2 | NEOLIBERALISM AND NEW FORMS OF PEASANT REBELLION
The last chapter placed the current land struggles in Brazil and Chiapas in historical perspective and highlighted the impact of property regimes on the different types of agrarian transition that Brazil and Mexico underwent in order to understand the type of countryside in which the struggle of the MST and the EZLN are inserted. In this chapter we turn our attention to the specific transformations that neoliberal restructuring triggered in the Brazilian and Chiapan countrysides. The objective is to understand how the grassroots membership of both organizations was concretely affected by these changes and assess the extent to which their response can be seen as new forms of peasant rebellions because of the radical nature of their resistance to neoliberalism and capitalism.
Latin America has a long history of peasant revolts, rebellions and revolutions. The land struggle currently being waged by the MST in Brazil and the EZLN in Chiapas share many of the characteristics of previous peasant rebellions. Although the MST and the EZLN’s struggles for land are not social revolutions in a strict sense,1 they do represent a radicalization of peasant politics that shows both continuities and ruptures with other peasant rebellions studied by a previous generation of scholars (Moore 1966; Wolf 1973; Migdal 1974; Paige 1975; Scott 1976; Skocpol 1982). Both organizations have strongly opposed the implementation of neoliberal policies, questioned the sanctity of private property, challenged the existing power relations in the countryside, and have inserted their struggle within a broader perspective of global social transformation. The fact that the MST and the EZLN have adopted forms of political action that privilege social mobilization over military confrontation should not impede us from using the term rebellion to characterize their struggle for land, because it simply shows that peasant movements adopt forms of struggle in accordance with historical circumstances. Even if they justify their actions on the state’s own terrain by linking it to national symbols, the contemporary discourse on democracy and even the constitutional basis of the current political regimes, the MST and the EZLN still seek to radically transform the existing social order. Furthermore, as will be shown in Chapter 3, the political practices encouraged within these movements also represent a radicalization of more traditional forms of politics because they emphasize grassroots politicization and participation within the territorial spaces under their control – namely encampments and settlements in the case of the MST and autonomous indigenous communities and municipalities in the case of the EZLN.
Scholars of peasant rebellions have identified the expansion of capitalism and state modernizing policies as two of the fundamental processes triggering agrarian changes that lead to revolts. However, since most studies were conducted during periods when traditional agrarian social structures characterized the countryside, most scholars inserted their analysis of the process of proletarianization within a framework that also attributed a great importance to peasant–landlord relationships, which were seen as quasi-feudal. As will be argued below, this framework is no longer appropriate for studying the current resurgence of peasant struggles in Latin America. In the last thirty years, following a continental trend (Kay 1995, 2000), in Brazil and Mexico ‘traditional landlords’ of the kind Moore, Wolf, Paige and Scott wrote about have essentially disappeared.2 The MST’s and the EZLN’s struggle for land cannot be explained by referring to feudal-like relationships. We are hence witnessing new forms of peasant rebellions, reacting at the same time to land dispossession and the experience of alienation through the labour market.
Scholars who have sought to characterize and explain peasant rebellions have mainly focused on four interrelated issues:
1 the conditions giving rise to peasant rebellions;
2 the social and political goals of the rebellions;
3 the class composition of the rebellions; and
4 the reasons explaining the success of the revolutionary movement.
There is a large body of literature that has focused on identifying and analysing the political and organizational processes that led to the emergence, development and success of the MST (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000; Navarro 2000; Branford and Rocha 2002; Welch 2006; Ondetti 2008) and the EZLN (Collier with Quaratiello 1994; Harvey 1998; Nash 2001; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). Hence, this chapter will focus mainly on the first three issues. In the first section, I will describe the neoliberal restructuring of the countryside that has occurred in Brazil and in Chiapas. I will follow with an overview of some of the debates on the goals and the traditional class composition of peasant rebellions. In the last section, I will provide a characterization of the class composition of the membership of the MST and the EZLN and highlight some of the radical and anti-capitalist aspects of their development alternatives, which will be described in detail in the following two chapters.
The crisis of peasant agriculture under neoliberal Brazil and Mexico
Most scholars of peasant rebellions (Moore 1966; Wolf 1973, 1999; Migdal 1974; Paige 1975; Scott 1976;3 Skocpol 1982) agree that modern peasant rebellions are responses to sudden drastic agrarian changes that disrupt the daily lives of peasants, and which trigger economic and political crisis. Focusing on Latin America, Susan Eckstein has also pointed out that the existence or the absence of exit options for peasants was crucial in determining whether or not a revolutionary movement emerged. When impoverished peasants are able to find work in cities or in agricultural enterprises, or when they can migrate to other regions, a revolutionary organization will have difficulty in finding recruits. Conversely, if no exit options exist, peasant rebellions are more likely to develop (Eckstein 2001 [1989]: 46). At first glance, if we look at the general structural causes that gave rise to the MST and the EZLN, the origin of these struggles for land does not seem to diverge from previous rebellions. However, the contemporary crises of peasant agriculture can no longer be seen in terms of encroachment upon the non-capitalist logic of isolated peasant villages by the logic of capitalist market relations. Members of the MST and the EZLN, although they partly rely on non-capitalist social relations for their survival, have engaged in capitalist exchanges for a long time, either through the sale of the crops they produce or their labour power for a wage. Hence, it is not the expansion of capitalist relations per se, but rather the nature of the restructuring of agriculture which explains the re-emergence of the struggles for land in Brazil and Chiapas.
As has happened in other regions of the South, the profound crisis of the peasant economy, exacerbated by growing unemployment in the countryside and in cities, has endangered subsistence, i.e. the simple social reproduction of the peasantry (Bryceson 2000b; Bernstein 2004; Moyo and Yeros 2005). In turn, this situation has led many sectors of the peasantry to confront the power of the state and rural elites. In Brazil and Mexico, particularly Chiapas, the economic crisis reached such a degree at the end of the millennium that the struggle for land is now geared towards the subsistence of poor and marginalized families. In both countries, maintaining or gaining access to land, and thus reclaiming the peasant condition (repeasantization), is one of the political strategies adopted by rural subaltern groups to resist the ongoing crisis. However, as shown in the previous chapter, since Brazil and Mexico adopted very different paths of capitalist development and state formation, which can be traced back to different regimes of land property rights, the actual nature of the countryside differed.
