The struggle for land is a struggle for a dignified life. We are not ‘vagabonds’, we are landless, we want to work the land. When you are working the land, you are producing, you are contributing to society, you are going forward. (Irene dos Santos, squatter, municipality of Andradina, state of São Paulo)
We are not fighting for much, we just want a piece of land to work, we just want health and education for us and our families. We want a dignified life as indigenous peoples that we are. (Juan, Chol Indian and Zapatista support base, Santa María, autonomous municipality Ricardo Flores Magón, Lacandona jungle)
With the struggle, all that I have, I have because we won the land. Land is the beginning of everything. (Jacir Suares, MST settler in settlement Pirituba, municipality of Itapeva, state of São Paulo)
It is not land in itself that is important. It’s what you build on it that is important. (Solange Parceanello, MST settler in COPAVI settlement, municipality of Paranacity, state of Paraná)
The movement has awakened me. It has shown me to fight for my rights, to fight for the rights of indigenous people. (Domingo, Chol Indian and Zapatista support base, Rancho Recuperado Primero de Enero, autonomous municipality Ricardo Flores Magón, Lacandona jungle)
While organized peasant and poor people’s struggles for land have never really disappeared from Latin America, by the early 1990s, when the Central American guerrilla movements had been defeated, they had certainly lost much of their revolutionary impetus. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath, most of the books on revolutionary processes, socialism or radical social change were now looked upon by many students and academics as simply relics of a distant past. In Latin America, many intellectuals who had once chanted the virtues of the revolution were now writing that the times had changed, that the revolution had been an erroneous struggle in the first place, and that it was now time to embrace ‘democracy and the market’.
In this ideological context dominated by neoliberalism, two movements stood out: the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Rural Workers’ Movement, MST) in Brazil and the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation, EZLN) in Chiapas. With their revolutionary discourse, their radical politics and their flags and hymns, these two movements appeared anachronistic in the midst of the transition to democracy, the consolidation of neoliberal hegemony, the crisis of the left, and the rise of postmodernism.
However, stories told to me by poor Brazilian men and women about the vicissitudes of fighting for land, of the dangers of confronting the state and its repressive apparatus, and of the difficulties of achieving concrete goals are not anomalies or exceptions in Latin America. They are part of a long history of struggle of subaltern classes against oppression. The stories narrated by Zapatista militants, although embedded in the specificities of the local Chiapanecan context and the indigenous experience of resistance, were also reminiscent of the same desires for a decent dignified life and a just world that have permeated so many stories of struggle in the twentieth century, not just in Latin America, and continue to shape the hopes of millions across the globe.
The struggles of the MST and the EZLN, as has been the case with many others in the region, are much more than struggles against neoliberalism. If they are reminiscent of the struggles of a few decades earlier, or even longer ago, such as the century-old initial Zapatista uprising of 1910, it is because they have profound historical roots in the capitalist development and state formation of their respective countries. At the same time, these struggles transcend their particular national and geographic setting, as well as their cultural and ethnic context, because they express a universal claim for the right to a dignified life over the faceless logic of capitalism. What is more exceptional in the particular cases of the MST and the EZLN is that these collective claims for a dignified life have led to the elaboration and implementation of grassroots development alternatives to neoliberalism, which envision the possibility of building more democratic and just communities.
This book compares the struggles for land and the development alternatives of the MST and the EZLN since the 1980s. Through a mix of Marxist political economy, critical theories of development, agrarian studies, and an understanding of social change and radical politics heavily influenced by Antonio Gramsci, it examines issues of the privatization of the right to land, resistance to neoliberalism, peasant agriculture and transformation of gender relations, as well as the politics of alliance of these peasant movements.
One of the main conclusions of the book is that, beyond having different class and ethnic compositions and being set in very different rural contexts, the landless people and Zapatista struggles for land and their corresponding development alternatives share some of the same broad objectives: securing subsistence and achieving some degree of autonomy from the state and the market for their member communities. In fact, I will argue that the strength of both movements lies in their capacity to create and/or strengthen ‘autonomous rural communities’, which depend on access to land for agricultural production geared in the first instance to food self-sufficiency. Access to land allows the members of both organizations to partially delink from or mitigate the effects of the market and confront the power of the state. However, I will also argue that these common objectives and features take on different forms, obviously because of the indigenous composition of the Zapatista movement, but also because of the different national trajectories of capitalist development and state formation in Brazil and Mexico.
An overview of existing scholarship on the MST and the EZLN
There are few scholars of globalization or anti-globalization activists who have not heard of the Zapatistas and the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement. Both the EZLN and the MST have indeed been quite successful in defending the right of access to land of poor rural families. Through their struggle, they have established the social and political conditions that allowed 60,000 families in Chiapas (Villafuerte 2005) and between 800,000 and 1 million families in Brazil (Fernandes 2007) to gain access to land through several organizations. But it is not their success but the dramatic nature of their struggle for land and their attempt to develop an alternative to neoliberalism which has won them the support and admiration of numerous authors, intellectuals and artists, as diverse as Noam Chomsky, David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Alain Touraine, Manuel Castells, Arundhati Roy, photographer Sebastian Salgado and Nobel literature laureate José Saramago. Surprisingly, especially considering the enormous attention given to the MST and the EZLN in academic and activist circles, there are few systematic comparative studies of the two movements.
There is nevertheless an enormous amount of scholarship on each of the movements separately, particularly on the Zapatistas (see Berger 2001). The MST has mainly been studied in relation to particular issues, such as agrarian reform, rural development and agricultural production (Zamberlam 1994; Zamberlam and Froncheti 1997; Palmeira and Leite 1998; Ferreira et al. 2001; Filho 2001), new collective forms of production (MST 1991; Zimmermann 1994; Bergamasco 1994; Brenneisen 1997; Singer 2002), its nature as a social movement within rural politics (Scherer-Warren 1988; Robles 2000; Wolford 2003a, 2003b, 2010; Ondetti 2008), and its contribution to the struggle against neoliberalism in Brazil (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000; Martins 2000; Galdino 2005). However, probably because the MST is not an indigenous movement and it adopts a fairly traditional view of state power, it is not viewed as a ‘new social movement’ and its struggle has not been seen as a struggle for peasant autonomy from the state and the market. Contrary to this widely held view, I will show that peasant autonomy has to be seen as one of the main objectives and achievements of the movement.
