4 | RESISTANCE, ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT AND THE MARKET

The previous presentation of how Antonio Gramsci sees the role of the Modern Prince and the role of the MST and the EZLN could give the impression that all that is needed for the development of an alternative to neoliberalism is for a movement to recruit individuals and establish the conditions for their politicization and empowerment. This is, however, only one aspect of the struggle. The other aspect, from which the process of politicization and empowerment cannot be separated, is made up of the decisions that the members of these movements have taken to ensure their families’ and communities’ well-being. So having underlined the importance of the MST and the EZLN as movements organized around autonomous communities, I will now turn to how they construct their autonomy against the market. I will focus on the way these different types of peasant households are integrated into the market, organize agricultural production and social reproduction. The way that these are organized allows the members of these movements to resist neoliberalism, by partially delinking them from, or at least mitigating the effects of, the market. I will also evaluate the potential of the forms of agricultural production adopted by members of the MST and the EZLN to generate non-capitalist social relations of production from the existence, maintenance and development of an alternative logic of production and reproduction that is based on subsistence, self-reliance and the search for equality.

With regard to agricultural production and the well-being of their communities, members of the MST and the EZLN share the same objectives of food self-sufficiency and community self-reliance. They share these objectives because they organize production around the peasant family unit, a unit which has specific characteristics that allow the communities to consider certain options that other direct producers cannot. However, the ways in which these objectives are met differ greatly in the case of the MST settlers and the Zapatistas because their respective development alternatives are embedded in radically different rural and cultural contexts. Thus, my argument in this chapter challenges the idea that there is a universal ‘peasant rationality or culture’ or that everywhere peasants per se are – or are not – market-oriented. My position is that peasants will be market-oriented when they are obliged to enter market relations in order to provide for their families; if this social imperative does not exist, they will not be so oriented. Moreover, as I will demonstrate, and as has been noted by Van der Ploeg (2010: 9–11), it is even possible for peasants to seek to avoid market relations after having experienced years of involvement in the market, either as simple commodity producers or wage labourers.

A related argument in this chapter is that, because of the process of class and ethnic consciousness that takes place at the level of the community and at the regional level, peasant agricultural production can form the basis for a non-capitalist development alternative. This possibility, however, does not rest on an inherent cultural or behavioural characteristic of the peasantry. The emergence of non-capitalist development alternatives is – or will be – the result of a process of class formation which combines ideological, political and cultural processes with the creation or reinforcement of social relations of production that privilege the objectives of subsistence, self-reliance and equality over accumulation.

The possibility of generating non-capitalist development alternatives rests, however, on a characteristic that distinguishes peasant households from other households: their direct access to the means of production and subsistence, and thus their ability to avoid the market to satisfy at least some of their needs, such as their need for food or labour. How this characteristic is conceived and articulated to other aspects of the development alternatives offered by the MST and the EZLN indicates the extent to which their development alternatives can be considered non-capitalist.

In order to explore different aspects of capitalist social relations appropriately enough to be in a position to identify non-capitalist practices, it is necessary to adopt a complex conception of capitalist relations. In addition, as is the case throughout Latin America, because of the diversity of the Brazilian and Mexican countryside, where a variety of capitalist and non-capitalist forms of production exist alongside each other, it is necessary to bring together studies that have looked at different types of producers. Drawing on the work of Harriet Friedmann, Armando Bartra, Frans Papma and others, I will analyse the relations of production and reproduction of MST settlers and Zapatista peasants. To do so, I will pay particular attention to different processes that are specific to capitalism, such as commodity production, monetization, competition and commodity fetishism, which I have presented in Chapter 1. I will also look at gendered aspects of the internal relations of production in the peasant household, which more often than not subordinate women.

My analysis of the development alternative of the MST and the EZLN will focus on three aspects of agricultural production: 1) land property and land tenure issues; 2) the focus and internal organization of production; and 3) the types of relations producers have with the market and the practices they have elaborated to avoid or mitigate the negative effects of the market.

Peasant agriculture: moral economy, micro-capitalism or non-capitalist?

Many authors have tried to delineate the contours of peasant interests, peasant rationality and peasant culture. Some authors have done so to either justify or reject the possible inclination of peasants towards non-capitalist forms of production and socialism. In parallel, other authors have studied peasant societies to justify or reject the integration of peasants into the market. The first type of debate is more prevalent in Marxist scholarship while the second predominates in scholarship that ponders the existence (or not) of a ‘moral economy’ of peasants that is opposed to the logic of the market.

James Scott’s The Moral Economy of the Peasant (1976) has now become a classic in the field of peasant studies. Scott’s main argument, that peasant attitudes and politics are organized around a subsistence ethics, has been taken up and critiqued by numerous authors. Although Scott acknowledges communal practices of reciprocity, he approaches peasant economic rationality through the lens of a market analogy. According to this approach, peasants assess their productive options in terms of risk-taking and risk avoidance. Scott argues that ‘the cultivator prefers to minimize the probability of having a disaster rather than maximizing his average return’ (ibid.: 18). He contends that peasants accord special value to their survival and the maintenance of their position, prefer to cultivate subsistence crops over cash crops, and resist innovation. All these features, attitudes and practices of peasants are organized around, and inform, what Scott calls the ‘safety-first principle’. However, for Scott, peasants are not completely averse to taking risks, and might very well take risks when their conditions and circumstances allow for it – for example, when the number of family dependants is lower.

Scott also clarified that the safety-first principle, while it applied fully to poor and, to a great extent, middle-income peasants, did not apply to rich peasants, who hired labour, possessed large properties and accumulated savings. Thus, Scott’s underlying argument is that if poor and middle-income peasant families had their subsistence secured, they would engage in risk-taking. Risk-taking to improve production, which for Scott most of the time is equivalent to production for the market, was seen by him as inherent to peasant production.

Scott highlighted the importance of the village as a key arena of the subsistence ethic of peasants because it is through the shared values and the patterns of social control and reciprocity within the village that the subsistence ethic is enforced collectively. The subsistence ethic constrains the power and wealth of the richer families of a village by generating relationships of patronage and reciprocity that link rich families with poorer ones. However, Scott argued that the village is not radically egalitarian but rather conservative, because:

The principle which appears to unify a wide array of behavior is this: ‘All village families will be guaranteed a minimal subsistence niche insofar as the resources controlled by villagers make this possible.’ Village egalitarianism in this sense is conservative not radical; it claims that all should have a place, a living, not that all should be equal. (Ibid.: 40)

Scott’s argument, presented in terms of peasant attitudes towards market risk-taking, reminds us of studies that were preoccupied with the market responsiveness of peasants conducted decades earlier (Bryceson 2000a: 25). However, authors who argued that peasants were as market-oriented as any attacked Scott’s work, particularly his safety-first argument and his emphasis on reciprocity. Samuel Popkin, for instance, argued that peasants are not risk avoiders and that they ‘are continuously striving not merely to protect but to raise their subsistence level through long- and short-term investments, both public and private’ (Popkin 1979: 4). Hence, villages are not egalitarian but rife with conflicts because peasants individually evaluate market possibilities and patron–client relationships, and they trade off between collective and individual interests (ibid.: 18). Contrasting his views with those of moral economists, Popkin offered his ‘political economy approach’, which sought to explain the rational decisions of individual peasants. Adopting a rational choice perspective which still inspires most mainstream liberal economics, Popkin contended that peasants analysed their environment and made their decisions in terms of costs and benefits (ibid.: 244–5). For Popkin and other liberal economists, peasants are thus micro-capitalists and relations within the village are similar to market relations. No matter how problematic, not least because it universalizes a particular and abstract form of rationality to all human relations, Popkin’s contribution to the study of peasant societies re-emphasized internal rivalries within peasant communities – although many Marxists, notably Lenin, had long underlined class differentiation among peasant communities.

Beyond the important differences between their approaches, in essence Scott and Popkin follow a Weberian conception of capitalism (Weber 1958) in which capitalist relations stem from particular cultural or personal inclinations more than from specific conditions which force peasants to engage in capitalist market relations, as I have argued following Brenner and Wood. However, Scott, by drawing on Polanyi and looking at collective practices that impose moral and political limits on exploitation, departs from the classic liberal understanding of market rationality. Scott thus highlights important processes that structure peasant consciousness and politics. As I have argued in Chapter 2, these processes are relevant to understanding the struggles of the MST and the EZLN. Nonetheless, Scott sees peasant culture and peasant individual economic rationality as somewhat separate phenomena. Moreover, Scott does not provide many insights into the processes and dynamics that lead to the development of capitalist social relations.

As I have highlighted in Chapter 2, because of the influence of structural Marxism, in order to evaluate the ‘revolutionary potential of peasants’ it was first necessary to establish the class position of different rural producers. Then, from this class position within the sphere of production strictly conceived, the researcher deduced the class interest of each particular sector of the peasantry and hence its inclination or not towards socialism (Otero 1999: 11). This was one of the reasons why the debate around the proletarian or peasant character of smallholders was so central to rural studies in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s. For orthodox Marxists who dominated the field, it was assumed that if proletarianization of direct producers was the main tendency, struggles around wages and working conditions would become paramount. In turn, these struggles would facilitate an alliance between rural proletarians and the urban working class that, under the right leadership, could lead to a socialist revolution. However, if the struggle to remain peasants was the dominant trend in the countryside, the peasantry, wanting to defend its right to property, would tend to side with the bourgeoisie against socialist revolution.

The main difficulty that Marxist scholars have had with the social category ‘peasant’ has to do with the fact that the peasant producer combines ‘in one person or family group the contradictory interest of the two predominant classes of capitalism’ (Friedmann 1986b: 188). Because peasants own or have possession of the means of production, i.e. land, their interests are thus analogous to that of capitalists. Simultaneously, because peasants produce mainly with their own family labour, their interests are also similar to those of workers. If, on top of reducing class consciousness and interest to class position, we look at peasant production simply through assumptions relating to other groups, we become incapable of approaching the specificities of peasant production.

To approach the specificity of family agricultural enterprise in developed industrialized countries, Harriet Friedmann developed the concept of ‘simple commodity production’ (1980, 1986a, 1986b) and distinguished it from peasant production in the Third World. In an agricultural family enterprise, production is organized through kinship, a division of labour based on gender and age, and the unit combines property ownership with labour power (1986a: 45). More importantly, simple commodity production ‘refers to the contradictory unity of property and labour in an economy characterized by the general circulation of commodities (including, of course, labour power and rights to land)’ (ibid.: 53). Friedmann’s emphasis on the insertion of simple commodity producers into an economy characterized by the circulation of commodities is extremely important because it implies a much broader conception of capitalist relations than the simple fact of selling products on the market which has become dominant in many academic circles. Here lies the major difference between simple commodity producers in developed industrial societies and peasant producers in the Third World. For Friedmann:

Motivational or behavioural differences between peasants and simple commodity producers (farmers), are not due to inherent rationality of each type of producer. […] the more commercial behaviour of simple commodity producer relative to peasants stems not from motivational differences, but from the individualisation of the household which accompanies commoditisation, and the resulting transformation of communal and particularistic relations, both horizontal and vertical, into competitive and universalistic ones. (Friedmann 1980: 174)

Henry Bernstein has contested Friedmann’s distinction between simple commodity producers and peasant producers. He argues that Friedmann’s view, like that of others who claim the specificity of household production, is based on ‘the notion of the intrinsically non-capitalist nature of peasant farming in terms of its social basis, its “internal relations” and/or its “subsistence logic”’ (Bernstein 1994: 54). Extending his critique to other approaches, Bernstein rejects the argument that suggests that even if they are integrated into capitalist development, peasants are not constituted through capitalist relations of production (ibid.: 54). For Bernstein the theoretical alternative is to be found in the concept of ‘petty commodity production’, which brings together peasants in the Third World and family farmers in industrialized capitalist countries (Bernstein 2000: 27). For Bernstein, ‘what differentiates the “peasant” of the South and the “family farmers” of the North theoretically then, might not be any intrinsic “logic” of their forms of production or economic calculation (e.g. “subsistence” and “commercial”) but how they are located in the international division of labour of imperialism and its mutation’ (ibid.: 27). According to Bernstein, Friedmann’s distinction does not hold because most peasants in the Third World, like their family farmer counterparts in the West, ‘are unable to reproduce themselves outside the relations and processes of capitalist commodity production’ (ibid.: 29), and capitalist commodity production has become ‘the conditions of existence of peasant farming and are internalized in its organization and activity’ (ibid.: 29). Hence, peasant production has gone through a process of commodification that has destroyed non-capitalist practices.