Regardless of their differences, the state-led models of agricultural production in Brazil and Mexico were part of a global food regime, dominated by ‘the United States as the main rule-maker and – consequently – main exporter’ (Friedmann 2004: 125). Within this regime, state intervention and regulation focused mainly on setting prices and conditions on domestic producers, controlling distribution, and protecting the national market (ibid.: 129). The United States has simultaneously promoted the commodification of agriculture and further technological improvements in agriculture, which in Third World countries was carried out through the Green Revolution via the encouragement of monoculture and the introduction of high-yielding varieties of rice, wheat, maize and potatoes, as well as the use of modern inputs such as pesticides and fertilizers (ibid.: 133). The shift from a state-led to a market-led model of agricultural production in Brazil and Mexico was thus also part of a worldwide restructuring process of capitalism and agriculture that was initiated in the core capitalist countries. In the second half of the 1970s, in response to the subsidized overproduction of US agriculture and the growing competitiveness of western European agriculture (ibid.: 135), the US government began pressuring Third World countries into opening their markets and phasing out state intervention in the agricultural sector. Like other Latin American countries, Brazil and Mexico adopted market-led development, and since the 1980s agriculture has been transformed by market and trade liberalization, the specialization of production, and the expansion of agribusiness. In both countries, transnational agribusiness complexes have also filled the void left by the retreat of the state and have increased their involvement in and control of the liberalized market. In both countries, processing companies set production standards and conditions, while the banks of agricultural equipment companies, such as John Deere, have become an important source of credit for modernized agricultural producers (Belik and Paulillo 2001: 103; Rubio 2004: 953). However, in each country, though more in Brazil than Mexico, the state maintained some support programmes for large and even small producers well into the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the Brazilian and Mexican states never returned to the kind of involvement in agriculture that characterized their policies before the 1980s.
In Brazil, even though agricultural credits were cut fivefold during the 1980s (Belik and Paulillo 2001: 96), the state continued to intervene in the market throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s by purchasing and stockpiling food crops and maintaining guaranteed prices (Dias and Amaral 2002: 214; Delgado 2001: 47). As a result, large Brazilian capitalist farmers were protected for several decades and are now fully integrated with the transnational agribusiness sector (Belik and Paulillo 2001: 98), as well as with the national supermarket chains (Dias and Amaral 2002: 217). In contrast, in Mexico, public investment in agriculture also decreased dramatically, but as the country opened its agricultural market faster than NAFTA prescribed it, heavily subsidized agricultural imports from the United States have pushed small and even medium-sized agricultural producers to migrate (Rubio 2004) or into production for self-consumption (Barkin 2002). Only a small proportion of medium-sized producers were able to find a niche in fruit and vegetable markets through production contracts with agribusiness (Barros Nock 2000: 169).
In Brazil and Mexico, small and medium-sized producers, peasants, squatters and rural workers have had to bear the costs of this restructuring. In Brazil, in addition to the already mentioned 28 million rural workers and peasants who were expelled from the countryside between 1960 and 1980, 10 million lost their jobs in the agricultural sector between 1985 and 1995 (Filho 2001: 196) and it is estimated that another 4 million people abandoned agriculture between 1995 and 1999 (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003a: 75). However, smallholder production was far from being eradicated because up to 1995 as many as 69.8 per cent of all production units in Brazil cultivated an area of less than 20 hectares (Buainaim et al. 2003: 322). However, as was mentioned earlier, it became more and more difficult for peasant families to maintain their access to land, compete on the market, and find paid work on capitalist farms. Similarly, in Mexico, the number of profit-making agricultural producers dropped from 4 million producers in 1994 to only 300,000 in 2000 (Rubio 2004: 955), and by the end of that decade only 20,000 of the 7 million producers could be considered dynamic enough to participate in the export sector (Pechlaner and Otero 2010: 201). In Chiapas, according to official data, the percentage of municipalities considered of ‘high’ and ‘very high’ marginalization went up from 63.06 per cent of all municipalities in 1995 to 93.16 per cent in 2000 (Gobierno de Chiapas – Secretaría de Desarrollo Social 2003: 27). In 2010, 78.5 per cent of the population of Chiapas lived below the poverty line, of which 38.3 per cent lived in extreme poverty. In the municipalities with a Zapatista presence, such as Ocosingo, Chilón, Las Margaritas, Tila and Chamula, the population living in extreme poverty was as high as 59.7 per cent, 70.6 per cent, 60.8 per cent, 69.3 per cent and 69.7 per cent respectively (CONEVAL 2012: 17).
In Chiapas during the 1980s, poor indigenous peasants experienced the crisis through a drastic drop in the price of maize and coffee, the two crops from which they derived their monetary income. INMECAFÉ, the state corporation that regulated, financed and purchased coffee production, was privatized in 1989 in the midst of the worst coffee crisis, which saw prices fall by 50 per cent in a year, leaving thousands of small and micro producers loaded with debt and without access to credit (Harvey 1995: 42–3). Similarly, the price of maize dropped drastically to the extent that in 1987 43 per cent of maize producers were operating at a loss. The number jumped to 65 per cent in 1988 (ibid.: 44). As a consequence, in all regions of Chiapas this crisis propelled an even more dramatic struggle for land. In the Lacandona jungle, where the EZLN emerged, the low price of coffee and maize came to exacerbate the already abrasive land conflict between indigenous peasant communities and the state, which dated back several decades. First, President Gustavo Díaz Ordáz (1964–70) promulgated a decree promising ejido titles to the peasants who colonized and settled in the Lacandona jungle. Then in 1971, his successor, Luis Echeverría (1970–76), halted the possibility of gaining access to land through colonization by allocating 614,321 hectares of the jungle to only sixty-six families of Lacandon s and cancelled the rights of twenty-six indigenous communities of other ethnic origins that had recently settled in the area (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 113). The indigenous settlers, whose lands were now endangered by the decree, did not want to relocate and began an arduous struggle against the government. Subsequently, in 1979, President José López Portillo (1976–82), through another decree, created the ecological reserve of Montes Azules, which meant another relocation of hundreds of indigenous peasant settler communities, and the revocation of their ejido titles. This threat against their land rights in the context of a deep economic crisis was at the root of an important process of communal organization and mobilization that culminated in the development of the EZLN (Harvey 1998: 68–90). Hence, in 1989, when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) granted ejido titles to twenty-six ‘illegal’ communities settled within the Montes Azules bio-reserve (Collier with Quaratiello 1994: 78), it was, for most of them, too little too late. The state had lost the little legitimacy it had enjoyed in the eyes of the peasantry, had become a class enemy and had effectively been replaced by the EZLN, which was at the time still a clandestine organization (see ibid.: 51). Collier synthetized the whole process in these terms:
Government intervention into the colonization of one of Mexico’s last frontiers thus subtly but irrevocably reversed earlier perceptions of agrarian authorities as allies. The government replaced large landowners as the hated enemy by taking over their role. First, the state came to act as a self-interested proprietor of national lands rather than facilitator of peasant needs … Second, the government, by rewarding peasants loyal to the ruling party, set peasants against peasants, just as hated landlords had once conceded marginal lands to ‘their’ peasants as a bulwark against claims of other peasants in the earlier phase of agrarian reform. And finally, in 1992, the government changed the law to put an end to the very claims it had encouraged peasants to make as colonists on the final frontier. (Ibid.: 51)
Thus, beyond some important differences between the conditions and development of the Brazilian and Mexican countryside, the modernization of agriculture in Brazil and the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s and 1990s in both countries led to a crisis in peasant agriculture and the marginalization of peasants and rural workers. In turn, this crisis created favourable conditions for the emergence of the struggle for land by the MST in Brazil and the EZLN in Chiapas. In the case of the MST, the land struggle started before the implementation of neoliberal policies, but neoliberal restructuring gave it a second impulse and has allowed the MST to continue growing nationally. In the case of the EZLN, neoliberal restructuring exacerbated an already existing local land conflict between indigenous peasant communities and the state. The deepening of the economic crisis of the Chiapan countryside has allowed the EZLN to expand its social base outside the initial geographic area of the Lacandona jungle, but only into regions within the state of Chiapas that are populated by indigenous subsistence peasants. The decision to reject any kind of relationship with the state, including anti-poverty cash transfers, has, however, fragmented many Zapatista communities internally, splitting them according to social and political affiliations.