There are few aspects of the Zapatista movement that have not been explored. Broadly speaking, we could argue that studies on the Zapatista movement can be classified into at least four types of work. The first is studies that analyse the Zapatista political project in relation to contemporary Western social theories and context (Jung 2008; Holloway 1997, 2000, 2002; Bruhn 1999; Yúdice 1998; Von Werlhof 1997; Burbach 1994). The second is studies that seek to explain the social origin of the Zapatista rebellion and which focus on the economic crisis triggered by neoliberalism and the rise of peasant and indigenous movements (Collier with Lowery Quaratiello 1994; Harvey 1995, 1998; Benjamin 1996; Villafuerte et al. 1999; Barmeyer 2009). The third type of work looks at the Zapatista movement as an indigenous movement and focuses on issues of identity, indigenous rights and autonomy (Nash 1995, 2001; Stephen 2002; Gossen 1996; Lenkersdorf 1996; Burguete Cal y Mayor 1998a, 1998b; Van der Haar 1998, 2001; Leyva Solano 2001; Esteva 2001; Higgins 2004). Finally, the fourth type of studies comprises those preoccupied with the global aspects of the Zapatista phenomenon and its relationship with the constitution of the anti-globalization movement (Khasnabish 2010; Mentinis 2006; Kiele 2005).
At the same time, there are very few studies (Toledo 2000; Earle and Simonelli 2005) that consider the kind of rural development proposed by the Zapatista movement. In fact, it could be said that this is the aspect of the Zapatista struggle that has received the least attention. With respect to the study of the Zapatista movement, the purpose of this book is thus to contribute to filling a gap in our understanding of the problems and challenges that Zapatista indigenous subsistence peasants face in the process of confronting neoliberal restructuring and elaborating strategies to improve the living conditions and well-being of their communities.
The comparative studies of the MST and the EZLN that do exist have looked at them as social movements (Rubin 2002; Zibechi 1999, 2003) or as new peasant movements (Veltmeyer 1997; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). In most cases, the conclusions drawn in these comparisons refer to similarities and differences that are explained as consequences of the ideological influences of the two organizations, their past political experiences, or merely as the result of decisions made by the organizations. In all likelihood, there are no systematic comparative studies of the MST and the EZLN because of their radical differences. Although they are among the most important and influential popular movements in Latin America, they differ greatly in size. The MST is what could be called a ‘mass movement’. It has a presence in twenty-two of the twenty-six Brazilian states and between 250,000 and 350,000 families – a million people – make up the membership of the organization (Carvalho 2003: 8; Wright and Wolford 2003: xiii). The EZLN does not compare in numbers with the MST. It is not spread throughout Mexico but is instead concentrated in the most indigenous regions of Chiapas where the population is estimated to be around 300,000 people.
Peasant alternatives to neoliberalism
From a conventional political economy perspective, a comparison of the MST and the EZLN is difficult because, as I will show more clearly in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, the landless people in Brazil and the Zapatistas are in a sense at opposite ends of the spectrum of the Latin American peasantry. In very broad terms, Brazil’s landless represent proletarianized rural workers while Zapatistas exemplify indigenous subsistence peasants. While it is easy to see the EZLN as an indigenous peasant movement, since it is mostly made up of indigenous families that have direct or indirect access to land, the case of the MST is not as simple. In terms of class origin, the MST has a more diverse social base than the EZLN. It is mostly comprised of landless rural workers, but small peasants with insufficient access to land, sharecroppers, tenant farmers and posseiros (peasants without land title) have historically made up a significant proportion of the membership.1 Nevertheless, the MST can still be considered a peasant movement because, as I was able to confirm during my fieldwork, most of the Sem Terra come from peasant backgrounds, have a personal or family history of land possession, and a class identity and a culture that is ‘still bound up with an access to land’ (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 101) and a peasant way of life.
Far from shying away from using the term peasant because it would lack analytical clarity, be anachronistic and permeated with an essentialism based on transhistorical and static understanding of rural producers (Bernstein 2006: 399–402), this study defends the usefulness of the term. Drawing on Colombian scholar Luis Llambí (2000: 181), in order to understand the various kind of rural dwellers that form the Latin American peasantry, I will use the term peasant to refer to a class of direct agricultural producers that ranges from ‘the independent subsistence farmers formally relished by Chayanovians’ to the ‘small entrepreneurs embedded in a capitalist accumulation process’ in a subordinate position, and that also include sharecroppers, squatters and small-scale contract farmers. This way of looking at the peasantry seeks to understand it less as an economic structural category, because ‘what unifies these different groups is not an immanent “peasantness” common to all so-called peasant enterprises, but multiple social relations linking them to the historical projects of a collective peasantry’ (ibid.: 181). In other words, the experience of struggle of these movements shows that the process of being a peasant or claiming peasantness (re-peasantization) is a political process more than a mere economic category. That said, and recognizing that the peasantry includes several social strata, as I will show in Chapter 2, the MST and the EZLN are movements of poor peasants in their respective context. Hence, the ways in which the different ethnic and class compositions play out in the struggle for land and the formulation of the development alternatives of both movements will be a fundamental aspect of the comparison I undertake in this study. Akin to how E. P. Thompson understood the emergence of the working-class consciousness in England (1991: 11, 887–915), the experience of the MST and the EZLN shows that peasants constitute themselves as a class politically through their experiences of struggle against expropriation and social marginalization, which leads them to cling on to or reclaim and constantly reinvent their peasantness and attach to it their own conception of how the economy should be organized in order to be fair.