To ‘demystify the notion of subsistence production by peasants [sic]’, Bernstein brings up two points. First, he contends that ‘when commodity relations and circuits become internalized in conditions of peasant existence, the spaces and forms of “subsistence” production (for own consumption) are determined by specific modes of insertion in commodity economy (agricultural or non-agricultural)’ (ibid.: 47). Secondly, he points out that ‘the conditions of “subsistence” production are themselves often commoditized, e.g., the purchase of inputs and labour hiring to cultivate food staples for one’s own consumption, although the extent of this varies across different classes of peasants’ (ibid.: 47). Bernstein adds that ‘an important stage of commodification is reached when farmers have to purchase means of production such as tools, seeds and fertilizers, as commodities, rather than produce them themselves’ (Bernstein 1994: 58).

Although commodification of peasant production and life is a major process undermining peasant production, my approach to peasant production is closer to Friedmann’s approach than Bernstein’s. First, in the case that I study in this book, the ‘subsistence logic’ is not necessarily inherent to peasant production. It arises, as a preoccupation, from the social and cultural context in which certain peasants live. For instance, subsistence is a focus for indigenous peasants in Chiapas because the indigenous approach to production (emphasizing the production of use-value), the conditions of production (limited land, dependence on climatic conditions) and the socio-economic context (absence of employment alternatives, absence of the imperative of competition) have all made it a focus and priority of peasants.

Social circumstance and conditions of production also explain the subsistence focus in Brazil. However, in the case of Brazil, subsistence is a focus of production mainly because of the socio-economic context. Before conquering land, settlers have experienced in their daily lives, as rural workers or shanty-town dwellers, years of social marginalization during which subsistence was a constant struggle. After they become settlers, subsistence remains a focus because market conditions do not allow them to compete with more productive farmers. More importantly, MST settlers are not subject to the full imperative of competition because their land is, most of the time, not commodified. In contrast to capitalist farmers, they are not faced with the possibility of going bankrupt and losing their land because of market failure.1 Secondly, the fact that peasants are consumers of certain basic consumption goods or buy agricultural inputs (tools, fertilizer, pesticides, etc.) does not mean that their internal relations of production, or even their relations with the market, take on a capitalist form.

As we have seen in Chapter 1, the separation of the labourer from the means of production and the establishment of absolute private property rights are fundamental conditions for the development of capitalism. The imperative to compete, which stems from the market dependence of producers, is another fundamental prerequisite of the development of capitalist relations of production. Marx, in Volume 3 of Capital, particularly in his exposition of the dynamic generated among capitalists by the fall of the rate of profit (1991: ch. 10), showed how competition between capitalists is at the centre of capitalist accumulation, technical innovation and labour productivity. Identifying competition as a major characteristic of capitalist relations of production, Harriet Friedmann contends that competition is another fundamental mechanism that distinguishes simple commodity producers from peasants. Simple commodity producers, in contrast to peasants, depend on the market for their social reproduction. Hence, Friedmann argues that:

Competition enforces an adaptive strategy on surviving producers. This involves attempts to lower costs, to invest in larger scale production when necessary, to save from past income in anticipation of required investment (often incorrectly called ‘accumulation’), and over time to develop the productive forces and to increase the proportion of costs devoted to renewal of means of production relative to those devoted to renewal of means of subsistence of the household. (Friedmann 1980: 164)

In contrast, peasants are not subject to competition because of their limited interaction with the market and their subsistence focus:

While some commodity production is often part of the definition of the peasantry, competition does not exclusively or even principally define the relation of peasants to each other or to outsiders. Peasant households have important communal relations, including local exchange of products and reciprocal sharing of labour. For this reason, the village is typically the immediate arena of reproduction. Even asymmetrical relations, such as credit and tenancy, are with particular persons, not banks or corporations, and are not governed by market prices … Peasant households typically do not relate to product markets individually and competitively. (Ibid.: 165)

Friedmann’s approach to peasant production emphasizes the need to analyse the character and the logic of the concrete social relations between peasant households and the different institutions that impinge on their world. Friedmann has emphasized also the need to analyse internal relations of production. To try to elaborate a theoretical model that could help to grasp the dynamic of peasant production in Mexico, Armando Bartra (1982, 2006) has elaborated the concept of the ‘unidad socio-económica campesina’ (the socio-economic peasant unit). Following Chayanov (1966), Bartra highlights three characteristics of the socio-economic peasant unit: 1) it is at the same time a production and consumption unit; 2) labour utilized within the unit does not represent the consumption of a commodity; 3) labour, oriented at satisfying the needs of the unit, is the organizing element of production (Bartra 1982: 27).

Hence, for the peasant, the consumption needs of the family unit determine directly his or her activity as a producer (ibid.: 28). It is not market signals which determine peasant production. Because market signals do not determine peasant production, peasant production does not internalize capitalist profit-maximizing logic. However, peasant units are also commodity-producing units, either through the sale of surplus food production or through the production of cash crops on a portion of their plot of land. However, even if an important part of peasant production can be transformed into a commodity, it is not produced through commodities (ibid.: 30). Actually, it could be said, agricultural products are not even produced as a commodity.

Moreover, the peasant unit’s interaction with the market does not follow strictly capitalist rules. According to Bartra, the peasant market does not have the same characteristics as the capitalist market. It operates through ‘personal decisions between producers rather than through the automatic operation of the market’ (ibid.: 28). Here, Bartra falls back on Marx’s distinction between ‘use-value’ and ‘exchange-value’ to further explain this particularity of peasant markets. The peasant produces use-values that he or she transforms into commodities in order to acquire money with which to acquire other use-values. Within this context, money is not capital; it is simply a means of exchange. Hence, even the monetary surplus sometimes generated by peasant units should not be considered as capital accumulation. It is often the case that ‘a relatively privileged situation in terms of agricultural productivity simply translates into a superior level of consumption for the family and into a relatively minor investment in the family labour force’ (ibid.: 52). This is the case because peasants are not subject to the imperative to compete, since their production is neither fully market dependent nor commodified.

Armando Bartra’s theorization, by focusing mainly on the peasant unit rather than on the overarching social formation, might give the impression that peasant units are much more autonomous than they really are. Bartra does not deny, however, that peasants are also subject to various forms of exploitation in their relationship with the overarching social formation. Their access to land is often not sufficient to meet their vital minimum needs, and they are thus obliged to enter the capitalist market. Hence they are subject to exploitation through the labour market, as well as to exploitation through the mechanism of unequal exchange in the market of commodities. What Bartra’s model allows me to underline, though, is that peasants, if they maintain their access to land and are able to resist full commodification, can enjoy more subsistence options than rural proletarians, urban workers or shanty-town dwellers. That said, when peasant production is insufficient to meet the needs of the family unit and the household thus has to go through the market to satisfy its needs, monetization can erode the alternatives open to peasant families and lead to further commodification.

Starting from the same objective that Bartra started from in the case of Mexico, Frans Papma, also inspired by Chayanov, argues that peasant production in southern Brazil is not fully capitalist and that it follows particular norms and practices that are not fully commoditized. To grasp the dynamic of peasant production in Brazil, Papma has elaborated the notion that peasant production is organized around the household estate (1992). The household estate refers to ‘all property held in common within households, and to the specific duties of household members to contribute to these common possessions and the right to draw from it’ (ibid.: 5). The household estate is thus a family institution to which every member contributes, either with his or her labour on the estate or his or her income outside of it. Somewhat akin to what happens within Bartra’s socio-economic peasant unit, the management of family unpaid labour to attain satisfying levels of consumption is one of the most important goals of the Brazilian household estate. However, since in southern Brazil peasant households are integrated into the market, another important preoccupation of the head of the estate is to administer the inflow of monetary income from agricultural production and/or income from the different members of the estate. Hence, the contribution to the estate can be in the form of either unpaid labour or monetary income. Hence, in contrast to the Mexican socio-economic peasant unit depicted by Bartra, use-values and exchange-values coexist to a much greater extent in the Brazilian household estate.

In accordance with Chayanovian demographic argument, conflict within the household estate arises mainly when children become adults and want to form their own families. The right to land inheritance follows the tradition of minorat, whereby parents, at an elderly age, pass on their land to their youngest son (ibid.: 27). However, all the other children are presented with a share of the estate (a certain amount of land, heads of cattle, other animals, pieces of furniture, etc.) as wedding gifts when they marry (ibid.: 30). Since land purchase is most of the time not an option open to peasants, inheritance and distribution of the estate assets become very contentious issues that can threaten the continuity of the estate. Because monetization is an important aspect of the relationships within the household, the household estate is under threat of gradual commodification not only from the outside but also from the inside, i.e. by the older children’s claims on the estate which are often made in monetary terms. For Papma, then, peasant households are ‘those in which the contesting of the estate (that is, old-age care and intergenerational devolution of land) interferes with productive practices’ (ibid.: 200). This interference also happens in the case of farmers, but because they have the ability to buy land, it does not have the impact that it has in peasant families.

Papma’s work on family farming represents an important contribution to the study of smallholder or peasant production in Brazil because it manages to point to important dynamics that are internal to peasant families. Conceptually, these dynamics place these Brazilian families between Friedmann’s small commodity producers and Bartra’s peasant units. However, since class is not simply an economic category, but rather one that is constructed politically, it still makes sense to speak of Brazilian small-scale family producers, especially those who join the MST, as peasants.

The meaning of land and nature

Up to now, I have focused mainly on how certain authors conceptualize peasant rationality and peasant production. However, the underlying discussion revolves around the capital/labour dialectic, i.e. whether peasant production is market dependent or not, and whether it is structured by capital or by labour needs. What is missing is the role that land, and nature in general, plays in the process of agricultural production. More particularly, what is missing is an interpretation of the particular meaning that different rural producers give to land. After all, land is the key element in the struggle of the Sem Terra and the Zapatistas, and the commodification of land is a major threat to the survival of simple commodity producers and peasants. A study of the agricultural practices of the MST and the EZLN would not be complete without an analysis of the particular ways their members relate to land and the consequences that this relationship can have for their agricultural practices.

As already mentioned in Chapter 1, the development of capitalism is accompanied by the social practice that Marx called commodity fetishism. The result of the fetishization process within capitalism is that social relations between human beings become mediated through commodities, of which money is the ultimate form. Through commodity fetishism, value is assigned to objects on the basis of the quantity of money-value they represent more than the concrete use they may have for people. Land, like any other ‘object’ that is transformed into a commodity, thus also acquires the form of an object containing intrinsic value that can be traded on the markert and be valued simply for that purpose.

In itself, the phenomenon of fetishism is, of course, not peculiar to capitalist societies. The existence of fetishes, religious or otherwise, has been studied in many societies. Many anthropologists (Godelier 1974; Taussig 1980; Bonfil Batalla 1994; Lenkersdorf 1996) have used Marxian categories to analyse how non-capitalist peasant societies give meaning to and establish limits on the interactions between human beings and nature. They have also studied how these societies live through, and make sense of, the social transformations that accompany the expansion of capitalism. In general, these authors highlight the point that the relationship of non-capitalist peasants with land is not analogous to a relationship with just any commodity, and they stress that land in these contexts is seen more in terms of use-value than of exchange-value. In the case of indigenous people, land is also imbued with religious meaning. Hence peasants also fetishize land, but not necessarily as a source of value. Some peasants understand land rather as a source of life itself.

