with the forces of production, there can be no contradiction, class struggle was defined out of existence. Political turmoil can only be counter-revolutionary and deserving of repression. The peasantry was destined to disintegrate which justified “socialist primitive accumulation.”

ALR on Marta Harnecker:

Harnecker considers the most important relation of production to be the relation of ownership and nonownership of the means of production. The peasantry belongs to some precapitalist mode of production; peasants seek only to maintain themselves and their families and not to create value from their property. Further, the private appropriation of a land parcel allows the peasants ownership of their own labor power. Since they own their own means of production and product of their labor they cannot be seen as members of the proletariat and are therefore incapable of realizing true socialist revolution.

Harnecker sees peasant struggles as spontaneous, isolated, motivated by petite bourgeois desires for wealth and property.

ALR argues that when peasants demand land, capital will often attempt to use land reform as a means to stabilize and control the peasantry. Yet a) such tactics are often responses by capital to the growth of working class initiatives and power and b) they often fail.

The Debate in Latin America:

Debate gained momentum when questions of underdevelopment and dependency became serious. Mainstream Marxists still believed that the peasantry disappears with the onset of capitalist industrialization and modernization, so the lack of development and presence of the peasantry must be the result of retarding old forms of production. Underdevelopment was the result of remaining feudal relations of production.

Opposed to this view was Andre Gunder Frank who argued that the backwardness of Latin American society resulted not from feudalism but from the expansion of the world capitalist system. Frank argued the peasant sector is not feudalist or isolated but intimately related and exploited by urban and international capitalist society through economic, commercial, political and social relations. No bourgeois revolution necessary in Latin America, instead Frank argued there needed to be a worker-peasant alliance to overthrow dependent capitalism. There were no more peasants (1970s) in the traditional sense of independent, self-reliant cultivators, rather today’s peasants constitue the rural proletariat.

Fernandez and Ocampo disagreed and said Latin America was fundamentally feudal based on an analysis of agriculture.

ALR argues this debate is useless b/c the authors do not look at the real struggle happening on the ground across the continent. Instead the authors are focusing on whether Latin America is capitalist, feudal or something else so that they can fit it into their narrow stagist conceptions of history and thereby have language through which to explain the continent (rather than studying what’s actually happening and developing categories that fit that actual experience).

Social Capital:

ALR influenced by Italian autonomism. Cites Mario Tronti.

“Circulation and reproduction of capital includes reproduction of the classes and class relation. If the social work day produces, reproduces, and accumulates new capital and new labor power, then the working class must be redefined to include those doing the work of producing and reproducing labor power. Workers are not only those producing value in the factory but must now include those working in the social factory reproducing the labor power.” [24-25]

Capital is not a thing but a class relation. The working class has a dynamic role, forcing, at times, capital to redefine itself and develop along new lines. Hence it is essential to focus on the role and initiative of the rank and file within the working class.

Cites Selma James and Mariarose Dalla Costa who make connection of unwaged work. The wage or lack thereof hit not only unpaid work done in the factory but unpaid work done outside it as well. The family is a center of social production, not just consumption. The woman is at home producing labor power as a commodity within the social factory. But because her work is unwaged it appears to be a personal service outside of capital within some precapitalist working condition. Women are workers exploited by capital but whose relationship with capital is mediated by men via the wage.

To be wageless is not necessarily to e outside of the capitalist relation. [29]

Cites Harry Cleaver.

“Cleaver argued that these workers-peasants-members of the reserve army constitue a part of total variable capital and must be maintained, reproduced, and supported by capital. For example, it is sometimes the case that land reform is used by capital to stabilize the peasants on the land—to keep them working but working at their own reproduction as reserve army, and, to the extent that they produce an agricultural surplus, contributing to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. ‘To be wageless is not to be outside or alongside accumulation, it is to be part of it. The unwaged must be accumulated right along with the waged.’” [29-30]

So the peasant has an unwaged function within capitalist production. But they are also part of the working class through their struggle against capital. “The realization that peasant struggle (even over land) is working-class struggle potentially disrupting capitalist accumulation shatters the orthodox Marxist image of the petit-bourgeois reactionary peasant.” [30]

ALR discusses self-valorization – the class’s capacity to bring about development which is completely alternative to capitalist valorization; people’s definition of self-needs that are outside and autonomous to capital; the process of self-val. Becomes the power to withdraw from exchange value and the ability ot re-appropriate the world of use values.

The peasant community and the concomitant attachment to land has the potential to allow peasant development of a life separate from and not dominated by capital.

“Peasants are already organized and always have been. The community is the basis of their struggle; the basis of their future self-development, which is self-valorization as opposed to capitalist valorization. Using community ties and institutions is not anarchic or a return to the past, but contributes to the overall struggle against the intrusion of capital into their daily lives—that is, contributes to class struggle.” [31]

Sources to follow up on:

Harry Cleaver, “The Internationalization of Capital and the Mode of Production in Agriculture, “ Economic and Political Weekly, March 27, 1976

Marta Harnecker, Los Conceptos Elementales del Materialismo Historico

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