Among the many peasant organizations that have emerged in the midst of decades of restructuring of the countryside in Latin America, the MST and the EZLN have stood out for the radicalism of their challenge to current neoliberal hegemony. Indeed, both have openly spoken in terms of revolutionary change. Moreover, they have had a national impact (transcending issues related to the countryside) that their recent predecessors did not have, and they effectively control territories where they implement their development alternatives. In the case of the MST, these territorial spaces are the ‘encampments’ and the ‘settlements’ that are scattered throughout Brazil, and bring together anything from 100 to 2,000 families. Indeed, the MST’s struggle for land has two stages. First, landless families temporarily live and prepare themselves for land occupation in encampments (acampamentos) on the fringes of federal roads near large property that meets the requirements for expropriation. Then, when the land occupation has been planned, the encampment moves to the chosen property. Depending on the negotiations with the state, the encampment can be located on a portion of that property for several weeks, months or years or moved on to another location several times. The period of encampment is thus a period of occupation/displacement/reoccupation/redisplacement (Gonçalves 2005: 151) when the territorial space of the encampment changes but its community space, institutions, social relations and practices are always reconstructed. Secondly, once these families have been successful in their occupation, they are given the land they occupied, and a permanent settlement (assentamento), divided into family or common plots, common area and buildings (school, healthcare clinic, cooperative, etc.), is created under the supervision of the Brazilian state. The people involved in land occupations are referred to as acampados and acampadas while settlers are referred to as assentados and assentadas. The ‘MST territories’ are thus not contiguous or grouped together geographically. They are more or less distant from each other but come together through the political structure of the MST, which is organized at three levels: the region, the state and the country. In the case of the EZLN, the territories that the movement controls are the Zapatista autonomous communities and municipalities that have been set up in several indigenous regions of Chiapas since 1994, namely the Lacandona jungle, the highlands, the north and the Fronteriza region, which make up about half the territory of the state of Chiapas (approximately 36,000 square kilometres).
Although in very different rural contexts, the emergence of the MST and the EZLN can be shown to have resulted from similar processes. Both movements developed as a response to the free-market restructuring of the rural economy that, because it was accompanied by the transformation of the nature of state programmes, impacted negatively on employment, wages and working and living conditions. A significant portion of the rural population lived in poverty in southern Brazil and extreme poverty in Chiapas, but in both cases neoliberalism exacerbated their working and living conditions. In both cases, the issues of access to land, agricultural production and marketing are paramount. In both cases, the organizations had to struggle against a history of state corporatism, clientelism and co-optation of leaders. With respect to their development alternatives, both the MST and the EZLN have emphasized the production of food, have adopted some kind of collective form of agricultural production (production, marketing or credit cooperatives, associations or groups), and have taken charge of education and health services. Politically, both movements have formed a collective and rotating leadership, accountable to assembly-type decision-making processes, and both have sought to participate in or generate national coalitions. Thus their current development alternatives point, in both cases, towards a process of self-management, self-government and autonomy of peasant communities.
However, these two organizations are embedded in very different cultural traditions and rural contexts. The MST emerged in the southern states of Brazil, characterized by European immigration and family farming, while the EZLN appeared in Chiapas, in regions where Indians make up the great majority of the population. Hence, these two movements exemplify very different traditions of resistance and rebellion – the EZLN, notably, having chosen an unprecedented form of armed struggle.2 In general, Brazil’s peasant communities do not have the ancestral ethnic roots that indigenous communities have in Mexico (Bonfil Batalla 1994) and Chiapas (García de León 1997). In contrast, Brazilian peasants today, for the most part, tend not to experience their landlessness as a process of collective dispossession but have historically organized regionally as rural workers through trade unions, or as small producers through cooperatives. Secondly, these two struggles for land have taken place in very different types of rural societies, a factor that conditions the form their development alternatives take. For instance, even though it seeks to establish some level of autonomy from the market, many features of the MST’s alternative to neoliberalism seek to improve the insertion of its members and small farmers in general into the market, while the EZLN’s alternative model of development is much more geared towards trying to find ways to bypass the market altogether. As I will discuss further in Chapter 3, their relationship to the market is one of the most fundamental differences between the two movements.
Another important difference corresponds to the relation that these organizations have with the state. Indeed, since their creation, autonomy from political parties and the state has been very important for both the MST and the EZLN, but the means to reach and maintain autonomy has led to completely different strategies based on different understandings of (and experience with) political parties and the state. The MST, for instance, has adopted a pragmatic strategy of pressuring the state and either collaborating with it or opposing it, according to the movement’s assessment of particular state programmes. It has also developed a very close relationship with the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), supporting it during electoral campaigns and presenting MST members as PT candidates at the local level. The historical alliance that the MST had with the PT led to serious contradictions since Luiz Inácio ‘Lula’ da Silva attained the presidency in 2003, as he did not accelerate the agrarian reform and chose to support agribusiness and made conditional cash transfer payments his main policy towards the popular classes. The EZLN, on the other hand, has since 1998 rejected any collaboration with the state in response to the government’s refusal to honour its commitment in the negotiations over the San Andrés Accords.3 As for its relationship with political parties, after the 1994 uprising the EZLN tried to establish some kind of an alliance with the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) but then became highly critical of it around 1998. Since then, the EZLN has definitively rejected elections as a possible path to social change, refused to support Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the PRD candidate in the 2006 and 2012 presidential elections, and has focused, with mixed results, on building bridges with sectors of civil society.
Considering the scarcity of studies that compare the MST and the EZLN, drawing from a variety of sources and debates, in this book I will seek to provide a systematic analysis and comparison of the land struggles and development alternatives of both movements. Like the few comparative studies that exist on these movements, the book will also look at the class, ethnic, ideological and organizational aspects of both movements. However, I will mostly seek to explain the specificities of these movements by combining a longer-term historical perspective on the kind of rural economy in which they are inserted with an analysis of the everyday preoccupations and social relations of production and reproduction of the peasant families that make up the grassroots membership of these movements. I will focus on the objectives, orientations, values and challenges behind the construction of these development alternatives, especially with respect to issues of political organization, access to land, orientation of agricultural production, and forms and relations of production and social reproduction. More specifically, the following questions will guide my inquiry: What accounts for the emergence of the current struggle for land in these two very different countries? What are the objectives, challenges and contradictions of the development alternatives presented by the MST and the EZLN? What explains the specific features of these development alternatives to neoliberalism? What are the political experiences and/or cultural practices that peasant organizations rely on to elaborate their alternatives? What has been the impact of state policies and practices on the elaboration of the alternatives sponsored by these organizations? What has been the political strategy of these peasant organizations with respect to alliances and conflicts with actors within civil society and the state?