Hence, as will be shown, it makes a difference whether peasants view land as a means to produce food (use-value) or as a commodity that is a source of value which can, therefore, be bought and sold (exchange-value). The analysis of the agricultural production practices of MST and EZLN members will begin by examining land tenure and the meaning given to land, because they are the foundations of the forms of production and the source of the non-capitalist nature of the social relations of production.

The movements’ position on property and land tenure

In Chapter 2, I showed that Sem Terra and Zapatistas challenge private ownership of land because they consider land concentration illegitimate and unjust when it impedes peasant families from having access to a decent and dignified livelihood. But how do individual members of the MST and the EZLN see their own rights over a specific plot of land? Do they see their rights to land in terms of rights over private property? Do they consider land a commodity? Is their land, in whatever form they possess it, subject to commodification?

In Brazil, during a collective discussion with acampados and acampadas in acampamento Nova Conquista in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, in order to justify the occupation of a large tract of private property, landless women and men expressed the following sentiments: ‘Land is for everyone, not only for a few’; ‘Some have a lot, many don’t have anything’; and ‘Brazil has a lot of land, it has land for everyone’. Clearly, throughout the Sem Terra movement, one of the justifications for occupying a large private property was that land should be considered a common good. When asked about the property rights of the fazendero (large capitalist farmer) whose property was being expropriated for distribution, Vanesa, a settler in assentamento Belo Monte in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo, answered by explaining that fazenderos were compensated for their expropriated land, that ‘they do not lose everything, the government pays for their land’.

Vanesa’s clarification that fazenderos are compensated for the expropriation of their land sounds somewhat apologetic and suggests a contradiction with regard to private ownership of land. In the first instance, the MST struggle for land challenges the concept of land as private property. But in the second instance, it re-creates the concept of land as private property in the form of the individual settler’s small plot. The question that arises is this: apart from its size, is the individual settler’s form of property in any way different from that of the land owned by the fazendero?

If we consider land tenure in a strictly legal sense, the answer to this question varies according to the circumstances and choices that settlers make as to the organization of their settlement. MST settlers have three basic choices when it comes to land tenure: 1) family possession under a ‘use concession title’ granted by the state; 2) family ownership through a private property title; and 3) collective ownership through a collective cooperative, organized in the form of a kibbutz, for example. Obviously, land tenure under the third (collective ownership) choice is drastically different from land tenure under the second (private property) choice. However, land tenure under the first (family possession) or second (private property) choices legally does not differ that much from the land tenure known to fazenderos.

Today, the most common pattern of land tenure for settlers is a combination of the family possession and private property options. Land is granted by INCRA first as a ‘use concession’ (título de concesão de uso) for ten years, at which point this title can be reconfirmed or transformed into a private property title. This practice was adopted after INCRA realized that handing out private property rights was not allowing settlers to retain ownership of their plots. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1980s, as in the cases of Fazenda Primavera in the municipality of Andradina in the state of São Paulo and Fazenda Macali in the municipality of Ronda Alta in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, INCRA gave out private property titles. This facilitated practices of selling off plots or renting them out to third parties and did not impede the general process of land concentration occurring throughout Brazil. For example, in 2003, in Fazenda Macali I, out of the 70 original settler families in 1981, only 9 remained. In Fazenda Macali II, of the 38 original families, only 13 remained. Of 25 plots sold, only 6 were occupied by their owners, while the 19 remaining plots were the property of absentee farmers.2

The property titles, by commercializing the right to land in the settlements, impeded access to land for landless families in need of land. In contrast, in the settlements where land has been distributed through usufruct titles after these initial experiments of settlements, the proportion of families that have exchanged or illegally sold their plots is much lower. According to members of the MST, this proportion does not exceed 10 per cent of the settlers. INCRA and the MST have realized the importance of impeding land concentration in the settlements and of maintaining the settlements so that they are open to the arrival of new landless families. Under the law, there can be no exchange of plots with someone who already owns land. Illegal land transactions still occur, but they remain exceptional cases.

The INCRA and the MST agreed to favour usufruct titles over property titles. With respect to credit, for the MST usufruct titles are even more convenient than property titles because they protect settlers from the possibility of losing their land in case of debt problems. In contrast, INCRA’s policy of offering to replace settlers’ usufruct titles with property titles after ten years is a recent policy directed at the gradual privatization of land rights. Considering the advantages of usufruct rights, the MST has decided to oppose the government’s latest titling policy, seeing it as a way for the state to avoid its responsibility of assisting settlers (CONCRAB 1998). Rosevaldo, from assentamento Belo Monte in the municipality of Andradina of the state of São Paulo, told me that the MST leadership would prefer that land be granted as a ‘real use concession’ so that land is not turned into a commodity, but all settlers would have the right to choose the kind of tenure they want, with many opting for the private property title. Ultimately, since it does not grant land titles, the MST leadership can only recommend what it sees as most appropriate for its membership. With regard to land tenure, the leadership cannot intervene between settlers and the state any more strongly than that. The strength of the role that the organization plays in land tenure decisions is, as we will see, one important aspect in which the EZLN distinguishes itself from the MST.

In Chapter 3, I showed that with regard to its form of decision-making, the EZLN revived the ejido model of organizing communities. Similarly, for its land tenure model, the EZLN has revived the ejido itself, that is the land tenure system inherited from the Mexican agrarian reform, and for the most part has tried not to disturb the already existing patterns of land tenure within communities. The EZLN has nevertheless returned to the original letter of the agrarian reform proposed by Emiliano Zapata during the Mexican revolution. Indeed, in its Revolutionary Agrarian Law, published in a pamphet (‘El despertador mexicano’) that circulates among indigenous communities to publicize all revolutionary measures, the EZLN states:

Third. All tracts of land that are more than 100 hectares of poor quality and 50 hectares of good quality will be subject to revolutionary agrarian action. From landowners whose properties exceed the aforementioned limits, from them the excess land will be taken away, and they will remain with the minimum allowed, so that they can stay as small landowners or join the peasant movement of cooperatives, peasant societies, or landed communal associations.

Fourth. [Existing] communal lands, ejido lands, and popular cooperatives’ lands, although they exceed the limits mentioned in this law’s third article, will not be subject to agrarian action. (Womack 1999: 253)

Hence, although the Zapatista revolutionary agrarian law threatens even relatively small property, the EZLN, in order not to clash with traditional practices and privileges, has decided not to challenge the ejido. This is also because the ejido individual plot is not widely seen or considered as private property since it cannot be sold or offered as collateral for loans.³ In Santa María, distribution of land had been carried out under government supervision when the ejido was created in the late 1970s. It was carried out on the basis of customary law and ejido law, as well as internal discussions. At the moment of allocating the plots, in order not to cause prejudice to any family, land was not distributed in unitary tracts but rather as various tracts located across the ejido so that each ejidatario would have land of different fertility, land irrigated by the river, and mountain land. At the time of the fieldwork, I was told that each ejidatario still has eight hectares of land distributed across the ejido. This arrangement did not change with the affiliation of most families of the community to the EZLN in 1994, although threats of eviction and land confiscation started in 1998 when some priísta families wanted to get their hands on the land of the remaining Zapatista families.

The ejido form of property is one of the building blocks of the Zapatista agrarian law. Hence Zapatista communities, like many other indigenous communities in southern Mexico (Moguel Viveros and Parra Vázquez 1998), have opposed the land-titling programme proposed by the federal state called PROCEDE (Programa de Certificación de Derechos Ejidales, Programme of Certification of Ejido Rights). This is how a Zapatista explained how he saw the real objective of PROCEDE:

We have tried to convince the community, even priístas, not to accept PROCAMPO or PROCEDE because the money can be used to steal the land. One year the government gives you or lends you money, but who knows if the coming year they [the government] won’t ask you to pay the money back. How are you going to pay if there’s no money? They will tell you, I am going to keep your land. That’s the way we are going to lose the land, we tell them.

Even though legally privatization of ejido land is not as simple a process as presented by this Zapatista, and must go through an ejido assembly vote (Ibarra Mendívil 1996: 57; Goldring 1996: 271), Zapatistas whom I interviewed saw PROCEDE as a way for the government to privatize land and then later expropriate it from them. They argued that by registering their plot with PROCEDE, they would be given access to credit, but would then have to put their plot up as collateral. They were thus very conscious of the danger of land privatization and preferred to avoid it. Zapatistas were also conscious that PROCEDE would lead to other forms of encroachment on their traditional forms of production, notably monetization. They argued that if they accepted PROCEDE, they would have to pay taxes of about 2,500 or 3,000 pesos a year.

If you don’t pay, taxes will start accumulating. Paying taxes obliges you to seek money to pay them. If you stay out of PROCEDE, maybe you won’t have access to credit, that is not a lot in the first place, but at least you won’t have to pay taxes and you will be able to live better than if you accept PROCEDE. Plus, why do we have to pay taxes if the government does not provide any service?

However, both in communities where all families are Zapatista and in communities with split membership, maintaining the ejido structure has also meant maintaining some of its unequal distribution of land. For example, in Santa María, the community where we did our fieldwork, the members of the EZLN who were not ejidatarios were not allocated land. They remained in the same situation as they were in before the conflict. They had to rely on their kinship relationships to secure the subsistence of their family. In Santa María, this lack of change was understandable since the EZLN did not have a presence in the community before 1994 and was able to keep the majority of the ejidatarios as EZLN members only for a short period of time. However, even in the case of communities where the majority or the totality of the community is Zapatista, the literature does not report any radical transformations to land tenure practices. Numerous testimonies refer to collective use of land in Zapatista communities. However, to my knowledge, because of the difficulty of conducting reasearch in Zapatista territory, there is no study that has been able to look into the transformation of ownership rights to land and land tenure practices in various Zapatista communities. It appears, though, that in some communities where the EZLN initially emerged and developed, traditional land tenure practices favouring the family unit have been modified by adopting forms of collective work (Leyva Solano 2001). This transformation through the reorganization of agricultural production, which I will analyse below, seems to be an attempt by certain Zapatista communities to tackle the issue of internal inequalities and lack of land for younger members of the community.

In the aftermath of the Zapatista uprising of 1994, peasant communities throughout Chiapas seized the opportunity to occupy private properties that were in the hands of Ladino and mestizo farmers (Villafuerte et al. 1999). The great majority of the land occupations were not the result of planned actions on the part of the EZLN, but ‘spontaneous’ occupations by over 669 groups of landless indigenous peasants affiliated to a broad variety of organizations (Villafuerte 2005: 467). These occupations were carried out by almost all the peasant organizations of Chiapas, be they independent organizations or those affiliated with the PRI. There were also cases in which land occupations by peasant organizations close to the PRI negotiated the occupation with the owner of the property so that the owner could later seek financial compensation (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 140–4).

In some regions, indigenous landless peasants not affiliated with any organization carried out occupations on land they had contested for years. Those occupations that were conducted by Zapatistas were called ‘land recoveries’ and the communities created on these lands were called ranchos recuperados (recovered ranches) or fincas recuperadas (recovered haciendas). There are approximately between 300 and 400 of these ranchos recuperados, comprising more than 60,000 hectares, according to Van der Haar (2001: 196), and 80,000 hectares according to Villafuerte (2005: 468). Hence, for the most part, Zapatista membership provided access to new land for young landless families from particular communities, but it did not modify the internal distribution of land within already constituted communities.