The neoliberal restructuring of agriculture that occurred in Brazil and Chiapas provides the conditions that made revolt possible, but it does not in itself tell us why peasants rebelled only in those two regions and not elsewhere in Latin America. Three factors can help explain the peculiarity of the struggle for land by the MST and the EZLN. First, peasant politics and the state’s response to it in Brazil and Mexico run counter to the recent history of peasant politics elsewhere in Latin America. Peasantries in Latin America have participated in guerrilla movements since the 1960s in Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Peru. Over a period of several decades, while guerrilla movements were frequently able to destabilize local oligarchic regimes, they never managed to defeat them completely. As a consequence, peasant movements in Central America have accepted that their demands must remain within the limits of liberal representative democracies instead of challenging them as the MST and the EZLN do. Jeffrey Paige, taking issue with Barrington Moore’s (1966) three routes to modern democracy, argues that Central American failed ‘socialist revolutions from below’ exemplify a fourth route to democracy, because the unintended consequence of these revolutions was the establishment of liberal democratic regimes (Paige 1997: 316, 329–32). In contrast, Brazil and Mexico are two countries where the state managed to suppress guerrilla movements very early on in the 1960s and 1970s. The Brazilian and the Mexican states were also able to develop or maintain successful corporatist structures in the countryside until the early 1980s (Houtzager 1998; Villafuerte et al. 1999: 154). Hence the demise of these corporatist structures, due both to the implementation of neoliberal policies and the challenge of a new wave of peasant movements, has led to the radicalization of some sectors of the peasantry two decades later than in other Latin American countries. However, as will be shown in Chapter 5, the decreased financial capacity of the state has not made corporatism fade away and most peasant organizations continue to seek clientelistic relations with political parties and the state.
Secondly, the absence of an exit strategy for peasants and rural workers in Brazil and Chiapas provided further impetus for this radicalization of peasant politics. In the case of Brazil, the mere size of the rural population expelled from the countryside eliminates the possibility of speaking of any kind of significant exit option. For many peasant families wanting to remain on the land, the choice was simply between social marginalization in cities and land occupation with the MST and other peasant organizations. The same is true for indigenous regions of Chiapas. Sources of local off-farm work that had traditionally been important for the subsistence peasants of the Lacandona jungle and for other indigenous regions of Chiapas became ever scarcer as a result of the development of cattle ranching from the 1970s and the coffee crisis of the 1980s. Moreover, in contrast to other indigenous regions of southern Mexico, in Chiapas migration to the United States did not replace migration to the city as an exit strategy. In 1995 Chiapas was still ranked 27th out of 32 Mexican states in terms of the amount of remittances received from abroad, as indigenous peasants continued to rely more on their kinship network and community for their survival than on migration.4
The third factor distinguishing the experience of the MST and the EZLN from those of other peasant organizations in Latin America arises from the role played by these peasant movements in the radicalization of peasants and landless rural workers. Joel Migdal emphasized that peasant revolutions could emerge only if a revolutionary organization filled the political vacuum created by the decline of traditional village institutions and leaders. For him, peasants would be ready to join a revolutionary organization if it was able to offer concrete solutions to their problems, provide them with material rewards or services, or allow them to reach longer-term goals (Migdal 1974: 237–52). Barrington Moore, on his part, highlighted the importance of the ‘types of solidarity arrangements among the peasants … insofar as they constitute focal points for the creation of a distinct peasant society in opposition to the dominant class and as the basis for popular conceptions of justice and injustice that clash with those of the rulers’ (1966: 479). However, he seemed to suggest that the type of solidarity arrangements was more the result of the agrarian structure of a peasant society and less the fruit of the efforts of peasant organizations. The experience of the MST and the EZLN shows that by controlling a territorial space – the encampment and the settlement in the case of the MST and a whole network of indigenous communities in the case of the EZLN – these organizations were able to replace the state and provide peasants with political representation and basic services (Robles 2000; Fernandes 2005; Burguete Cal y Mayor 2003; Starr et al. 2011). From these ‘autonomous rural communities’ they were able to develop a radical understanding of politics and social change based on the re-creation or strengthening of the bonds of solidarity among peasants and landless rural workers. Very few peasant movements in contemporary Latin America have achieved a similar control over a territorial space that can be translated into a powerful tool for social mobilization. When they have achieved that control, such as in the case of the indigenous movement in Ecuador, the actions of peasant movements have yielded impressive political results (see Perreault 2003).
Searching for a revolutionary subject in the countryside
Determining which sector of the peasantry is more prone to adopt revolutionary strategies has been at the centre of many heated debates among scholars of peasant rebellions. Indeed, in his study on the Russian countryside, Lenin argued that middle-income peasants were a barrier to socialist transformation ‘because of their vacillating nature on the border of subsistence and profit-oriented production, and because of the brake they placed on the development of a home market, given their tendency to be self-sufficient producers’ (Bryceson 2000a: 10). Lenin added that, in contrast, landless rural labourers, because of their class position, could be considered allies of the industrial proletariat in a socialist revolution. Two of the most influential studies on peasant rebellions, Barrington Moore Jr’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) and Eric Wolf’s Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (1973), provided evidence against the argument about the conservative orientation of peasants and the revolutionary potential of rural labourers. For Moore, Wolf and Scott, landowning peasants were more prone to rebel than landless peasants and rural workers (Skocpol 1982: 352). Wolf’s work is more relevant here because, among the three, he is the one who tried to push and refine this argument the farthest.