While analysing the impact of neoliberal policies, the social and ethnic composition and the organizational structure of both movements, taking issue with the idea of a transhistorical single peasant rationality that Bernstein correctly criticizes (2006, 2009), I explain the nature of the struggles of the MST and the EZLN by looking at the distinct paths of capitalist development and state formation of Brazil and Mexico, and the practices and objectives guiding agricultural production of Zapatista and MST peasants. I argue that both movements share two features: 1) the control of a geographic space allows the organization and mobilization of rural communities that reach high levels of political cohesion, politicization and empowerment through the development of popular, participatory and autonomous structures of power, which are alternative to the state; 2) the control of the means of subsistence and the organization of production around the peasant family unit allows their memberships to prioritize food production and avoid the market for their social reproduction in different degrees. Hence both development alternatives generate ‘autonomous rural communities’ that seek political autonomy, food self-sufficiency, community self-reliance, and class, gender and racial equality. To a different extent, these objectives are reached by relying on non-capitalist and non-commodified social relations such as family labour and kinship or community reciprocity and solidarity. However, because the MST has evolved within a highly capitalist countryside and receives credits from the state, its members are also preoccupied with finding ways to better negotiate market integration and secure state support and funding. Inversely, since the EZLN is located in predominantly indigenous regions with marginal market penetration, its membership emphasizes the reinforcement of non-commoditized kinship and community relations. Finally, I look at the strategies that the MST and the EZLN have adopted towards the state, political parties and civil society to explain why they have not been able to build a broad national coalition against neoliberal policies.
Alternative development and alternatives to development
This book approaches the MST and the EZLN development alternatives ‘from below’ – that is, by focusing on the experiences, expectations and objectives of grassroots members of these movements. Thus I have left aside some very important aspects of these movements, such as their impact on – and active role within – the anti-globalization movement. In the case of the EZLN, I have also turned my attention away from the Zapatista discourse and the prominent figure of Subcomandante Marcos, not because they have not been important, but because I believe such a focus distracts from what Zapatismo represents for the indigenous peasant families that form the movement.
Further to this, I invite the reader to abandon some commonly held ideas about development, to think about development as being not so much about quantifiable, material means but more in terms of social relations that guide the interaction between people. Secondly, the reader will be asked to abandon the commonly held idea that development needs to be assessed on its universal potential. In other words on how much it can serve as a model for other cases. One of our main goals in the book is to assess whether and the extent to which these development alternatives enhance the peasant families’ control over their own lives in contrast to that of the general working-class population. Thirdly, the reader will have to get rid of the statist bias that dominates most thinking about development, and be open to the idea that the state, although unavoidable, can be bypassed or confronted, albeit never completely transcended, by local communities and social movements, which can become the subjects of their own development.
In this book I touch upon various issues related to social mobilization against neoliberalism, popular participation, and different aspects of local rural development. The scholarship and thinking that comes closest to my concerns is the literature that can be grouped around the idea of ‘alternative development’ (Max-Neff et al. 1991; Rahman 1993; Friedmann 1992; Carmen 1996; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 2000; Barkin 2001). A secondary body of literature that is also relevant to my study is the post-development approach (Schuurman 1993; Escobar 1995; Munck 1999; Esteva and Prakash 1999). The ‘alternative development’ and ‘post-development’ perspectives are eclectic and interdisciplinary. They draw from Marxism, Weberian sociology, Polanyian institutionalism, dependency approaches, world system theory, liberation theology, postmodernism, feminism and environmentalism. Apart from sharing similar perspectives on development, they also share a particular political view of social change, a feature that is clearly marked by the historical conjuncture of their emergence (Veltmeyer 2001a, 2001b). Having emerged in the 1980s when revolutionary processes in the Third World had lost their momentum, both approaches abandoned the idea of radical structural social change and focused instead on the potential of the everyday resistance practices of social movements. For these intellectuals, the practices of social movements signalled ‘new forms of doing politics’, ‘new forms of sociality’, ‘new forms of relating the political with the social’, and ‘new ways of associating the public with the private’ (Escobar 1992, 1995; Calderón et al. 1992). More specifically, according to many, the practices and the outlooks of social movements appeared to be moving them away from the state towards demands for a greater level of autonomy for civil society. Hence, analysts argued, the scholarly thinking around development alternatives had to follow the lead of movements and also move away from its traditional focus on the state.
The main differences between the ‘alternative development’ and the ‘post-development’ schools of thought revolve around their interpretation of the term development and their assessment of Marxist class analysis, and the relevance or appropriateness of approaching social issues from a political economy approach. Authors working within the alternative development approach, although they recognize the problematic meaning associated with the traditional concept of development, think that the term should be reclaimed and infused with a humanist meaning. In contrast, those adopting the post-development approach argue that the term development is too embedded in the modernist project, be it liberal or Marxist, and should thus be abandoned. One of the most influential proponents of this latter view is Arturo Escobar.
Escobar (1995), inspired by Foucauldian thought, criticized the concept of development for being simply an apparatus that links forms of knowledge about the Third World with deployment of forms of power and intervention, thus setting up a particular set of discursive power relations that construct an objectified representation of the Third World. Escobar called for abandonment of the concept of development altogether and a focus instead on alternatives to development as represented by social movements. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality (Foucault 2001: 635–57), the main idea behind Escobar’s call was that any type of analysis, policy or political project using the concept of development could not escape either its Eurocentric character or its corollary deployment of objectifying forms of knowledge and intervention.