It is mainly in these new Zapatista communities that were created on recovered lands after the uprising in 1994 that the EZLN has attempted to develop new practices of land tenure, which privilege collective ownership and recall prior experiences of collective ejidos dating as far back as the Cárdenas presidency (1934–40) (Hellman 1988: 88–94). With regard to redistribution of land, the Revolutionary Agrarian Law stipulates:

Fifth. The lands affected by this agrarian law will be redistributed to landless peasants and farm workers who apply for it as COLLECTIVE PROPERTY for the formation of cooperatives, peasant societies or farm and ranching production collectives. The distributed land must be worked collectively.

Sixth. PRIMARY RIGHT of application [for expropriated land] belongs to the collectives of poor landless peasants and farm workers, men, women, and children, who duly verify not having land or land of bad quality. (Womack 1999: 253)

One such recovered ranch, called ‘Primero de Enero’, was created in the region around Santa María. Primero de Enero represents a case of spontaneous land occupation by landless indigenous peasants who were not affiliated with any organization. The recovered ranch, the property of three Ladino ranchers with an area of 350 hectares, was seized in March 1994 by young indigenous landless peasants from a nearby community. The occupation started with sixty families, all without rights to land in their own community. The group was not affiliated with any organization, although it was composed of PRI and Zapatista sympathizers. The EZLN visited them after they had seized the land and they decided to join the movement. From the very beginning, the land was worked collectively because it was considered insufficient to divide it among all the families. Even though only twenty-two families have remained, they still work the land collectively. The land was never partitioned and only the residential areas were allocated to each family. Recovered ranch Primero de Enero seemed to follow the Zapatista legislation guidelines.

Gemma Van der Haar’s research on the recovered ranch Nueva Esperanza in the Tojolabal Highlands region just outside the Lacandona jungle contrasts with the case of Primero de Enero. In Nueva Esperanza, land was distributed to landless families of neighbouring communities, following Zapatista Revolutionary Agrarian Law. However, in contrast to the case of Primero de Enero, land tenure in Nueva Esperanza was not organized following Zapatista guidelines, but through a combination of elements of ejido practices and Tojolabal customs. Although Zapatista legislation stipulates that land should be held and worked collectively, land tenure in Nueva Esperanza followed the ‘property arrangement common to most communities in the region … combining individual rights to cultivation plots with general rights to the rest of the territory’ (Van der Haar 2001: 200). At the same time, the collectivist guidelines of Zapatista legislation were implemented on top of individual productive activities. Nueva Esperanza, although not an ejido, adopted the ejido model. Land was allocated to individual families, which shared rights over the resources of the forest, and the community elected its comisariado and other authorities and held assemblies (ibid.: 199). However, instead of being under the authority of the agrarian reform state institutions, Nueva Esperanza was integrated into a Zapatista autonomous municipality, from which it was obliged to accept some impositions (ibid.: 198–9).

Even if these two cases represent different forms of adopting Zapatista guidelines with regard to land tenure, they are both part of the same system, which has displaced the state agrarian institutions. From a short visit to Primero de Enero, I was not able to determine whether collective land tenure was fully implemented or whether there was a different dynamic being created within this particular Zapatista community. However, what was perceptible was the importance that the EZLN had for the villagers, especially since their claims to land were being challenged by a neighbouring community. In effect, although the land recovery most certainly provoked the outrage of the expelled owner, at the time of the fieldwork in 2004, the main conflict of the Zapatistas of Primero de Enero was with a nearby community called El Mirador which had also seized land, joined the EZLN and created a recovered ranch. When all the members of both Primero de Enero and El Mirador were Zapatistas, the rivalries between the two had remained under control. But as soon as part of the population of El Mirador turned priísta, the conflict over land resumed, as this faction contested the boundaries of Primero de Enero. For the Zapatistas of Primero de Enero, the capacity of the EZLN to defend their land claim from rival groups is currently the only guarantee that the conflict will not continue to escalate and threaten their control over their territory. Indeed, probably evaluating the likelihood that they could not easily displace the Zapatistas from Primero de Enero, the priísta faction had decided to submit the conflict to mediation by the Junta de Buen Gobierno. The situation has changed since the election of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012). Conflicts have been reported there and in other regions, leading to the assassination of a Zapatista local leader called Galeano in La Realidad in 2 May 2014.

In many cases, Zapatista authorities, first those of the autonomous municipalities and now of the JBG through their land and territory commissions, have displaced state agrarian authorities as a land conflict resolution body (ibid.: 199). This is in part due to the fact that the EZLN has refused to enter into negotiations with the state to have their land recognized by the state through the Acuerdos Agrarios (Agrarian Agreements) that the federal state struck with other peasant organizations (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 196).

The Acuerdos Agrarios were the way found by the Mexican government to solve the issue of land occupations that arose in Chiapas after 1994. Since land distribution had been ended with the reform of Article 27 of the Constitution, the federal government decided to buy the occupied land from the landowner and sell it to the peasants who had conducted the occupation. The price of the land was negotiated with the intermediation of the state between the landowner and the peasant organization representing the squatters. Once an agreement was struck, the state would buy the land and sell it to the peasants and grant them a co-property title. In exchange, the peasant organization would also sign a document in which they promised not to carry out new land occupations (ibid.: 140–3). Through these Acuerdos Agrarios the state legalized over 322,000 hectares (Villafuerte 2005: 467), the majority going to organizations with close ties to the PRI (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 192–3).

Hence, as long as the EZLN has enough strength regionally to enforce the land claims of its member communities, conflicts and grievances over land seized by Zapatistas cannot be solved through official agrarian tribunals and authorities. Instead, they necessarily have to go through the Zapatista civilian autonomous structures, even when they are presented by non-Zapatistas.

In summary, both the EZLN and the MST represent and seek to reinforce smallholding. The institutional form of land tenure, either sanctioned legally by the state in Brazil, or by the state or the EZLN in Chiapas, is not a form of private property. In MST settlements, at least during the first ten years, settlers have been allocated land under ‘use concession’, while in Zapatista communities land tenure mainly follows the ejido form. However, approaches looking at forms of land tenure to determine if land – titled as private property, as ‘use concession’ or as collective ownership – is seen by those who live and survive on it as a commodity would fail to appreciate that land, for MST settlers and for Zapatistas, has important symbolic as well as material value.

The MST: land, the market and the struggle for life For Sem Terra in Brazil and for indigenous peasants in Chiapas, acquiring land is the result of a long process of struggle. In the case of the landless people in Brazil, I have already highlighted what the period of encampment and land occupation implies in terms of both hardship and empowerment. Similarly, the stories of indigenous peasants from the highlands of Chiapas and hacienda workers from the regions surrounding the Lacandona jungle, like those of most Mexican ejidos, also tell the tale of how the initial ejidatarios had to battle against a large landowner, a hostile natural ecological system or corrupt politicians and state officials to secure their collective right to land (Van der Haar 2001: ch. 4). Understandably these foundational narratives give land a very charged affective importance and symbolic meaning that shape the way community members relate to the possession of land and its use (Nuijten 2001). The slogan ‘land to the tiller’, although probably a slogan that is as old as modern land struggles themselves, still expresses the attachment to land from both the MST and the EZLN perspective, and ties together land, labour and production in a variety of ways.

Wendy Wolford, reframing E. P. Thompson’s concept of moral economy, has recently analysed the contrasting meaning of land for capitalist landlords and members of the MST. She showed how the right to and the meaning of land for MST members were deeply associated with notions of work, community and a sense of following God’s will (Wolford 2005: 254–5). In my fieldwork experience in Brazil and Chiapas, I also came across very similar discourses around private property that sought to establish moral limits on the logic of the market, but I also found that the demand for autonomy from the market and the state was another recurrent theme. In both cases, the ability to reach some relative form of autonomy rested on gaining or maintaining access to non-commodified land.

Don José Nunes Pereira, one of the leaders of the historical struggle of Fazenda Primavera4 in the early 1980s and now a relatively well-off small farmer, told me, in a way that is surprising given that it is now more than twenty years since he fought for his right to land, ‘land is for those who work it … land is to work, to produce, one should not be allowed to sell it, it should not be property’. On the other hand, he stated this after he had proudly showed me the property title granted to him by the Brazilian state. The impression I have is that José showed the title to me not so much because it made him a property owner, but because it proved that he and his comrades had won their struggle and that they had been right to fight, that they had won against a landlord. Moreover, throughout his story José repeatedly underlined that they had fought for that land and that they had refused personal offers from the illegitimate owner in order that all the posseiros of Fazenda Primavera would have land. José reiterated that throughout the process, when they faced difficulties or hesitations, they told each other, ‘The land is ours’ (a terra é nossa) and continued their struggle.

Calixto da Silva, a settler in assentamento Sumaré I in the municipality of Sumaré in the state of São Paulo, and like José a protagonist from the first generation of settlers, articulated a similar discourse about land. As Wolford underlined, his thinking showed the influence of liberation theology, the framework that provided the ideological foundation of the first phase of land struggle in the early 1980s:

Brazilians are not brought up in their own culture. They are brought up with the North American [read US] culture, the culture of money not the culture of land. If we have a property title, those who are more corrupt, those against agrarian reform, will want to buy it. If someone wants to sell his house, he can. But he should give the land to someone else that wants to work the land … In order to be able to put food on the table, we have to put people on the land … The Brazilian culture is to produce, to plant, not to sell. That culture comes from God. God wants men to work and be free.

Solange Parceanello from assentamento COPAVI in Paranacity in the state of Paraná, who occupied land in the early 1990s, used almost the exact same words as José Nunes Pereira, who never participated in the MST: ‘Land conquered through the struggle has to be everyone’s. It should not be for an individual. Land should not be a commodity so people can divide it and sell it. Land is meant to produce. One has to use it. If one doesn’t, then one should pass it on to someone that will work it.’

Apart from the different ideological influences and rhetoric behind these declarations, what is common is the association between land and work, land and production, and land and subsistence. Land, because it can yield food, is seen more as the very foundation of life than as a simple means to an objective. Land is seen as a way to secure self-subsistence and well-being and not as an object for producing monetary or capital wealth.

My interview with María Ines, an acampada in an encampment that does not directly belong to the MST but where acampados invited the MST to assist them, provides an interesting contrast. When I was about to leave the encampment, I thanked her and said goodbye. María Ines thanked me back and said, ‘Come back and see me when I have my fazenda.’ When she realized the slip of the tongue she had just made, and realized the MST political organizer was there listening, she corrected herself, saying, ‘Come back to see our assentamento.’ My interview with Ademilson, who illegally bought his land in a settlement, also diverged from the common understanding that MST members have of land. He asserted, ‘It’s not good that people don’t have title. It’s better to pay even during your whole life in order to have a title. Elderly people could sell their right to someone else that could buy it so they would have something to retire with.’

These interventions speak of two understandings of land, one of land as use-value and the other of land as exchange-value, which most of the time coexist in the minds of settlers. Nonetheless, land as use-value was much more prominent in the minds of settlers who lived in MST encampments. In contrast, land as exchange-value was the principal way of looking at land for those who had not been MST activists. Moreover, in parallel to these two conceptions of land, a third one developed out of the struggle for land itself, one which relates land with a personal and a collective achievement and which carries with it a broad range of emotions, memories, suffering, joys, and so on. Representing this third conception, Sergio Oliveira Siquera, from assentamento Taruma in the municipality of Joía in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, commented: ‘Land should not be sold. Land was not conquered alone. It was conquered with the organization of everybody, with the participation of everybody. We didn’t conquer one plot of land, we conquered a whole area. If I sell my plot, it’s as if I sell the effort of everybody.’

Also tying up land with collective effort, Ari Marcon and his wife Terezinha, from assentamento Annoni in the municipality of Pontão in Rio Grande do Sul, expressed an emotional attachment to their plot: ‘I value land,’ said Marcon, adding, ‘This land has a lot of blood, it has sweat, it has tears … it has a lot of suffering.’ ‘It also has a lot of joy too,’ Terezinha reminded him.