According to Wolf, poor peasants or landless labourers cannot be revolutionaries because they have no tactical power (Wolf 1975: 268). Only the ‘land-owning middle peasantry’ or a ‘peasantry located in a peripheral area outside the domain of the landlord control’ has sufficient internal leverage to sustain a rebellion (ibid.: 269). But for Wolf it was basically middle-income peasants, those ‘who work their own land with labour of their own family’, who were the ‘prime movers to rebellion’, because ‘only they possess the degree of autonomy required to initiate political action and to become viable allies for “outside agitators”’ (Wolf 1999: 235). In contrast to Wolf, Jeffery Paige recognized that under particular circumstances peasants could radicalize and even engage in revolts, but only to return to their prior conservatism (Paige 1975: 339). For Paige, it was the migratory estate labourers and the sharecroppers (i.e. the poorest sectors of the peasantry) who formed the principal base of revolutionary movements.5
The respective positions of Wolf and Paige in the debate over which sectors of the peasantry were more prone to rebel is grounded in different views on the ties that different groups within the peasantry maintain with land and with their communities. Indeed, Wolf argued that middle-income peasants were ‘primary movers of revolutions’ also because their children, who are sent to the city to work, maintain their ties to their village and can introduce to the village revolutionary ideas learned in the city (Wolf 1973: 292, 1999: 235). Conversely, according to Wolf, children of poor peasants, once in the city, simply break their ties with their family and village (Wolf 1973: 292, 1999: 235). In contradistinction to Wolf, Paige’s analysis of the migratory estate system shows that it is the ties of poor peasants (migrant estate workers) with land and their communities which allow peasant communities to be drawn into a revolutionary movement (Paige 1975: 361).
Similarly, for scholars of the Latin American countryside, one of the major debates within agrarian studies has been that around the characterization of the social condition of the majority of rural producers. There are broadly two positions within this debate: the ‘proletarianist’ position, which argues that the main tendency in the Latin American countryside is towards the proletarianization of rural producers, and the ‘peasantist’ position, which argues that regardless of the growing reliance of rural direct producers on wages, the peasantry as a class still resists the process of proletarianization and manages to remain connected to land through their kin or villages (Harris 1978: 8; Otero 1999; Kay 2000).
Implicitly, in the background of this entire debate, a few central questions always come back: Through what productive process do rural producers ensure their material reproduction? Is it through what they produce on their plots or is it through the wage that they earn as wage labourers? Because the reality of agricultural production and the peasant condition within capitalism are much more complex than a simple answer to those questions could allow, a subsequent question normally follows: Which of these two components of agricultural production is more important for the simple social reproduction of the peasant family? Some analysts see wage labour as a complementary activity to peasant production for self-consumption, while others see production for self-consumption simply as a means of survival that helps rural proletarians to reproduce themselves as labourers. In turn, again rarely explicitly, this search for the correct characterization of the class position (proletarian or peasant) of rural social subjects involved in rebellions is rooted in a particular understanding of class formation that is built upon the base/superstructure model. Determining the correct class position becomes important because it is believed that class consciousness derives from ‘objective’ class position, i.e. from the place of the subject within the productive process. This objective class position can later be mobilized and shaped by militant political struggles of a radical organization, which triggers the ‘subjective’ (i.e revolutionary) aspects of class formation. Marxists theorists have used the metaphor of ‘class in itself’ to refer to the first moment and ‘class for itself’ for the second moment.
To escape from this conundrum, one has to understand class and social reproduction as a highly complex phenomenon that cannot be accurately grasped primarily by the structural reductionism that establishes the condition of social subjects according to their simple ‘material’ or ‘objective’ conditions of existence. On the contrary, class and social reproduction must encompass, as equally determining, political, cultural and symbolic elements, understood as constitutive elements inseparable from the totality and as acquiring a materiality through concrete social relations, but also, as we will see in Chapter 3, through the process of participating within a political organization. That said, identifying the kind of economic activities in which rural subjects are involved is important, not because it tells us something about their class consciousness, but rather because it indicates the various kinds of experiences that they bring with them when they decide to enter an organization. Peasants or proletarians will not be ‘revolutionary’ per se or collectively become a class because of their place in the economy, but rather because they have reflected on the people, institutions and mechanisms that oppressed them and have taken collective means to address this situation.
Hence, at the beginning of the new millennium, experiences as wage labourers in the countryside or in the city are extremely important in the radicalization of landless rural workers in Brazil and subsistence indigenous peasants in Chiapas. These experiences are not as important in terms of access to revolutionary ideas – especially not today – as they are in terms of experiences of alienation and marginalization. The long periods of unemployment and on-and-off casual wage work lead poor peasants and landless rural workers to reassess the advantages of having access to land. In the case of indigenous peasants in Chiapas, these experiences with the vicissitudes of underemployment, which are racially mediated, reinforce their sense of alienation from Mexican society. As early as the late 1960s, some Latin American Marxists (Marini 1973; Quijano 1994; Nun 1994) argued that expelled peasants would not be integrated into the reserve army of labour but would instead enlarge a marginal population (marginal mass or marginal pole) that is permanently unemployed and reproduced through various activities within what has been called the ‘informal sector’ (Kay 2006: 459–62). Following that trend of thought, Cristóbal Kay has recently argued that as a result of the modernization of agriculture during the last thirty years, which has entrenched seasonal work as the main type of occupation in the countryside, ‘most of Latin America’s peasantry appears to be stuck in a state of permanent semi-proletarianization’ (Kay 2000: 132). Indeed, the particularity of the process of industrialization and agricultural modernization in Latin American countries makes it difficult to talk about proletarianization as the main or the only tendency in the countryside, unless by proletarianization one simply refers to the generalization of experiences of wage labour within various sectors of the peasantry. On the contrary, even in cases such as Brazil where the process of proletarianization of rural direct producers has progressed more rapidly than in other countries of Latin America, the peasant responses to the restructuring of agriculture impede a linear understanding of the process. Hence, land struggles in the context of incomplete proletarianization are products of dynamic processes of depeasantization/semi-proletarianization/repeasantization. In this context, rural direct producers, in response to the instability of their wage-earning activities, shift back and forth between the condition of semi-proletarianized rural workers and peasants, combine both for an extended period, and often seek to regain their peasant condition.
Alternatives to impoverishment and social marginalization
In contrast to how past peasant rebellions were portrayed by a previous generation of scholars, the social composition of both the MST and the EZLN is very diverse. Indeed, most scholars of peasant rebellions differentiate between peasants and rural wage labourers, associating the latter with the proletariat. As the previous discussion highlights, this clear-cut distinction can no longer be made in Latin America, as the great majority of rural producers combine different activities and class experiences, and move from one condition to the other.6 Nevertheless, some distinctions between the social composition of the MST and the EZLN have to be drawn if we want to understand the specificity of their struggle for land.