This kind of criticism of the concept of development, particularly its Eurocentric and imperialist character, was not new; indeed, other authors had made that argument long before Escobar (Goulet 1988 [1971]; Wiarda 1988 [1983]). What was new, however, was how the post-development approach reframed this old criticism within a new postmodernist, post-structuralist framework (Ahmad 1996). Thus two features distinguish the ‘post-development’ approach (Schuurman 1993; Escobar 1995; Munck 1999; Esteva and Prakash 1999) from the ‘alternative development’ approach. First, proponents of the ‘post-development’ approach reject any kind of Marxist-inspired analysis on the basis that it is incapable of integrating categories such as gender, ethnicity and race within a non-economistic framework. Secondly, they reject any form of universalizing claim regarding social agency and experiences.
Drawing on the literature on alternative development, this book will adopt the following understanding of development:
1 The process of development is understood as a process of empowerment (Friedmann 1992), a process in which human beings are able to fully realize their creative potential (Rahman 1993: 187–8, 207), and a process in which ‘object-person’ human beings become ‘subject-person’ human beings (Max-Neff et al. 1991: 8).
2 This process of ‘people’s self-development’ has to be based on horizontal popular participation and on forms of organization that can allow a certain degree of political autonomy with respect to the state and the market through the creation of a ‘counter-power’ (Friedmann 1992: 190; Carmen 1996: 83, 86–8).
3 The process of development can thus only be endogenous (Rahman 1993) and should be focused on realizing fundamental needs (Max-Neff et al. 1991). Fundamental needs, as opposed to basic needs, move away from a purely ‘material’, redistributive, and assistancialist understanding of needs towards an understanding in which human beings realize these needs through their own creative power (Carmen 1996: 147; Rahman 1993: 187). Hence, development should rely on the inherent capacities of individuals and communities more than on the accumulation of goods.
4 One of the fundamental objectives of these approaches to development is thus the search for self-reliance. Self-reliance can be achieved through a variety of means, including non-capitalist ones, such as relations of solidarity, reciprocity, and so on. For certain proponents of this understanding of development, non-Western cultures are identified as the basis for a different kind of development (Escobar 1995; Carmen 1996; Esteva and Prakash 1999).
5 Logically, this kind of development has to be carried out on a human scale (Max-Neff et al. 1991) by focusing theoretically and practically on the household (Friedmann 1992: 31–3), the community and popular social movements (Rahman 1993).
6 This combined focus on empowerment, popular participation, endogeneity and the household obviously implies the need to address issues of gender discrimination and seek gender equality (Friedmann 1992; Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 2000; Carmen 1996) by transforming traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures of power.
7 Finally, development has to be environmentally sustainable (Mies and Bennholdt-Thomsen 2000), organically linking human beings, nature and technology together (Max-Neff et al. 1991: 9).
After more than two decades since their emergence, many of the ideas, themes, issues and emphases that ‘development from below’ approaches have raised (community-based development, empowerment and participation, the satisfaction of fundamental needs, gender equality, respect for cultural diversity, and so on) have been gradually integrated into mainstream approaches to development. Sen’s human development approach (which has inspired the United Nations Development Project – UNDP – as well as many development agencies in Western countries), the appropriation of Putnam’s concept of social capital by economists of the World Bank (Fine 2001), and the more recent ‘sustainable livelihood approach’ are all examples of this process (Petras and Veltmeyer 2001: 87; Veltmeyer 2001a: 22; Kay 2005: 10–15). However, in contrast to the alternative development and the post-development perspectives, all of these new mainstream appropriations are fundamentally liberal in their understanding of agency, and are thus uncritical of the market bias of most development policies. For them, development is ultimately about individual or community integration into the market.
The alternative development approach has opened the doors to a broader critique, including ethical and philosophical dimensions, to conventional understandings of development. It has also managed to integrate insights from gender analysis and the practices of social movements and non-governmental organizations, and has consciously attempted to grasp their universal appeal. Within the context of the recurrent economic and social crisis, and given the dominance of neoliberal policies, the scholarship written from alternative development perspectives represents an important contribution to the process of rethinking development. On one hand, studies written in this vein provide an alternative to both the anti-universalism of the post-structuralist analysis of the post-development approach and to the reductionism of orthodox Marxism. On the other, they represent an alternative to mainstream approaches that still operate within the boundaries of market economics.
Alternative development approaches nevertheless have several limitations. First, they lack a historical perspective that is capable of identifying the long-term effects of the insertion of local processes into regional, national and global ones. Secondly, by relying on the use of the undifferentiated category of ‘the poor’, proponents of this approach have abandoned the attempt to grasp the specificity of peasant communities and smallholder production within different national capitalist formations. Thirdly, alternative development proponents tend to avoid facing the issue of power relations among (and within) classes, ethnic groups and genders, and resort to moral criticism rather than recognizing that all forms of oppression rest on power relations and can only be tackled through conflict and struggle. Fourthly, their criticism of the state-led model of development, which is subsidiary to their criticism of state-imposed neoliberal restructuring, has also led them to avoid reflecting on the role that state power could play within a broader project of social transformation. Finally, alternative development approaches tend to overemphasize processes of social change at the local level. This heavy focus on the local level reflects a theoretical and political weakness with regard to how alternative development proponents address the insertion of local processes of social change into global processes and struggles. Petras and Veltmeyer go even farther and argue that alternative development as well as post-development approaches share the objective of not seeking ‘fundamental change or challenge to the broader system – that is social transformation – but instead look for democratization to enlarge the space for local, community-based and people-led development’ (2001: 87). Petras and Veltmeyer are probably overstating the critique, since both of these schools have at least the merit of having followed the lead of the practice of many social movements, which have recognized the importance of transforming interpersonal, especially gender, relations as well as the need for radical structural social change.