Children of settlers who now have families of their own recognize the importance that land has for their parents. But they are also a generation away from the struggle for that land and they approach it and agricultural production without the symbolic weight it has for their parents. This dual understanding of land was evident in my conversation with Hilario da Silva, the son of Calixto from assentamento Sumaré I, who is currently trying to set up a marketing cooperative for the settlement:

We have to be realistic. We are going to set up a cooperative within a capitalist system. It has to function like an enterprise. Not simply for the purpose of working collectively, but rather to have an economic return …
      Our fathers conquered the land through the struggle. It’s everything for them. They want to be buried here. Land allowed them to sustain their family. For them it’s pure gold. Youth [read the second generation] understand and want to maintain this. The land and the assentamento are sacred. But there is also the influence from the city through school. The third generation is really the problematic one because they are really influenced by the city. Many of them work outside. What land represents for our parents, because they went out in search of land and all that … all that can be lost in that third generation. That’s why we have to guarantee that the roots of why our parents went to search for land don’t get lost, that land does not become only a financial instrument.

Many MST settlers had lived in the city for several years, an experience which made their conquest of land similar to a return to an idealized past in the countryside. MST literature and events seek to convey that idea through what they call their ‘mística’ (cultural and symbolic practices). Even when in practice land can be used as private property and even as a commodity in order to seek profits to improve production, this other cultural and symbolic meaning of land is in the background, making full commodification more difficult.

The association of land with labour and with production, as well as the understanding of land as a collective conquest, is what makes the struggle of landless rural workers in Brazil and Zapatista indigenous peasants in Chiapas similar struggles. In their organization’s discourse and in the discourse of the grassroots, Zapatistas have also taken up the idea of ‘land to the tiller’. For Zapatistas, land should go to peasants and not to rancheros or finqueros,5 who in the jungle symbolize the large property owners, even if in most regions their property rarely exceeds the dimensions allowed before 1992. Because of past experiences, rancheros or finqueros are associated with the state and a victory over them is a victory over an entire oppressive system. Hence, as Van der Haar observed in the case of the Tojolabal Zapatistas she studied, land recoveries were presented by Zapatistas as a collective achievement, even if they had not themselves directly benefited from land distribution (Van der Haar 1998: 199). In contrast to that of MST members, though, the Zapatista understanding of land goes far beyond the particular struggle for land of a group of people to become linked with the reproduction of an entire culture that places land at its very core.

The EZLN: land, nature, culture and intersubjectivity Ever since the conquest, for Ladino landlords land has meant and symbolized status, power and wealth. For a long time the capacity to appropriate surplus labour depended more on the subordination of indigenous communities through a variety of mechanisms than on the actual ownership of land (Stavenhagen 1975). However, with the expansion of capitalist social relations, and the growing necessity to control extensive areas of land for capitalist agricultural production, the traditional symbolic character of land for the landlord seems to have given way to a more capitalist understanding of land as a commodity and source of money.

In contrast, for Mayan Indians, land is an integral part of a completely different way of conceiving the world (Bonfil Batalla 1994). The indigenous cosmovisión (worldview) conceives land as part of the community; hence land is constitutive of their identity. Stavenhagen even argues that ‘… it does not matter whether this land is communal, ejido or private. In any case, it will be a property but not a commodity. It is a means of production, but it is not capital. It is a source of income, but not rent’ (Stavenhagen 1975: 183). Hence, in periods of hardship, indigenous peasants will try many strategies before selling their land, preferring instead to mortgage part of their future harvest.

Ethnolinguist Carlos Lenkersdorf (1996) has pointed out that the Tojolabal culture (one of the seven indigenous nations forming the EZLN) is constructed around a communitarian, collectivist and naturalistic understanding of life. A fundamental characteristic of the Tojolabal language is the absence of the object/subject dichotomy. Human beings, nature, animals and objects have a life (a heart) and are all considered subjects. Thus interactions between human beings and other beings in their environment are relationships between subjects. This ‘intersubjectivity’ has two consequences. First, it does not place human beings in a superior or external position with respect to nature, animals or objects but rather in a situation of mutual correspondence organized around the centrality of land, understood as the source and sustenance of life. Secondly, it conceives the personal attributes of a human being not as inherent or acquired indefinitely but rather as a process of continuous achievement based on his/her day-to-day practice.⁶ In the case of the relationship with land and objects in general, the Mayan worldview establishes fundamental limits. Land, the source of life and foundation of the community, cannot be owned, not even collectively. The land has no owner, in contrast to the fruits of human labour (maize, beans, use of trails, etc.), which belong to the labourers. The Mayan relationship with land is thus one where exchange-value is opposed and where use-value predominates. However, at the same time, use-value is also transcended since land is understood in a much more vital way than as an object of use; it is understood in terms of being the source of life (ibid.: 110).

The relationship that indigenous people have with land is a fetishized relationship, i.e. a relationship that attributes power to land, a will similar to that of a social subject. For example, when planting, indigenous peasants perform a ritual to thank the earth and ask for a good harvest. During the fieldwork, my wife and I were invited to witness and participate in one of these rituals on the day the land was being sowed. On that day, peasants practise a ritual in honour of the earth’s will to provide a good harvest. The whole family and the helpers go to the field. While the men are planting, women cook a chicken soup, which constitutes one of the finest dishes of the regular diet of poor peasant families. After planting, people gather on the side of the milpa, where one can find some shade in which to have lunch. Everyone has his or her share of the soup and keeps the bones. When all have finished eating, everyone moves to the centre of the milpa, where two small holes are dug, one for the earth to eat from and the other for her to drink from. In the hole to drink, alcohol made of sugar cane is poured at the four cardinal points and the most special pozol7 (chocolate pozol) is poured into the drinking holes. At that point everyone takes a sip of alcohol. The leftover chicken bones, as well as a chicken breast – ‘the best of the best of the chicken’ (lo mero bueno), someone said to me – that has been set aside for the earth are deposited in the eating hole. Tortillas are also deposited in the hole to accompany the chicken breast. At that point, both holes are covered up and a short prayer is whispered.

Similar rituals are carried out on 3 May, the day of the Holy Cross for Catholics, in honour of the Gods who rule the Earth. Ritual participants ask for a good year, good harvests, good health for family members, animals, and so on. This celebration, however, involves greater expense and is more elaborate, as a pig is often killed for the feast and chicken tamales are prepared from very early morning until the afternoon. The rituals are more formal and are thus conducted by traditional principales (traditional religious leaders) or catechists in every home and in some fields. Some families organize a party to which they invite relatives, friends and neighbours. It is believed that the more one spends on this festivity, the more the gods can give back.

As many anthropologists have highlighted, at least two mechanisms can be at play here: prestige and wealth equalization (Polanyi 1944; Wolf 1999: 147–59; Halperin and Dow 1977; Nash 1995: 14–18). An extensive literature exists on fiestas in indigenous regions of Mexico and Latin America, but it is not necessary to review it here. What is important to stress for this particular case, however, is that the two Zapatista families who organized large celebrations were the two families with more influence within the community. One was the family of the representative to the Junta de Buen Gobierno, and the other was the family that was relatively the most well off in terms of access to monetary income.

What the Zapatista relationship with land refers to is an understanding of land for subsistence, for social reproduction and for life, as in the case of the MST. However, Zapatista rituals, ceremonies and fiestas, which are key expressions of the indigenous identity and culture, speak of a deeper relationship with land that would lose most of its meaning if indigenous peoples lost their access to land. The Zapatista struggle for land is thus also a struggle for the survival of the indigenous culture and way of life. This explains why, as highlighted in Chapter 2, the Zapatista struggle implies not only access to land but also the control of a territory over which indigenous cultural, social, political and economic practices can be protected and develop.

However, this relationship to land is not frozen in time. It is constantly being modified by indigenous peasants themselves and infringed upon and in competition with a more commercially oriented understanding of land, which can actually be induced by the necessity to improve subsistence margins. For instance, in a conversation with a Zapatista of the community, I discovered that he had bought land from a priísta ejidatario. When I asked him whether it was not a contradiction to buy land from an ejidatario who was as poor as himself, he told me that it was ‘because land should be for those who work it and the man who I bought it from was not working his land and I do’. Whether this Zapatista was being faithful to the slogan ‘land to the tiller’ or not, what appears certain is that he was contributing to the commodification of land, to the extent that he bought his right to land. However, his objective for acquiring more land did not differ from the general objective of a peasant producer. He was buying land not to accumulate land in order to produce for the market, but rather to improve the subsistence margins of his family household. Would this situation be different if the community was closer to urban markets or more accessible through means of transportation? Most probably, geographic isolation has contributed a great deal to the subsistence focus of many Zapatista households.

Strengthening peasant family farming

MST settlers and Zapatista peasants practise an agriculture that resembles what Friedmann calls ‘independent household production’. Such production resists commodification, presupposes land availability, allows for subsistence production with village organization, and demonstrates relative absence of competition (Friedmann 1980: 176). However, MST settlers in southern Brazil, because of their deeper integration into the market, are caught between the peasant condition and that of a small commodity producer. MST settlers in southern Brazil are, however, not capitalist farmers because they organize production as family units and most of the relations of production internal to family units are not commodified. Moreover, many aspects of their production are organized around the production of use-value, and most of them are significantly self-sufficient in food production. Zapatista households, on the other hand, are organized as typical peasant units, as described by Armando Bartra (1982).

In both cases, though, the fact that land is not understood as a commodity but as the result of a struggle may have reinforced the patriarchal nature of peasant production. For instance, the decision about what to do with land is the father’s and the father’s alone. Family farming within MST settlements, if it were not for certain modifications in the gender relations within the household and the community, could be considered as a type of reintroduction of the household estate in regions where it had previously disappeared owing to the modernization of agriculture. In Chiapas, it is possible to think that a similar development has occurred since the ejidatario is more often than not the male head of the household. Decisions regarding the use of land (what to plant, rent or sell) are decisions made by the male head of the household. Moreover, in both Brazil and Mexico women tend not to have land titles or at least their name does not appear on land titles. Importantly, however, the state, supported by the MST, has recently adopted a policy of registering the names of both spouses on the land title.

In southern Brazil and Chiapas, market integration and commodification of social relations do not appear to be occurring through privatization of the land of MST settlers or Zapatista peasants, i.e. through the subjection of their land to capital. However, there are still other ways that the integration of MST settlers and Zapatista peasants into the market can lead to the commodification of agricultural social relations, thus endangering peasant subsistence practices. One of these paths is through the growing importance of commodities in the daily lives of peasants. For Bernstein, once commodities become necessary to fulfil the consumption needs of a peasant household:

… commodity production is internalized in the cycle of simple reproduction of the peasant household [and] simple reproduction cannot take place outside commodity relations. In other words, commodity production becomes an economic necessity. To meet its needs for cash the household produces commodities which become, through the circuit of exchange, material elements of constant capital (raw materials) and ‘variable capital.’ (Bernstein 1977: 63, cited by Goodman and Redclift 1981: 89–90)

It is true that the need for consumption commodities generates the need for money, which in turn can lead to commodification of agricultural production. However, this process is not as automatic as Bernstein would have it. Van der Ploeg, citing Friedmann, argues that peasant concrete practices can resist commodification ‘if access to land, labour, credit, and product markets is mediated through direct, nonmonetary ties to other households or other classes; … then commodity relations are limited in their ability to penetrate the cycle of reproduction’ (Van der Ploeg 2010: 6). This occurs to differing extents in Brazil and Chiapas. First, as Bartra reminds us, it is not because peasants have to buy commodities to fulfil some consumption needs that they actually buy them as capitalist commodities. These commodities are bought mainly as use-value, and are often bought only if the peasant family is incapable of producing or unwilling to produce the particular item itself. Secondly, often the commodification of agricultural production that the need for money generates is only partial and selective. In the case of Zapatista peasants, for instance, production oriented to generating monetary income to buy consumption commodities is limited to the production of chilli or coffee. Even in the case of MST settlers, where most of the production is sold on the market, a substantial portion of their reproduction needs is covered through agricultural production for self-consumption.