Since the early 1980s it has been possible to identify two fundamental waves of militants. Most of those who make up the first wave struggled for land in the 1980s, have a family history of land possession, and are thus from an unambiguously peasant background. The first wave of Sem Terra were mainly land-poor peasants, landless peasants (sharecroppers or squatters) and landless rural workers who, in the 1970s, because of land concentration and the mechanization of agriculture, had to migrate to other rural areas or to the cities in search of employment. An important proportion of the people who joined the MST in the 1980s were thus former peasants or rural workers with access to land through a family member. Especially in the early 1980s, Sem Terra had experiences with subsistence agriculture and non-monetarized relations of production somewhat similar to those of Zapatista indigenous peasants. However, this does not apply to all the members of the MST, since many of them come from family farming, which, especially in the south, is much more integrated within the circuit of modern capitalist farming.
The second wave of MST militants is probably more diverse than the first wave, although the proportion of landless peasants, sharecroppers and the like is lower than in the first wave. This second wave of Sem Terra is much more clearly made up of landless rural workers, often with no family history of land possession, while the proportion of urban dwellers with little or very distant connections with the countryside is now growing. This last tendency directly contradicts Wickham-Crowley’s argument (2001 [1989]: 151) that a peasantry that has been landless for some time will tend not to participate in radical movements. In the case of the current second generation of Sem Terra, it cannot be said that their struggle represents a reconnection with a lost peasant past. Their struggle represents more a deconnection from a current experience of urban marginalization. Regardless of the differences between the two waves of landless people, both share the objective of finding a space for subsistence within a peasant economy in the midst of a profound unemployment crisis.7 The achievement of this goal depends on gaining access to land and, at least in the beginning, producing food for self-consumption. Once this initial phase of survival is completed, MST settlers become much more preoccupied with finding ways to better integrate into the market through the creation of cooperatives, the diversification of production or through participation in the niche market of agro-ecological production.
In contrast, the EZLN is a movement made up of subsistence indigenous peasants and their semi-proletarianized kin, who migrate temporarily to work in farms and ranches or cities of Chiapas. The Zapatista movement has enrolled communities in the Lacandona jungle, the north, the highlands and the Fronteriza regions of Chiapas. The EZLN has not been able to set up alternative political structures in the non-indigenous regions of the state, such as the Soconusco and Central Valley, which are more integrated into the market and where contingents of rural proletarians are larger.
One of the early discussions around the Zapatista uprising in English-speaking academic circles was the debate around whether the Zapatista rebellion was mainly an indigenous or a peasant rebellion. Some authors argue that the Zapatista movement is an identity-based movement (Burbach 1994; Gossen 1996). Others emphasize that class still plays a central role in defining the movement (Veltmeyer 1997; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001). The great majority of authors, however, prefer to highlight that identity and class are two fundamental and inseparable social categories that allow us to understand the character of the Zapatista movement (Nash 2001; Harvey 1998; Otero and Jugenitz 2003). Following this latter trend, I argue that the EZLN is an ‘indigenous peasant movement’ whose membership is essentially made of indigenous subsistence peasants and their semi-proletarianized kin.
Many authors (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 105–6; Márquez Rosano and Legorreta 1999: 11; Villafuerte et al. 1999: 107) have pointed out the existence of two logics within the Chiapan countryside: the ‘peasant logic’, associated with subsistence farming, and the ‘accumulation logic’, associated with commercial farming. Historically, peasant or subsistence logic marked the agricultural practices of indigenous peasants while the accumulation logic dominated among Ladino8 landowners. According to the great majority of studies, based on a comparison of data from the 1990 agricultural census with the previous decades, the main tendency in the Chiapan countryside was towards the encroachment of the subsistence logic by the logic of accumulation (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 89, 92, 128, 137; Villafuerte et al. 1999: 108, 110).
Traditionally in Chiapas, as in many other parts of Mexico, the peasant community, which relies to a great extent on female unpaid labour, assumes part of the burden of the survival of their members who work for a wage and thus makes up for part of the reproduction of the agricultural labour force (Otero 1999: 62). Historically, in order to increase the monetary income derived from the sale of agricultural products, men had to seek wage labour outside indigenous regions. Most of them left their community for short periods of time to earn money for the rest of the year, during which time women and children worked the family plot. Thus, a significant proportion of Zapatistas have had – and still have – experience with wage work in fincas and ranches9 but also in urban centres of the region (Palenque, Ocosingo, Comitán, Villa Hermosa), where they seek any employment10 they can find. Hence, in the face of difficulty, the response by indigenous peasants in Chiapas has been to pull back from the market and reinforce the communities, which are built around kinship networks (Earle and Simonelli 2005: 21).
Data from the national census of 2000 suggest that, as a result of more than a decade of economic stagnation, an important tendency towards subsistence agriculture can be observed in many indigenous regions of Chiapas. According to the census of 2000, in Los Altos 45.5 per cent of all households do not receive any income. This proportion rises to 68.6 per cent when we add households with less than half a minimum salary. In the north, these proportions reach 48.7 per cent and 65.4 per cent, respectively. In the jungle, they are 46.3 per cent and 60.4 per cent (INEGI 2000). In a recent article, Villafuerte has modified his earlier view on the subordination of the ‘subsistence logic’ to the ‘accumulation logic’ within Chiapas agriculture (2005: 462). He now argues that Chiapan agriculture is going through a ‘terminal crisis’, in which the rise in production for subsistence is among the most important indicators (ibid.: 470–2). In sum, the tendency within the peasant economy is thus not towards the expansion and generalization of commercial agriculture. Rather, the phenomenon that can be observed is a ‘retreat movement’ towards subsistence agriculture and activities. More and more peasants, particularly in indigenous regions of the jungle, the highlands and the north, are retreating, as much as possible, from commercial relations – dedicating only a minimal portion of their activity to this purpose.11
However, being subsistence peasants does not mean that the Zapatista social bases live outside capitalism or are disconnected from the international and national market economy. Zapatista indigenous peasants felt their socio-economic situation worsen during the neoliberal restructuring of the countryside of recent decades. The adoption of neoliberalism by the Mexican state affected subsistence peasants, even if they were weakly connected to the market. However, they were affected by the modification of prices more than by the appearance of the imperative of competition in their local market. The price of their main source of income – cattle, chillis, coffee or maize and bean surpluses – dropped owing to the liberalization of prices, while the price of consumption goods kept rising because of inflation. The following testimonies from Zapatistas from Santa María express this process clearly:
MOISES: I started by looking at my situation, at my family’s situation, at my community’s situation. We have nothing. We live in poverty. It was time we did something. We had to do something.