In this book I will adopt a perspective that allows addressing the five limitations identified above. Working from this background, I argue that in order to assess peasant alternatives to neoliberalism we ought to turn our attention to the issue of whether (and to what extent) these alternatives change the social relations of production and reproduction between human beings and their environment within peasant communities. In other words, any assessment needs to examine the achievements, limitations and contradictions of these alternatives for the particular human beings involved in them. Hence, this book analyses the development alternatives implemented by the MST and the EZLN by drawing from a number of debates within the field of agrarian studies that have attempted to understand the dynamic and contradictions of peasant production. But rather than falling back on the conventional Marxist frameworks of analysis of peasant agriculture produced by Engels, Lenin, Kaustky and Chayanov, I will sustain my analysis on a less conventional framework that draws freely from the Marxian categories of use-value, exchange-value, ‘so-called’ primitive accumulation, commodification, commodity fetishism, competition, property relations and alienated labour (Marx 1991, 1992, 1993).
In his ‘Economic and philosophical manuscripts (1844)’ (1992), Marx pointed to the establishment of private ownership of the means of production as the beginning of a process of alienation of human beings. This is because private ownership prevents labourers from fully realizing their creative potentialities for transforming nature and their social environment. We can fully enjoy this ability only when we maintain control over our work, the labour process and the product of our labour. However, the imposition of private ownership of the means of production forces men and women without property to sell their labour power, and so alienate themselves from their creative potentialities in exchange for a wage. Through this process, human beings under capitalism are alienated from their individual and collective nature in four ways. First, people are alienated from their labour as it is controlled by the owner of the means of production. Secondly, people are alienated from the product of their labour, which becomes an object with intrinsic value that presents itself as something external to them and their labour. Thirdly, people are alienated from their nature of creative and social beings, because the labour process is turned into an individual and atomized activity. Fourthly, people are alienated from other human beings, who as capitalists are responsible for this alienation or as workers become competitors in the labour market.
Twenty-three years later, in Volume 1 of Capital, Marx added that this process of alienation linked to labour exploitation is mediated by and wrapped around a mystification that he called ‘commodity fetishism’, through which social relationships between humans are suppressed and transformed, by humans themselves, into relationships between objects that take on a life of their own (Marx 1990: 165). Thus social relations between humans become mediated through commodities, money and exchange-value. The labour that enters into the production of value seemingly disappears and the different usages that an object can have for human beings become subordinated to its exchange-value.4 In capitalism, land, like any other ‘object’, is transformed into a commodity with seemingly intrinsic value and appreciated for that alone. The fact that the land, through the efforts of human beings, can be a source of livelihood, food and material environment for social life (in other words that it can have use-value in meeting all the major vital needs of human beings) is obliterated by its exchange-value on the market.
I justify the use of these Marxian categories because the struggle for land of the MST and the EZLN is fundamentally about challenging capitalist private property and reclaiming control over land, production and reproduction, but also because these categories help to understand and contrast the social practices in communities oriented mainly towards subsistence agriculture5 as much as those embedded in capitalist settings. Moreover, the personal life trajectories and the everyday experiences of most peasants involved with the MST and the EZLN speak of the coexistence of the logic of subsistence and the logic of the market, but also of the difficulty of striking a balance between focusing on subsistence as a refuge from the market and the imperative of having to engage with the market. In the current context of the profound crisis of peasant agriculture and rural and urban unemployment, Marx’s concept of alienated labour (Marx 1992) in particular appears to be very appropriate to help us understand the experiences that lead landless and indigenous families to join the movements, as well as the roots of their moral and political claim on the use of land.
Staying with MST and the Zapatista communities
Owing to the different contexts and types of struggles, the fieldwork experiences with the MST and the EZLN were very different. In the case of the MST, I was able to benefit from the organizational structure of the movement. Two staff persons at the Secretariat for International Relations (SRI in Portuguese) established contact with the regional branch of the MST before I travelled to their region, and they were in constant contact with me during my fieldwork. As a result, in 2003 I was able to visit eight encampments and seventeen settlements, ranging from settlements that had been created fifteen years earlier to others that had only been in existence for four years, in the states of São Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul. Altogether, I was able to interview over seventy settlers and squatters in the relatively short time of three months. In 2009, I visited three more encampments and five settlements in the sugar-cane-dominated regions of the state of São Paulo. In every settlement and encampment I visited, an MST family hosted me. I was able to visit every facility I asked to see. I had the opportunity of interviewing a broad range of settlers, from people who were highly militant to people who were at a distance from the movement; from settlers who worked their land as a family unit to those who worked under different kinds of cooperative arrangements. I never sensed that there was any attempt to withhold information. On the contrary, some MST members even stated, ‘We have to talk about everything, what is good and what is bad, otherwise we will not move forward.’ Because many landless people took self-criticism seriously, I was exposed to contradictions and tensions within the organizations and was able to hear what various Sem Terra had to say about their experiences, the movement, and the challenges and problems within the movement.
With respect to the fieldwork in Zapatista territory, the bulk was carried out in one isolated community, which, in order to protect the anonymity of the Zapatistas, I have chosen to call ‘Santa María’. The community was located in the Santo Domingo Cañada (valley), on the northern fringe of the Lacandona jungle, but I also conducted visits to other Zapatista communities and facilities. Santa María belongs to the Ricardo Flores Magón Rebel Autonomous Municipality, which is one of the five municipalities that form the Junta de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Council) of La Garrucha in the region of Ocosingo of the Lacandona jungle.
Santa María is a small indigenous peasant community, made up of about thirty families. From the information we could gather, it was founded by Chol indigenous families who came from the region of Tumbalá in the north of Chiapas in the early 1970s. However, according to some testimonies, Santa María was awarded its ejido title only in the early 1980s after several conflicts with authorities from the Ministry of Agrarian Reform. The ejido is a form of land tenure that dates back to colonial times, but which was institutionalized after the Mexican Revolution. Ejido refers to a peasant community that has been awarded by the state the right to collective use of a given territory. There were some experiments with collective ejidos in the 1930s and again in the 1970s. Most ejidos allocated an individual parcel of land to each of its founding families and maintained a reserve of land for their offspring. However, even if the ejidatario (ejido title holder) has an exclusive right to his plots of land, before 1992 he could not sell his plot or use it as collateral for loans. This exclusive usufruct right over a parcel of land given to an ejidatario is accompanied by political rights and duties. Only ejidatarios are allowed to participate in formal ejido politics. Only ejidatarios can vote in the ejido assembly, which discusses and takes decisions on community matters such as water use, maintenance of community areas and buildings, etc. Only they participate in the election of ejido political representatives who will be in charge of carrying out the decisions of the ejido within the ejido, and represent the ejido before the municipal, state or federal authorities (Ibarra Mendívil 1996).