The gradual commodification of agricultural production, in my view, seems to be much more dependent on: 1) the conditions of peasant agriculture (land tenure, productive diversity – or lack thereof – of peasant agriculture); 2) the concrete structures and dynamics of local markets of agricultural and consumption products; and 3) different state policies. Moreover, it is my contention that peasants who have become members of the MST and the EZLN consciously cling to subsistence production to slow down the pressure for commodification of agriculture. One of the first objectives of the MST and the EZLN is food self-sufficiency for member families. However, the MST approach with regard to this objective differs greatly from that of the EZLN. Since it is inserted within a much more market-oriented rural context, one of the main preoccupations of the MST has also been to improve production by introducing technological improvements such as mechanization. Food self-sufficiency is only a building block among the productive strategies of MST settlers. In contrast, the decisions of Zapatista indigenous peasants with regard to production are reminiscent of Chayanov’s assumptions about the logic of the peasant economy (Chayanov 1966). The central priority of Zapatista families is food self-sufficiency.

The MST settler: between subsistence, modernization and agro-ecology If winning land comes after a very long and extremely difficult struggle, remaining on the land is also far from being an easy task. Becoming a settler means, first and foremost, a battle to secure survival within a very hostile market of agricultural production controlled by large farmers and large agribusiness enterprises. To achieve this survival goal, MST settler families have to start by reinserting themselves within the circuits of agricultural production. Fernandes refers to this process as the reinsertion of peasants into ‘the capitalist production of non-capitalist relations of production’ (Fernandes 2005: 318).

In schematic terms, most MST settlers have long personal experience of two production models, the ‘peasant/traditional model’ and the ‘modernizing extensive model’, and have been exploring a third one, the ‘modernizing intensive or integral model’ alongside these other two models (Zamberlam 1994). In the peasant/traditional model, production is diversified, oriented to self-subsistence, and organized around the absorption of family labour. The production of inputs is internal to the household, and productivity is low (ibid.: 273). In the modernizing extensive model, production is specialized in cash crops, mechanized to reach economies of scale, and integrated into agro-industry. It is dependent on the intensive use of chemical inputs and access to credit and does not use family labour to its full capacity. In this model, subsistence production is almost abandoned (ibid.: 273–4). According to Zamberlam, during the 1980s most MST settlers did not follow the traditional model of subsistence production but rather the modernizing extensive model. This choice responded to their initial expectations with regard to agricultural production. But with the fall in prices and the high interest rates that occurred during that decade, most families found themselves incapable of continuing with the modernizing extensive model. Some reverted to subsistence production. Some experimented with renting their plots and selling their family labour. Others formed cooperatives. Still others, perhaps about 5 per cent of the group, started exploring the third model, the modernizing intensive or integral model (ibid.: 276–9).

During my fieldwork, I observed that most MST settlers, in their struggle to survive and to improve their standards of living and levels of autonomy with regard to the market, continued to combine elements from the traditional model and the modernizing extensive model. To a certain extent, it could be said, as Zamberlam argues, that a new agricultural model is emerging along the lines of the ‘intensive or integral model’ that is today referred as agro-ecology (Altieri and Toledo 2011). This model seeks to adapt production to the characteristics of the land by using the proper type of mechanization to reach economies of scale, by privileging organic inputs but combining them with chemical ones in a reduced quantity, by increasing productivity, by combining subsistence and cash crops, and by experimenting with the creation of on-farm micro-industries (Zamberlam 1994: 274).

Elements of the first peasant/traditional model can clearly be seen in the first objective of the MST productive strategy, i.e. to secure the self-subsistence of its settlers. Where land is sufficiently fertile and allows for the cultivation of many crops, settlers are encouraged to reach this objective through the diversification of their production. In southern Brazil, the great majority of settlers tend to cultivate a variety of crops that constitute their basic diet, such as beans, maize and manioc. Most families also raise animals, such as chickens and pigs, and have a garden where they grow all kinds of vegetables. The choices of food crops by MST settlers are far from being path-breaking decisions. The favoured crops tend to correspond with the general trend of peasant agricultural production. Throughout Brazil, peasant households and small farmers grow a significant proportion of the food production: 30 per cent of rice, 67.2 per cent of black beans, 48.6 per cent of maize, 83.9 per cent of manioc, 72.4 per cent of onions, 58.5 per cent of pigs, 52.1 per cent of milk, and 39.9 per cent of poultry (Ferreira et al. 2001: 494–5). In southern Brazil, peasants and small farmers produce these agricultural products in some cases in even higher proportion, reaching 92.1 per cent of onions, 80.3 per cent of black beans, 65 per cent of maize, 88.9 per cent of manioc, 68.6 per cent of pigs, 79.6 per cent of milk and 61 per cent of poultry (ibid.: 494). Small producers from the state of São Paulo also cultivate most of these products, although generally in a lesser proportion than their counterparts from the south. However, they do produce a higher proportion, 51.3 per cent, of the regional rice production (ibid.: 494). MST settlers, most of the time, have chosen to continue producing these crops for self-consumption. Occasionally, they might sell their surplus on the local market when they have easy access to it. Food production by the family household within MST settlements is thus mainly oriented towards producing use-value instead of exchange-value.

The proportion of agricultural production that is geared to self-consumption, although generally small, represents an enormous difference compared with the situation of poverty and food scarcity many landless people experienced while they were living in the city. Indeed, most settlers pointed to food self-sufficiency as one of the fundamental advantages of gaining access to land because it allowed them not to have to depend on money to cover that fundamental need. The many visits I made to settlements from different regions of São Paulo, Paraná and Rio Grande do Sul in 2003 and 2009 confirmed the result of the study conducted by Jurandir Zamberlam and Alceu Froncheti a decade earlier in the settlement of Rincão de Ivaí in Salto de Jacuí in Rio Grande do Sul. Zamberlam and Froncheti found that almost all settler families had three meals a day and that their diet was much more varied than that of the average peasant family (Zamberlam and Froncheti 1997). In addition, they found that the production of food for self-consumption constituted a barrier to the full commodification of social relations in the household and the settlement, which I would argue helps mitigate the negative effects of the market both in terms of the prices of commercial crops and rural employment wages.

However, even if the great majority of settlers have successfully solved the problem of poverty and hunger, they still have to enter the market to satisfy a variety of other needs. Hence, in their struggle to remain on the land, MST settlers are faced with a major challenge: having to create economic mechanisms that will generate secure sources of income. Most MST settlers in southern Brazil attempt to reach this objective by cultivating cash crops. Because of market fluctuations, many settlers in the south, following the regional productive pattern of the soybeans-wheat farm, have concentrated their production on soybeans, the only product which has not been affected by the same dramatic drop in price that other products have experienced. On the contrary, soybean has seen its price increase in recent years, thanks to growing world demand since the mid-2000s. Maize and wheat are the other major commercial crops that the majority of MST settlers grow. But by choosing soybeans and wheat, MST settlers have reinserted themselves into the market, although often in a subordinate position within the local marketing networks. A minority of more entrepreneurial-minded settlers have also experimented with a series of products, including vegetables, for the local market, which they attempt to cultivate using agro-ecological techniques.

In order to avoid dependency on a single or a few cash crops and fluctuating prices, the MST recommends that its members choose a product that will guarantee a constant minimum income the whole year round. This strategy becomes especially crucial between harvests. In southern Brazil, the great majority of families have invested part of their government loans for infrastructure (first known as PROCERA, Program de Crédito Especial para Reforma Agraria, Special Credit Programme for Agrarian Reform, and now called PRONAF, Programa Nacional de Fortalecimento da Agricultura Familiar, National Programme for the Strengthening of Family Agriculture) in the purchase of a few head of cattle, mainly for milk production. The diversification of commercial agricultural production is extremely important for settler families because the great majority of them confront difficulties in paying back their government loans owing to the often fluctuating and disadvantageous market prices for the main commercial crops. Similarly, the move away from or the decreasing use of fossil-fuel-based inputs by some settlers also seems to be partly determined by economic considerations. The use of agro-ecological techniques could thus be interpreted as a strategy to avoid having to buy inputs, making it a kind of ‘agro-ecology of the poor’.8

However, if one looks at the choice of commercial crops and the investment in milk production in particular, it could be said that MST settlers are involved in a process of monetization of agricultural production. However, to determine whether this process of monetization leads to commodification or not, it is necessary to look at the forms of production within the household. Currently, peasant farmers in southern Brazil use modern agricultural techniques, such as mechanization, improved seeds, chemical and organic fertilizers, practices of soil improvement, and sanitary control of animals (Navarro et al. 1999: 46). As with the choice of crops to cultivate for food security and the choice of commercial agricultural production, MST settlers are not innovators but tend to follow the general trend of the local economy. With regard to commercial production, MST settlers follow the ‘modernizing extensive model’, which allows them to cultivate around half of their 15–18 hectares of land. In cases where settlers have formed a cooperative or a production group to buy machinery and inputs, most of the work in the field is carried out with machines and modern inputs. Those who are not members of these production groups, in general, tend to rent machinery either from these or from farmers in the region. However, cultivating land with modern techniques, even though it means having to buy or pay for many of the means of production, does not necessarily imply the commodification of social relations of production within MST settlers’ households because production is still organized around family labour.

On the plots of MST members who cultivate the land ‘individually’ (i.e. as a family unit), the farming workload is distributed under fairly traditional gender lines among the husband, the wife and the children, until the latter are old enough either to join an encampment to gain their own plot of land or to seek employment outside the settlement. Since most of the families buy milk cows to secure a monthly monetary income, milking cows and attending to the cattle are among the most important chores of the day. Often, this task will be the responsibility of children, but when the children are still too young or when they have left the household it is the responsibility of the couple. In general, once the milking has been done and the cattle attended to, the husband will leave for the field, while the wife remains at home to take care of domestic chores and care for the children and/or grandchildren, as well as attend to the home garden, poultry and pigs. Hence, even if the period of encampment challenges many gender roles, once families are settled, men and women tend to return to their traditional gender roles within the household, even if within the politics of the settlement women often continue to break with their traditional role of ‘non-political actors’. The situation is somewhat different in settlements that have decided to form a collective or a cooperative, such as in the COPAVI in Paranacity or the COPANOSSA in Itapeva. There, settlers have made the effort to transform traditional gender roles, by adopting a policy of rotation of duties within the cooperative so everyone learns the different tasks ranging from all the aspects and kinds of agricultural production to management. However, as was explained to me, many didn’t feel comfortable outside their traditional gender role and preferred to be assigned to more traditional tasks for their gender, such as working in the community kitchen if one was a woman.

What is important to underline is that, even though patriarchal relations are only partly modified, all the productive and reproductive tasks are carried out by the different members of the household without any monetary compensation, effectively blocking the full commodification of social relations of production within the household. Hence, even though MST settlers are involved in the market at different levels, instead of profit maximization and capital accumulation, another dynamic, crucial for productive decisions, is at play within the household.