JUAN: I also saw that the situation was very bad. It was even worse than before. Before, by selling a little bit of maize, it was possible to buy the things we needed … some clothes … not a lot, but at least something. Today, this is not possible any more. If you sell maize, you may get 700 pesos. With 700 pesos you can buy clothes, cooking oil, sugar, and you are left with nothing … It’s not enough … Before you could get more for the money we got from selling maize, frijol or chilli.
Most of the indigenous subsistence peasants are ejidatarios whose plots are subject to demographic pressure and decreasing fertility. The semi-proletarian members of the EZLN are mostly young males without rights to land in their communities, who subsist on their parents’ plot and contribute to the family household in labour or with monetary income from their temporary wage work. Hence, contrary to García de León’s opinion that the support for the EZLN comes from the ranks of the middle-income peasants and not from isolated poor peasants (García de León 2002: 514–15), the majority of Zapatistas are subsistence peasants and fewer can be found within the ranks of market-dependent indigenous peasants. From the testimonies that I collected from Zapatistas during fieldwork, the middle-income peasants – who in Chiapas would be the more market-dependent indigenous ‘peasant/ranchers’ – joined the movement in the first years of the conflict. Many of these more market-dependent peasants thought that they would improve their situation by benefiting from the concessions that the state would eventually make. When the policy of resistance was decided, many of them abandoned the EZLN. The fact that the EZLN is made up of poor subsistence peasants explains why so many of the choices that the movement has made on issues of land tenure focus on agricultural production, and micro-development projects are geared to reinforcing self-subsistence and self-reliance (see Earle and Simonelli 2005).
The MST and the EZLN: defensive reactions or progressive struggles?
Most authors have highlighted that peasant rebellions are often accompanied by – or rooted in – profound moral outrage responding to a sudden increase in levels of exploitation or insecurity. Scott emphasizes the suddenness of the shock these changes create because they are more likely to be seen as a ‘sharp moral departure from existing norms of reciprocity’ (1976: 194). In the case of Latin America, Eckstein has noted that peasants will take the risk of direct confrontation only when the injustice against them is perceived as intolerable, and when local and national institutions and cultural conditions, such as strong kinship and ethnic and cultural bonds, lead peasants to struggle collectively (Eckstein 2001 [1989]: 15). However, because peasants revolt it does not mean that their objectives are necessarily revolutionary ones. Scott’s view of the peasant village dynamic, for instance, led him to argue that peasant revolts were ‘best seen as defensive reactions’ (Scott 1976: 10). According to Scott, the moral claim to subsistence is not revolutionary because it rests on the norm of reciprocity that links poor peasants with the ruling elite in the village or the region, which obliges the ruling elite to secure and promote the well-being of the lower classes (ibid.: 189). As we have seen, Migdal, in contrast to Scott, did not see peasant rebellions as a priori conservative or even inclined towards reforming the traditional order.
As has been the case with past peasant rebellions, the land struggles of the MST and the EZLN also come to the fore through a moral discourse. This discourse is the foundation of the Sem Terra and Zapatista demand for land. In both cases, we find a conception of justice, based on a moral framework in which land is understood as a right that does not necessarily depend on – or which goes beyond – the existence of a legal framework. In other words, in a fashion that is reminiscent of Scott’s argument, for the Sem Terra and Zapatistas, subsistence needs and the right to a dignified life take precedence over legality (Meszaros 2000; Van der Haar 2001).
However, the struggles of the MST and the EZLN go far beyond the defensive character that James Scott (1976) attributes to peasant revolts. Indeed, in Brazil and Chiapas, one of the first institutions of the capitalist society to be challenged by the struggle of the MST and the EZLN is private ownership of land. The legitimacy of private ownership of land, particularly if it is perceived as constituting a latifundio, is assessed through a moral understanding of justice. Land concentration, regardless of its legal character, is considered unjust because it blocks the access of poor people to a decent livelihood. Within this perspective, for the Sem Terra and the Zapatistas, the right to land is associated with a right to live with dignity, understood as a fundamental human right and thus as having supremacy over property rights. Moreover, this claim to the right to land for subsistence reasons is not directed at traditional landlords or village elites, as Scott would have it. The land struggles of the MST and the EZLN are not struggles demanding that elites live up to their moral obligations towards their subordinates. On the contrary, both movements seek to fundamentally transform or even transcend that relationship by empowering their membership through the creation of ‘autonomous rural communities’ (Robles 2000; Burguete Cal y Mayor 2003). These ‘autonomous rural communities’, which practise self-governance over a great variety of issues and break away from traditional forms of subordination, allow their members to secure and protect their access to land and hence resist the full commodification of land and monetarization of relations of production. More importantly, this non-correspondence between the characteristics of the land struggle of the MST and the EZLN and Scott’s conclusions highlights one of the major limitations of the conventional studies of peasant rebellions in general.
Most scholars of this specific literature continued locating peasant rebellions within rural contexts in which the subordination of peasant to traditional landlords was one of the central forms of exploitation and domination. Scott, more than any of the others, is a good example of this reliance on an underlying feudal-like model. The consequence of the adoption of a feudal model to analyse peasant rebellions is to overemphasize the conservative character of peasant rebellions, by arguing that such rebellions aim mainly at re-establishing a social order ex ante, characterized by a submissive relationship to landlords.
The feudal-like model is inappropriate to analyse the land struggle of the MST and the EZLN because traditional ‘landlords’ – i.e. those who extract rent from tenant farmers or labour services from squatters in exchange for usufruct rights – have lost most of their economic and political power (Kay 1995, 2000) or are far from being the main class enemy of these movements. In Brazil, in addition to the fact that non-agricultural corporations own significant amounts of land for fiscal purposes, traditional landlords have transformed themselves into large capitalist farmers or have used their access to land to venture into other economic activities (Palmeira and Leite 1998: 122–5). As for the existence of a feudal-like peasant culture, in southern Brazil where the MST originally surfaced, there is no entrenched history of common peasant culture establishing social limitations on the power of landlords. In Chiapas, in the Lacandona jungle, the region that gave birth to the EZLN, traditional landlords were almost absent, although reminiscences of serf-like relationships persisted in the outskirts of the jungle until the 1970s. The original Zapatista rebel communities of the Lacandona jungle, and even most of the indigenous peasants of the highlands, were also not inserted within a rural context that resembles the traditional image of the quasi-feudal landlord/tenant model.