Santa María has no direct access to a road and is accessible only by footpaths that connect it to neighbouring communities. At the time of the fieldwork it had no electricity and no water pipes (they have had electricity since 2006), and women were in charge of providing families with drinking water. Since the division of labour is extremely gendered, the spatial organization of the community is also gendered. For instance, the communal areas, such as the casa ejidal,6 the school and the basketball court, around which the community is organized, are mainly spaces where men socialize at the end of the day, while the section of the river where women get the drinking water is a place strictly reserved for women – because it is also where they bathe – and pre-teen children.
During our fieldwork, in 2004, a third of the families were Zapatista and two-thirds were followers of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI). Of the latter, some had been part of an indigenous organization called Xi-Nich. Villagers of Santa María had never heard of a guerrilla movement in the region before January 1994, but very quickly after the uprising some of them went in search of the EZLN leadership, were recruited by the movement, and began recruiting others within their family and among their neighbours. According to many accounts we gathered, between 1994 and 1997, before adopting the policy of ‘resistance’ (refusing any funds or programmes from the state), two-thirds of Santa María’s families had abandoned their priísta affiliation (i.e. to the PRI) to become Zapatistas. The adoption of the resistance policy slowly led many villagers back to the PRI in order to gain access to the meagre state subsidies, a situation that has divided the community and created some tensions between the two groups.
Although Zapatistas with land rights have been allowed to continue to participate in the decisions of the ejido assembly, there have been many occasions when priístas have tried to impose decisions on the Zapatistas and threatened to expel them if they did not comply. Many places in the community where people customarily gather have thus also become somewhat politically segregated, clearly separating Zapatistas from priístas. For instance, Santa María has two elementary schools, an official multilevel primary school, and an autonomous Zapatista multilevel primary school. Aside from this division, unlike what has happened in other indigenous regions and communities, Santa María has not fared too badly, and family ties that cut across political affiliations have remained strong and allowed the different groups to work out their differences. Circumstances are, however, very fluid and can vary depending on the political conjuncture. In June 2013, following Enrique Peña Nieto’s victory in the presidential elections of 2012, tensions and violent clashes were reported in several communities of the regions owing to attempts by PRI followers to expel Zapatistas from their communities or destroy the buildings they were using in village communal spaces.
Comparing the MST and the EZLN
There are few comparative studies of the MST and the EZLN because they represent radically different peasant movements and yet important insights are gained by comparing the two. It is crucial, then, that any comparison takes account of the differences between the MST and the EZLN, especially with regard to class and ethnic composition, to national paths of capitalist development and state formation, and to the concrete experiences and struggles of these movements. By adopting this approach, the picture of the MST and the EZLN that I present can provide a very interesting, albeit partial, portrait of land struggles and peasant movements in Latin America. The comparison allows for the opportunity to contrast two extremes of the Latin American countryside: one marked by the redundancy of rural proletarians owing to the concentration and modernization of agriculture, the other by the growing marginalization of subsistence peasant indigenous communities owing to the crisis of peasant production triggered by a shift in food systems. The comparison will thus allow us to understand these two different land struggles in Latin America as moments in the current worldwide process of resistance against privatization of land rights and globalization of agriculture.
There are obviously some important methodological challenges to the comparison as I have designed it. These challenges are, to a great extent, related to the different kinds of fieldwork it proved possible for me to undertake. But the principal challenge of the exercise was of course typical of the raison d’être of comparative politics: to explain variation and commonality.
Sociologist and comparativist Charles Tilly identifies four types of comparison: 1) individualizing; 2) universalizing; 3) variation-finding; and 4) encompassing. According to Tilly, ‘a purely individualizing comparison treats each case as unique, taking up one instance at a time, and minimizing its common properties with other instances’ (Tilly 1984: 81). In an individualizing comparison, ‘the point is to contrast specific instances of a given phenomenon as a means of grasping the peculiarities of each case’ (ibid.: 82). In contrast, ‘a pure universalizing comparison, on the other hand, identifies common properties among all instances of a phenomenon’ (ibid.: 81) and thus ‘aims to establish that every instance of a phenomenon follows essentially the same rule’ (ibid.: 82). Tilly argues that Reinhard Bendix adopts the method of individualizing comparison in his work on the industrialization and democratization of the West (ibid.: 89–97), while he sees Theda Skocpol’s work on social revolutions as a good example of a universalizing comparison (ibid.: 109–15). The third type of comparative study, variation-finding comparison, ‘is supposed to establish a principle of variation in the character and intensity of the phenomenon by examining the systematic differences among instances’, while the fourth, encompassing comparison, ‘places different instances at various locations within the same system on the way to explaining their characteristics as a function of their varying relationships to the system as a whole’ (ibid.: 82–3). According to Tilly, Barrington Moore’s study of the origins of democracy and dictatorship is a good example of variation-finding comparison (ibid.: 119–24), while the work of Stein Rokkan on conceptual maps of Europe epitomizes the results of an encompassing comparison (ibid.: 131–9).