In his study on family farming in Paraná, Papma observed that a third of the families in the region he studied had moved to monoculture during the late 1970s. During the 1980s, with the drop in the price of soybeans, they gradually returned to polyculture, cultivating maize and black beans (two subsistence crops that can be grown without much fertilizer) in addition to soybeans (Papma 1992: 148–9). Surprisingly, Papma observed that the families that were in the best condition (in terms of the amount of land to which they had access and their productive capacity) to profit from the soybean boom did not engage in soybean production. They preferred to continue growing more traditional subsistence crops, did not take bank loans, and used family labour instead of mechanizing production (ibid.: 155). In contrast, many of the extremely poor households appeared to ‘gamble their lives away by taking out loans, refinancing them with new loans, and risking all of their possessions’ (ibid.: 157). For Papma, this pattern of the richer peasant not investing in modernization can be explained through intra-household evaluations of couples with respect to their old-age retirement strategies, because loans imply mortgaging land and risking its loss. Contrary to Scott’s argument highlighting the safety-first strategy of poor subsistence peasants and the market-oriented rationality of richer peasants, in Paraná couples within a family household that has secured its reproduction, following a safety-first strategy, will thus prefer not to risk the loss of land while a peasant household that is barely surviving may decide to take the risk. For Papma, then, after attaining the simple reproduction of the family household, the main driving objective of the heads of households is to secure old-age care, not to orient production towards the market.

MST settlers, who are far from living in extreme poverty,⁹ do not approach production of cash crops in the same way as the more well-off peasant households in Papma’s study. In contrast to the latter, MST settlers engage in mechanized and modern soybean production and often tend not to use all the family labour they might use. However, the context has changed since state credit programmes were set up in the 1990s. Soybean production, now financed with credits from the government (PROCERA-PRONAF) or from the MST’s regional cooperatives, provides monetary income without fully jeopardizing food production or landownership. However, MST settlers most probably also take the decision to engage in modern soybean production after evaluating their old-age retirement strategies, just as the well-off peasants in Papma’s study did. In the case of MST settlers, however, even if internal demographic pressure on land from children exists, it does not play out in the same way as it did before the emergence of the MST. Today, the possibility of acquiring land through occupation is the parents’ preferred option for their older children. In turn, this option, considering the symbolic character it has for the parents, cannot easily be rejected by older children and makes their claim over the household estate weaker. In terms of commodification of the household, the possibility of gaining access to land through occupation thus reduces some of the pressures towards the commodification of agriculture. As will be shown in Chapter 5, this changed within the first few years after Lula took office, as the creation of new settlements and thus the occurrence of land occupation came down significantly.

Together, Papma’s example and my own drawn from the study of MST settlers in southern Brazil further demonstrate that there is no single inherent logic or rationale to peasant production. Instead, the productive choices of peasants will vary according to the internal dynamics of the household and the features of the general and local context. The productive choices will also depend on the different state programmes and incentives to which peasants have access.

The reinsertion of MST settlers into their local rural economies necessitates a substantial amount of funding, which most settlers do not have. For years now, scholars and social movements have been criticizing the Brazilian state for not demonstrating a real commitment to the agrarian reform sector. According to some perspectives, this sector would not form part of an alternative agricultural policy but would merely be an instrument of state social policy. The distribution of land would be more a way to reduce poverty and social confrontation in the countryside than a measure directed at reorienting agricultural policy towards goals such as the development of a dynamic sector of small producers geared to providing food for the internal market (Wright and Wolford 2003: 274–9). Even INCRA officials have recognized that, in reality, ‘INCRA was simply planting minifundios throughout Brazil’, only partially solving three problems: hunger, housing and employment (Cardim et al. 1998: 24). The administration of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, by creating programmes of productive credit (PROCERA-PRONAF), provided more support to settlers than previous administrations, but did not depart from this tendency. In effect, the amount of credit per family allocated through PROCERA – between R$1,000 and R$2,000 for harvest and between R$3,000 and R$7,500¹⁰ for infrastructure¹¹ (CONCRAB 1998: 8) – makes it more a programme for poverty reduction than one that actually promotes growth in production and the productivity of small farming (Cardim et al. 1998: 24). In its defence, the Cardoso government stressed that the great majority of the government’s financial resources for agrarian reform had to go to cover compensations and that this was due to the way Brazilian tribunals handled land expropriation.¹² The situation did not change significantly when Lula became president in 2003 and under the following PT governments. Lula, and Dilma Rousseff after him, took steps to help small agricultural producers, such as renegotiation, rolling back or partially cancelling outstanding debts, increasing the amount of credits, and making them available before harvest. They have also instructed municipal governments to buy up to 30 per cent of food of their poverty-relief programmes, such as free meals in primary schools, from small producers. However, none of these measures provides the amount of support that is allocated to large capitalist farmers and agribusiness, and which would allow peasant farming to prosper.

However, even if the loans provided to initiate agricultural production, build infrastructure and buy machinery are modest, they have had the effect of slowly imposing the imperative of competition on MST settlers. They have had to find ways to increase and improve production, to work more or differently or even to hire labour to try to increase their profits in order to pay back their loans. The extent to which the imperative of competition imposes itself on individual settlers depends, however, under which form they hold their land, because it determines whether they are at risk of losing their land or not. That is only the case when they have decided to replace their possession title with a private property one. It also depends on personal character and cultural values, as for many the shame of not being able to ‘live up to their word’ pushes them to find all kinds of ways to acquire the needed money. Others make a political and structural reading of their situation. They reject the idea that their inability to repay their loan is their failure, making connections with how large producers and corporations dominate the market with the support of the state, but also how large corporate groups are able to evade this requirement of repaying their debts. Those who take the more political reading of their situation also tend to place their current difficulties in relation to their initial struggle for land and seek political solutions. Here again, the form of ownership of land obviously has an impact on how people are able to act on their specific analysis of their particular circumstances.

In this context, in order to improve the economic situation of settlers and collectively renegotiate the terms of their loan repayments, the MST turns to its traditional strategy of pressuring the state for agrarian reform, credit and programmes of various kinds. However, considering the power of large capitalist farmers and agribusiness, the MST on its own does not seem to have the capacity to propose a solution or an agricultural model that would break the barriers to the sustainable development of MST family farmers beyond the subsistence horizon. Its strategy in this respect has mainly been a political one, and involves an alliance with the Workers’ Party (PT) and participation in institutional politics at the local and state level. I will analyse this strategy in Chapter 5.

Zapatista agriculture: non-capitalist relations as refuge and the agro-ecology of the poor Even though the programmes implemented to help Brazilian settlers fall short of really promoting peasant agriculture, subsistence indigenous peasants in Mexico do not benefit from any state programme that could remotely be said to resemble what MST settlers have in Brazil. Recently, the only state programmes accessible to subsistence peasants in Mexico were FOSOLPRO (Fondo de Solidaridad para la Producción, Solidarity Fund for Production) and PRONASOL (Programa de Subsidio Directo al Campo, Programme of Direct Subsidy for the Countryside). Even more than their Brazilian equivalents, the funds distributed through these programmes function as poverty relief funds rather than real subsidies for agricultural production. In 1996, the average amount of financial assistance distributed in Chiapas through FOSOLPRO was 234 pesos per producer, while the average distributed through PROCAMPO was 745 pesos per producer (Villafuerte et al. 1999: 376).¹³ Since then, PROCAMPO has been slightly modified, but because the amount of cash distributed is still low and allocated on a per hectare basis, the funds going to small-scale producers are not enough to substantially contribute to increasing production or investing in inputs. The programme should thus be considered more as a poverty alleviation cash transfer programme (Winter and Davis 2009). Hence, since the liberalization of agriculture, and more so since the implementation of NAFTA, subsistence peasants in Mexico can be said to work practically without any state support whatsoever.

Within this context of government neglect, Zapatista subsistence peasants have followed a type of agricultural model similar to that followed by indigenous peasants from other tropical forest regions in southern Mexico. Although many agronomists often view the practices in this model as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’, indigenous agricultural practices in tropical forests are actually part of a very complex and diversified form of resource management (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996: 134). The milpa system can include up to twenty-five types of agricultural and forest species (Toledo 2000: 137). Indigenous peasants modify and manipulate their forest environment to different degrees in accordance with land fertility and type of soil, types of production, and family consumption needs. For instance, they will virtually clear some areas for maize, beans, chilli and cattle, while leaving other areas with more vegetation to allow for the production of coffee, vanilla and cacao (ibid.: 137). They will also prepare other areas for the cultivation of fruit trees (citrus, bananas) and sugar cane, and maintain family gardens or poultry yards around the house. Finally, indigenous peasants will also constantly tap into their forest areas to complement their diet with indigenous species of plants, fruits, fish and animals (ibid.: 137).

Agricultural production relies on an extensive set of family and kinship relations. Thus, it cannot be said that farming is simply an individual or even a family activity in indigenous peasant communities. In general, men carry out the bulk of the work in the field, although in certain periods women also work in the field three to four times a week in addition to their domestic chores. Often children over ten years of age also help in various tasks in the field, while older daughters start helping around the house, taking care of younger brothers and sisters. Help with food preparation begins at a much earlier age. Depending on the amount of vegetation, slashing and clearing of land can take up to a week per hectare and is carried out by three to five persons, normally the ejidatario and his family and one or a few extended family members. Often, teenagers (sons, younger cousins or nephews) will be the ideal helpers because they do not have their own plot to work on. Other family members, such as cousins or uncles, also often help in the slashing on the basis of a labour exchange, or repayment for a loan or crops. The wife of the ejidatario will help if not enough helpers are found. The work, almost completely carried out with a simple machete, starts around 5.30 a.m. and continues until 11 a.m. or noon, after which time it becomes extremely difficult to work because of the intense heat.

After waiting a week or so for the vegetation to dry, it is time for burning. This task is a simple one that does not require the presence of too many people and which can be accomplished by the couple and their children. The sowing of the seeds follows, and is executed by the couple. To save time, sowing can also be conducted by a small group (four or five people, selected on the same basis as for the slashing procedure). The sowing technique is fairly simple. The planters, keeping less than one metre apart, walk side by side with a stick in one hand and seeds in a side-bag. They dig a six-inch hole in the soil with their stick, drop five to six grains of corn into the hole, and cover it with their feet. For several months following the sowing, ejidatarios who have sufficient monetary income will spread chemical insecticide or herbicide on the field.

Around four to five months after the sowing of the field, harvest time comes. In the Lacandona jungle there are two harvests, one at the end of the regular summer rains around September, the other benefiting from the less predictable winter rains (ibid.: 109). The harvest is carried out by the whole family but can also include relatives (selected on the same basis as the other tasks described above). The collected maize is stored in small cabañas (cabins) built near the field, where it slowly dries and from where the family takes the quantity that it will need to satisfy its weekly consumption. The quantity of maize brought in by a harvest as well as the number of cattle owned by a family were topics that were not openly discussed between neighbours.

It is difficult to be sure of the official orientation of the Zapatistas in terms of agricultural production. The EZLN, and particularly Subcomandante Marcos, have produced numerous communiqués presenting their understanding of democracy, social change, the role of civil society, and so on. However, there are very few documents that present their views on agricultural production. To assess the Zapatista alternative understanding of agricultural production, it is necessary to draw on the Revolutionary Agrarian Law and the actual practices and mechanisms developed by Zapatista peasants and their autonomous municipalities. Sections 8 and 10 of the EZLN’s Revolutionary Agrarian Laws state:

Eight. Groups benefiting from this Agrarian Law must dedicate themselves preferentially to the collective production of food necessary for the Mexican people: corn, beans, rice, vegetables, and fruits, as well as animal husbandry for cattle, pigs, and horses and bee-keeping, and [to the production] of derivative products (milk, meat, eggs, etc.).