Indigenous peasants moved into the Lacandona jungle from the 1950s onward and established ejidos of subsistence peasants, which complemented their income by selling their coffee or cattle in the fincas (haciendas) that surrounded the jungle (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 92). These indigenous peasants from the Lacandona jungle were thus subject to exploitation by modernizing landowners, but more as temporary wage labourers or sellers of cattle than as traditional tenants. Furthermore, as was seen, the main source of contention of these communities was not the power of large landowners but rather the arbitrary decisions and policies of the state.12 Traditional landlords did not dominate the landscape in two other regions where the EZLN expanded after the uprising of January 1994. In the highlands, beginning in the 1960s, traditional Ladino landlords had been slowly expelled, whereas in northern Chiapas they had modernized their estates by switching to cattle ranching with its characteristic reduced need for labour. In this latter case, which is studied by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2007), it could be said that the landed class was the focus of the contention, as the numerous land occupations can attest. However, the indigenous peasants who carried out these occupations in the aftermath of the Zapatista uprising in northern Chiapas, as elsewhere in the state, were not in their majority members of the EZLN (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 180–98).13 Bobrow-Strain, following Jeffrey Paige, characterizes these land invasions as classic examples of a ‘land rush’, which occurs ‘when a landed upper class has been critically weakened … [It is] a short intense movement aimed at seizing land but lacking long-run political objectives’ (Paige 1975: 42–3, cited by Bobrow-Strain 2007: 148). Hence, in some degree and notwithstanding the important financial compensations they received in exchange for their land, landowners, even if they were not the principal target for Zapatista grievances, ended up on the losing end of the social, political and cultural transformations triggered by the Zapatista uprising at the regional level.
Anti-capitalist impulses and different forms of autonomy
In the current context of the profound crisis in peasant agriculture and rural and urban unemployment, and considering the experience that Brazilian and Chiapan direct rural producers have had with the market, Marx’s concept of alienated labour (Marx 1992) is very useful to help us understand the roots of the moral and political claim on land put forward by the Sem Terra and the Zapatistas. Because peasants, in all their differences and diversity, are often closer to this original process of expropriation of the means of subsistence and production, they are perfect examples of a class that experiences the genesis of the process of alienation and disempowerment in the course of their lives. Having to seek work in several settings, most members of the MST and the EZLN are also exposed to the insecurity of wage work in a context of high unemployment. Their understanding of the functioning of the market and their demands, which challenge the sanctity of property rights, thus contain clear anti-capitalist impulses.
In Brazil, during my interviews with landless people living in encampments or with long-time members of the MST who had been successful in gaining access to land many years ago, the desire to be free of the dependence on someone else’s will in the effort to sustain their families came up again and again. Similarly, in Chiapas, in my conversations with Zapatistas, the issue of controlling the pace of work in the field also came to light. Within this context, gaining and protecting access to land means gaining control over their labour and the autonomy of taking decisions on issues of agricultural production. However, as has been argued, the experiences of members of the MST and members of the EZLN are very different, and so are their more concrete objectives. The struggle of landless people in Brazil, for instance, aims at regaining the right to citizenship, while the struggle of the Zapatistas is also an anti-colonial struggle. In Brazil, one of the most determining experiences of Sem Terra is the prolonged experience of unemployment and underemployment, lived as a situation of complete loss of control over their life and of marginalization from society. Because of the negative perception that the rural population in general had of landless people, joblessness has also often been lived as a humiliating experience. In a collective discussion with acampadas and acampados in the region of Andradina (SP), one acampada summed up the general feeling: ‘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 moving forward.’
In a very fundamental way, access to land is thus a way of regaining the human dignity that is associated with a productive life, but also with the right to participate in a more just Brazilian society. Because many current acampados and acampadas have lived in cities for relatively long periods of time, Brazilian landless people build this moral discourse on the right to land and the valorization – and idealization – of the peasant condition in contrast to urban life. In many discussions with acampados and acampadas, access to land and life in the countryside had the advantage of securing self-subsistence and a peaceful community life, whereas unemployment, poverty, violence, drug abuse and impersonal relationships were seen to characterize city life. Landless people also emphasized the advantage of having access to the means of subsistence in the countryside as compared with the absence of this resource in the city. Many MST members also associated life in the city with the inescapable power of money:
LUIS: Winning land resolves the questions of employment and housing and also of hunger. In the city, without money you can’t do anything. In the countryside, there is always a way to have something to eat.
DONA LIDIA: Here I have everything for me to eat. In the city if you don’t have money, you don’t have anything. Here my daughter was able to study. She is a teacher. Do you think that I would have achieved this in the city?
Hence, landless people see access to land also as a way to counter the need for – and power of – money which completely dominates life in the city because this power finds at least some limits when one owns a plot of land. The right to work or to have a decent source of income, both derived from the access to land by landless people, is a right that landless people oppose to the blind functioning of the market. This type of discourse, shared by settlers from the early 1980s and current squatters, is one of the ideological foundations of the struggle for land of the MST. However, this claim on land does not form part of a broader system of customs and traditions that one could associate with a moral economy of the Brazilian peasantry.14 This strong association between land and work is more a consequence of the political influence of progressive clergymen who adopted the ‘preferential option for the poor’ within the Catholic Church and who were key leaders in the rebirth of the landless movement in the early 1980s (Almeida and Ruiz Sánchez 2000: 14; Cadji 2000: 32; Navarro 2000: 37). Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, Catholic priests, reframing Marx’s distinction between use-value and exchange-value, promoted the distinction between ‘land for production’ and ‘land to work’ (terra para producir and terra para trabalhar) and ‘land for business’ (terra para negôcio). Regardless of who introduced the formal idea of distinguishing ‘land for production’ and ‘land for business’, the idea struck a chord with many landless rural workers because of their own lived experiences.
However, the MST land struggle is not only for the right to work the land, nor is it only against unemployment and marginalization from Brazilian society. It is also for the right to work autonomously, for the right to control one’s own work, and the product of one’s labour. In many discussions that I had with Sem Terra, the sense of being at the mercy of someone else’s will, of being treated as an object and not as a person, was emphasized again and again. Adão, for instance, expressed this view in the following way: ‘Winning land was a satisfaction because I had always worked for someone else. My work would become the profit of someone else.’ If gaining land was presented as a way out of the humiliation of unemployment and marginalization, it was also seen by landless people as a way to take their destiny into their own hands.
Zapatista subsistence peasants share many of the same experiences of alienation and marginalization that Brazilian rural workers have endured. Pedro, a Zapatista from the northern fringe of the Lacandona jungle, for instance, had decided to return to the village after having worked for a few months in a modern car parts factory in Monterrey, in northern Mexico. When I asked him why he came back, he told me that he did not like life in Monterrey, that he preferred life in his village – indeed, that ‘life in Monterrey was not life’. He went on to say how, in his community, he did not have to put up with someone telling him what to do. Life, he argued, was also much slower, much more enjoyable, in his community, regardless of the hard times they had to endure.