One of the main limitations of most of these approaches to comparative analysis is that they tend to favour the adoption of a relatively static and somewhat ahistorical understanding of the state and the market (McMichael 1990: 393). Hence, in contrast to what I attempt to do in this book, the changing nature of the state and the market across time and space is not considered as a major component of the comparison. Philip McMichael, in order to avoid the limitations of conventional ‘encompassing comparison’ and the ‘individualizing comparison’, has proposed the idea of ‘incorporating comparison’, which can be either ‘multiple’ or ‘singular’. McMichael argues that:
Rather than using ‘encompassing comparison’ – a strategy that presumes a ‘whole’ that governs its ‘parts’ – [incorporating comparison] progressively constructs a whole as a methodological procedure by giving context to historical phenomena […]. The goal is not to develop invariant hypotheses via comparison of more or less uniform ‘cases’, but to give substance to a historical process (a whole) through comparison of its parts. (Ibid.: 386)
Following this objective, an incorporating comparison can be ‘multiple’, by analysing instances ‘as products of a continuously evolving process in and across time’, or it can take a ‘singular form’ that analyses ‘variation in or across space within a world historical conjuncture’ (ibid.: 389). Following McMichael, land struggles as different as that of the MST and that of the EZLN are thus comparable ‘because they are competitively combined, and therefore redefined, in an historical conjuncture with unpredictable outcomes’ (ibid.: 389).
In the research that led to this book, I adopted an individualizing comparison approach, and I conducted my study of the two movements’ land struggles and development alternatives separately and individually in order to understand them in their specificity. I started by studying the Zapatista case and placed the EZLN within its specific Chiapanecan and indigenous context and its relation to the nation-state. I then followed with the case of the MST and studied the context of its emergence in southern Brazil. At that point, I relied mainly on scholarship that investigated the socio-economic and political transformations in which these movements have been involved, as well as the literature that described their forms of struggle and their organizational features.
To be able to assess the development alternatives of these movements, I established that, during the fieldwork period, I would concentrate on gathering observations focused on the following six aspects: 1) the meaning of land and the preferred forms of land tenure; 2) the forms of labour and management of agricultural production; 3) the type of agricultural production, marketing and credit; 4) the kind of presence or absence of state institutions and programmes in their region of influence and communities; 5) the type of autonomy that rural communities were able to achieve in respect to the state and political parties; and 6) social reproduction and gender relations within the household, the communities and the two organizations.
It was really only after my first period of fieldwork in southern Brazil in the summer of 2003 that my comparison of the MST and the EZLN started to take form and that the global aspect of these two struggles for land began to emerge. However, it was only at the end of my second fieldwork experience – in a Zapatista community in the spring of 2004 – that the commonalities between the two struggles and their proposed development alternatives became clear to me. From that point on, my study moved more towards what McMichael calls a ‘singular form of incorporating comparison’ (ibid.: 393), where the struggle of the MST and the struggle of the EZLN represent two different kinds of Latin American ‘instances’ of the global historical neoliberal restructuring of agriculture, the process of privatization of land rights, and the emergence of peasant development alternatives to neoliberalism. The fieldwork experience also led me to place the control of the means of production and social reproduction of peasant families at the centre of my analysis of the development alternative of both movements.
Overview of the book
With this book I seek to contribute to the understanding of the characteristics, achievements and challenges of the development alternatives presented by the MST and the EZLN. From a theoretical perspective, I provide an approach to peasant struggles that combines the macro perspective of the historical trajectories of distinct nation-states with the micro perspective of the everyday preoccupations of peasant families living in radically different contexts. Hence, I hope to contribute to current debates on the effects of and responses to neoliberalism in the field of political economy and development, on the nature of peasant production in the field of peasant studies and on the factors explaining the success of peasant movements in the field of social movement analysis.
The book is organized into five chapters and follows a thematic presentation that covers and compares both movements in each chapter, rather than a presentation that analyses each case separately and undertakes an actual comparison only in the concluding chapter.
In the first chapter, I outline the theoretical framework for my study of peasant agriculture within the context of different paths of capitalist development and state formation in Brazil and Mexico, and do so in order to place the land struggle and the development alternative of the MST and the EZLN in a longer-term historical context, beyond that of the current neoliberal period.
The second chapter provides a characterization of the land struggles of the MST and the EZLN. In it, I assess earlier generations of scholars who explained the peasant rebellions by applying their general conclusions to the land struggle of the MST and that of the EZLN. I suggest that these land struggles represent new forms of peasant rebellions, and I offer an alternative approach to the notion of semi-feudalism that many students of peasant rebellions have adopted.
In the third chapter, I look at the internal organization and decision-making structure of the movements in order to show the process of empowerment that the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement and the Zapatistas are carrying forward. Falling back on Gramsci’s idea of the modern prince, I make an argument that the MST and the EZLN have replaced the political party in its function of ‘school of government’. I also argue that the control of a territory, along with the development of political structures that are alternative to the state, differentiates peasant movements from other social movements because they allow the creation or strengthening of ‘autonomous rural communities’. Here, I also look at the extent to which women have been allowed or encouraged to participate, and the degree to which gender relations have been transformed.
In Chapter 4, I analyse the productive and reproductive aspect of these development alternatives to neoliberalism. I look at questions of land tenure, organization of production, and the focus and objectives of production, as well as the gendered division of labour. By contrasting some of the work on ‘peasant rationality’ and ‘peasant culture’ with debates around petty commodity and simple commodity producers, I show how many practices and decisions regarding agricultural production of MST settlers and Zapatista indigenous peasants correspond to a non-capitalist logic, which is consciously chosen and not inherent to peasantness. I also show how food security, and thus production for subsistence, is the primary objective of MST settlers and Zapatista indigenous peasants, and how this focus on subsistence allows them to partially mediate the effects of the market.
In Chapter 5, I analyse how the MST and the EZLN view state power within a broader project of social change, and I look at the strategies they have adopted towards civil society, political parties and state institutions. I argue that both movements have been successful in growing numerically, but that they have not generated a social and political alliance that would lead other actors in Brazil and Mexico to adopt political positions and strategies closer to their more radical political outlook. The MST’s more pragmatic approach to collaboration has actually backfired since the PT attained the presidency, and the Zapatista strategy of rejecting state power has convinced only a small minority of movements in Mexico.
Finally, in the Conclusion, I review the main arguments of the book, highlight some of the main commonalities and major differences of both land struggles and development alternatives, and assess the movements’ achievements, failures, contradictions and challenges.