This type of testimony to the value of peasant village life is probably as old as peasant resistance to industrialization and modernization itself. But in the case of indigenous peasants, in addition to the idea of control over one’s life, it also suggests the attachment of indigenous people to a way of life and, most importantly, a way of looking at life (i.e. a worldview) that clashes with the most alienating experiences of modern urban existence.15 This valorization of village life speaks also to the importance of being peasants and part of a community for the constitution of the indigenous identity in regions like Chiapas. For indigenous peoples in Mexico, ever since the conquest, the community has always been a space of refuge from the city, where indigenous people suffer all kinds of discrimination. In addition, many of the features of colonial domination can still be seen today in the different regions of Chiapas. Indeed, since colonial times, indigenous peasants and communities have been maintained in a subordinated position by a landed oligarchy of European descent that controls the local state and the local market. Historically, the ethnic and class domination of Ladinos over Indians was exercised through control of the indigenous labour force. The development of market relations since the 1960s reinforced this subordination, because Ladino merchants were also in a position to buy cheaply the agricultural products produced by indigenous peasants. In turn, they could sell dearly the consumption products that Indians gradually started to need as a result of the growing commercialization of their agricultural activities (Stavenhagen 1975). Throughout the 1980s, with the obvious intention of avoiding the Ladino merchants, many peasant organizations from Chiapas used state credit to attempt to organize their own channels of commercialization or ventured into new activities, such as the sale of art crafts (Nash 2001: 95–102). There were some successful experiences, but the dominance of the market and the state by Ladinos has not been eradicated and many indigenous peasants still see Ladinos, or Caxlanes, as class oppressors.
Xochitl Leyva Solano (2005) has recently looked at the development of an Indianist movement16 within independent indigenous organizations in Chiapas since the 1970s, which led to the construction of an alliance with the EZLN, and the creation of a neo-Zapatista network. Leyva Solano argues that the current indigenous discourse emerging from Chiapas is a manifestation of similar ‘claims to recognition’ by indigenous peoples in Latin America and that they can be looked at as claims to ‘ethnic citizenship’, whereby particular ethno-cultural groups demand the adaptation of universal rights to their collective particularism (ibid.: 574). In effect, to a great extent the San Andrés negotiations between the Mexican government and the EZLN and the development of rebel autonomous structures of power in Zapatista territory since 1994 are largely about this issue. However, if we seek to understand the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and self-determination within the context of persisting unequal power relations between Indians and Ladinos, the Zapatista struggle can be seen as a decolonization struggle (Burguete Cal y Mayor 1999: 284), as a sort of indigenous nationalism articulating the interests of poor indigenous peasants. This resonance within indigenous communities of the need to right the wrongs of the conquest is why occupations of private land are often presented by Zapatistas as ‘land recoveries’, even where there is no concrete history of community dispossession in the particular area where the recovery is taking place. However, as the land restorations of private fincas by indigenous communities of the municipality of Las Margaritas on the outskirts of the Lacandona jungle can attest, there are also recuperations that were justified more as an act of justice because their ancestors had been exploited as mozos (semi-servile labourers) in those particular fincas than simply because they were indigenous (Van der Haar 2001: 205).
The indigenous composition of the EZLN gives the Zapatista land struggle a peculiar character. The Zapatista struggle is not only a struggle for land as a source of subsistence and autonomy. It is also a struggle for land understood as a territory, as a space for physical, cultural and spiritual reproduction. Hence, as has been highlighted by Starr et al., ‘the Zapatistas have more of a sense of “territory” … [than the MST]’, who ‘still think in terms of “land” [rather] than “territory”’ (2011: 113). In the case of the Zapatistas, then, the struggle for land is a struggle to regain control over their labour and the product of their labour, but it is also a collective struggle to take control of their destiny as a people within a reconstituted Mexican nation.
As has been shown, the land struggles of the MST and the EZLN share many of the features that scholars of peasant rebellions have identified. Notably, as has been the case with many previous peasant rebellions, the MST and the EZLN frame their struggles around a moral discourse that attacks the unjust functioning of the economy confronting the various sectors of the peasantry. However, in both cases this moral discourse does not arise as a response to the restructuring of traditional relations of subordination between peasants and landlords, but rather as a result of the neoliberal restructuring of the countryside, a phenomenon that endangers the survival of both poor peasants and rural wage labourers.
Hence, the members of the MST and EZLN come from the most impoverished sectors of the Brazilian and Chiapan peasantry that have been hit both by the drastic drop in the price of agricultural products during the 1980s and 1990s and by the reduction and growing instability of temporary wage work experiences in the countryside. In addition, most members of the MST and the EZLN have several years’ experience of wage work in the city, mainly in the informal sector, which is badly paid and highly unstable. As a consequence, the experiences of alienation and marginalization from society are probably much more important today than they were forty or fifty years ago, when Moore, Wolf, Paige, Migdal and Scott analysed peasant rebellions. For landless rural workers, poor peasants and subsistence peasants, gaining or protecting access to land is a way to regain some degree of autonomy from the cold functioning of the market. Access to land not only allows families to produce food for self-consumption, it also represents a way to regain control over their own life and hence to be in a position to collectively practise an active form of citizenship. In the case of the Zapatistas, the exercise of this new citizenship requires the recognition of their cultural distinctiveness and the reversal of their colonial subordination. Thus, contrary to what many scholars argued about previous peasant rebellions, the land struggles of the MST and the EZLN are not defensive struggles, even though in the case of the Zapatistas demands include reclamation of some of the rights enshrined in the Mexican Constitution after the revolution of 1910–17. Both the MST and the EZLN build rural communities, organized around popular and participatory political structures, which have reached significant levels of autonomy from the state. For all these reasons, the land struggles of the MST in Brazil and the EZLN in Chiapas should be seen as new forms of peasant rebellions.
Theoretically, these features render inappropriate the use of analytical models that study peasant economies through the lens of quasi-feudal relationships. Marx’s concept of alienated labour appears much more fruitful to analyse the struggles for autonomy by landless and subsistence peasant families currently taking place in Brazil and Chiapas. However, it is still useful to look at the agricultural production of MST settlers and Zapatista subsistence peasants in terms of capitalist and non-capitalist dynamics. As will be shown in the following chapters, for these two movements the existence of spaces of resistance based on subsistence agriculture, which are not completely dominated by the capitalist logic, has permitted the development of responses to the neoliberal crisis of peasant agriculture. These spaces of subsistence have also provided a material basis on which to build something more than ‘economic’ responses. They have allowed the EZLN and the MST movements to envision and implement development alternatives based on alternative models of societies and polities that are rooted in autonomous rural community (Earle and Simonelli 2005; Fernandes 2005; Robles 2000). The right to land, as a means for subsistence and social reproduction, but also as a means to regain human dignity and attain higher levels of autonomy, understood as self-reliance, is at the centre of these development alternatives. Membership of the MST and the EZLN provides or protects the material basis, i.e. access to land, from which to resist the state and the market. The next chaper will focus on resistance to the state, through the creation of autonomous rural communities and popular power structures, while Chapter 4 will focus on resistance to the market.