Ten. The purpose of collective production is to satisfy primarily the needs of the people, to form among the benefited a collective consciousness of work and benefits, and to create units of production, defence and mutual aid in rural Mexico … (Womack 1999: 253–4)

The Zapatista focus on food production does not conflict at all with the common practice of indigenous peasants in the Lacandona jungle or in the other indigenous regions of Chiapas. For indigenous peasants of these communities, the first and foremost objective of production is still self-consumption and not production for the market. The main subsistence crop is maize, which is grown in combination with beans and a commercial crop of some sort. In regions suitable for coffee production, on top of the maize self-consumption production, families cultivate coffee on a certain portion of their plot, regularly not more than two hectares (Toledo 2000: 109). Coffee productivity in the jungle reaches only 60 per cent of the average of the state and 25 per cent of the average of modern plantations of the Soconusco region (ibid.: 114). In certain regions, many subsistence peasants also raise cattle, but it cannot be said that their involvement with the cattle production market has diverted them from their subsistence preoccupation towards strictly commercial endeavours.

The average ejido plot in the Lacandona jungle, as in other tropical jungle regions of southern Mexico, has a very diversified production. According to a study conducted in the early 1990s in the Cañadas region of the Lacandona jungle, 95 per cent of families cultivated maize, between 55 and 75 per cent grew beans, 70 per cent grew coffee, and more than 50 per cent raised cattle (ibid.: 109). In terms of the area of the typical ejido, on average 10 per cent of the plot was dedicated to the cultivation of maize, 6 per cent to coffee, 3 per cent to beans, 2 per cent to sugar cane. Of the remaining land that was not sown, 26 per cent was made up of acahual,14 24 per cent of pasture and 29 per cent of mountain (CIEDAC, cited in ibid.: 113).

In Santa María, each family cultivated between one and three hectares of their eight hectares,¹⁵ allowing the rest to lie fallow to recover its fertility. In Santa María, as in most communities of the jungle, because of the decreasing fertility of the soil, indigenous peasants have had to clear a growing portion of mountain land to incorporate new land into their plot rotation practices. However, mountain land tends to be more subject to erosion and ends up being turned into fallow land much more quickly than land in the valley. According to Juan, a normal harvest brings in between 15 to 20 zontes (a zonte equals 50 kilograms) per hectare and up to 30 zontes (between 750 kilograms and 1,500 kilograms) if the harvest is good. These numbers coincide with Toledo’s estimate that maize production in the Cañadas reaches around 900–1,500 kilograms per hectare (Toledo 2000: 113). According to Pedro, a family of seven to nine members is able to live on what a single hectare of maize brings in, but most families sow another additional hectare or two with a combination of more maize, beans, chilli, bananas, papayas, sugar cane, etc. All these products were cultivated for self-consumption and only chilli and the surplus maize was sold on the market.

In the highlands and in the north of the state, peasant subsistence farming is combined with coffee production, which is marketed locally or internationally through intermediaries or cooperatives. Zapatistas from the highlands and the northern region live on much smaller plots (on average only between three to five hectares) and are closer to employment sources and urban markets than their comrades from the jungle. Zapatistas from the highlands and the north are thus much more integrated into the market through wage labour or the production of a variety of commercial products, such as vegetables and flowers. Indeed, in the highlands, commodity production of artisan pottery, charcoal and fruit intensified in the 1970s and the money acquired from these activities financed the purchase of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which became a very important input for agriculture (Nash 2001: 91, 96, 97). In those years, peasant agriculture became more and more dependent on commercial activities. At that time, there were even important signs of monetization, as highland indigenous peasants’ demand for loans even exceeded the capacity of the Ejido Bank (ibid.: 101). Nash argues that, in the highlands, women’s artisan work was ‘not just a supplement to men’s production in the subsistence economy’, but a ‘major determinant in whether they could continue as small-plot cultivators’ (ibid.: 101). However, with the agricultural and employment crisis throughout Chiapas, even more commercially oriented peasants see food production for self-consumption as a crucial element of their survival strategy.

The Zapatista focus on food production, especially on maize production for self-consumption, follows a trend of peasant production that is observable throughout Mexico. Between 1970 and 1998, notwithstanding the fivefold growth in maize imports, domestic production has doubled (Barkin 2002: 80). Throughout the 1990s, around two-thirds of the maize was sown on rain-fed plots (ibid.: 87), signalling that maize production was mainly carried out by peasants and not farmers. Thus, regardless of the drastic decline in maize prices, which dropped from 820 pesos per tonne in 1990 to 559 pesos per tonne in 1999, peasants increased maize production, which jumped from 14,635,439 tonnes in 1990 to 17,706,375 tonnes in 1999 (ibid.: 87). Chiapas does not differ from this national trend. Maize output in Chiapas has increased substantially since 1994. Between 1994 and 2003, the harvested area was expanded by 32,000 hectares, and the output grew from 1.5 million tonnes in 1994 to over 2 million tonnes in 2003 (Villafuerte 2005: 471). This trend contrasts with a decrease of 34,000 hectares of harvested area in municipalities such as Comitán, Villaflores and Tapachula, where producers are traditionally known for producing for the market and for using modern agricultural techniques (ibid.: 471).

It is important to note that these three municipalities are the three municipalities with the fewest indigenous language speakers in Chiapas (CIACH et al. 1997: 85). Production of maize in Chiapas has shifted from areas of high productivity to low productivity (Villafuerte 2005: 471). Today, the main maize producers are smallholder peasants who possess less than five hectares. They grow maize mainly for subsistence instead of for the market (ibid.: 470). The production of beans, the second-most important food crop, also increased substantially. Between 1994 and 2003, the harvested area increased by 15,318 hectares and the output from 52,000 tonnes to 72,000 tonnes (ibid.: 472). As is the case with maize, it is safe to say that production of beans is mainly oriented towards self-consumption and that the crop is grown by smallholders.

The Zapatista peasant focus on production for self-consumption is thus part of a trend in Chiapas that is also part of the subsistence strategy of millions of peasants throughout Mexico, who are searching for ‘mechanisms to reduce their vulnerability to many of the negative impacts of international integration [and to] protect and reinforce their own social structures and lifestyles’ (Barkin 2002: 83). Even if they are basically self-sufficient as far as food production is concerned, Zapatista subsistence peasants in the Lacandona jungle are not completely self-sufficient. They have to enter the market to satisfy complementary – although fundamental – necessities. These necessities are satisfied through the purchase of all kinds of domestic products (clothes, soap, cooking oil, sugar, limes, etc.) and some productive inputs such as agricultural tools, chemical fertilizers and pesticides. The current economic crisis has led subsistence peasants to try to cut down as much as they can on consumption goods. However, they cannot avoid the market because they do not have local, self-produced substitutes for products available in the market. Hence, as is the case with MST settlers, the need for consumer goods is a pressure point pushing Zapatista families towards the commodification of agriculture.

In order to generate monetary income, subsistence peasant families have limited options. The male head of household or another member of the family can seek temporary employment in the nearby fincas in Chiapas or Tabasco, and in the construction sector in nearby urban centres. When it is the male head of the household who leaves the community to work temporarily, the agricultural workload falls entirely on the female head of the household and the children. Since employment opportunities have just about dried up since the 1994 peso crisis, temporary work is more and more difficult to find. This situation has led to a significant increase in migration to central and northern Mexico and to Cancún, as well as to the United States (Villafuerte 2005: 477–8). For the families who stay, another option is to sell coffee, chilli and cattle, as well as their surplus maize. However, the monetary income obtained from these activities represents only very modest amounts because, for the most part, the cultivation of commercial crops is carried out on a very small portion of the plot, and the low price paid for these products brings in only a few hundred pesos. The monetization of agricultural production is thus fairly limited. A more detailed analysis of the market relations in the maize and cattle markets can demonstrate the extent to which these market relations are actually not entirely capitalist.

In contrast to MST settlers who sell their products in a capitalist market, Zapatista subsistence peasants exchange their products in a local market that resembles the following description of peasant societies by Rhoda Halperin and James Dow:

Peasants seem to mix monetary and nonmonetary mechanisms in similar ways for organizing production and distribution … nonmonetary modes such as reciprocity often prove useful and indeed more effective than monetary ones for the survival of peasant sectors … Peasant economies are distinguished from industrial capitalist economies not by the presence of certain traits or elements themselves, but by a certain combination of commercial and non-commercial elements. (Halperin and Dow 1977: 187)

In the case of the sale of the maize surplus, the amount of maize that is sold is very limited and the actual transactions at the local level are not carried out under a strictly capitalist logic, even though international and national mechanisms intervene in the determination of prices. First, only a very small proportion of production is sold, on average only between 5 and 12 per cent of the total production, according to Márquez Rosano (1996: 217). Thus, the sale of maize is not geared to capital accumulation but simply to acquiring money to meet the consumption necessities of families. During my fieldwork, following the trend of other subsistence peasant communities across Mexico, many members of the community, even though the additional income from the sale of their maize surplus would have allowed them to purchase more consumer goods, preferred to refrain from selling maize in order to make sure they would not jeopardize their family’s subsistence.

Secondly, the destination of this surplus production is the local market, where local producers still have a privileged position over external agents. The lack of attractiveness of the local market, due to bad road conditions, the high costs of transportation and the low income of the local population, has discouraged the entry of competing agricultural products, particularly maize and beans, which are a crucial source of monetary income for many peasants of the jungle. In concrete terms, the real buyers in the local market are the other peasants of the regions who are, structurally or temporarily, more dependent on the market for their social reproduction. These peasant families are either those families that have converted almost completely to cattle ranching or those that have encountered difficulties with their maize harvest (plagues, little rain, etc.). The exchange between sellers and buyers takes on a variety of forms. It can happen either through the intermediation of local merchants or it can be face to face between seller and buyer.

For subsistence peasants, selling and purchasing surplus maize through an intermediary is probably the least preferred option because it implies little possibility of mitigating market rules through kinship relations of reciprocity and solidarity. Within this market arrangement, since there are only a few intermediaries (coyotes¹⁶ and merchants) who control the sale and purchase of products, prices do not strictly follow the trends of the national market. Local agents mediate national and international prices. These intermediaries are in a position to determine prices, taking into account local demand and supply, but always from a quasi-monopolistic position. Obviously, the situation is different for indigenous peasants who live in regions with easy access to urban centres such as San Cristóbal, Ocosingo, Altamirano, Palenque or Comitán. Traditionally, coffee, chilli and cattle are mainly marketed through intermediaries, although coffee producer cooperatives have existed since the 1980s and are, in terms of price, a preferable option for peasant producers.

Subsistence peasants prefer face-to-face market exchange because it implies a greater variety of options that do not necessarily involve money. Depending on the circumstances of a particular family, the exchange process can involve either the producer seeking out the buyers or the buyers seeking out the producers. This search can take place either within a community or it can require travelling to other communities or regions where families are ready to sell their maize surplus. Market exchange can include a monetary exchange or it can be agreed upon according to reciprocity, where the product might be acquired in exchange for a promise of future labour. The choice of including a monetary transaction or not will depend on the need for money of the selling family and the access to money of the buying family, and it will be evaluated with regard to the goal of self-subsistence of the selling family, which can very well trump that family’s need for money. As for the purchasing family, since maize is being bought for consumption, the decision to buy from one producer or another will not be determined solely on the basis of price alone. Peasant families will not necessarily buy the cheapest corn on the market. They will, in fact, prefer to buy local maize because the foreign maize that is sold through CONASUPO and later the DICONSA community stores,17 I was told, ‘is not as tasty as the type we grow in the region’. However, when a monetary exchange has been agreed upon, the price set by the government functions as a reference point for the price of the local maize, which will often be sold and purchased at a higher price.

When the buyer and the seller have agreed to privilege forms of reciprocity over monetary exchange, they can resort to the simple exchange of products for work or under the form of a ‘loan’ to help a needy family of the community or of the extended kinship network. Thus in many cases, kinship relations function as a network for the sale and purchase of maize, where market exchange is carried out through a variety of practices (barter, in exchange for labour, in exchange for a promise of future reciprocity in kind, as a loan repayment, etc.), in which personal relationships are more important than market relations (ibid.: 217). For instance, in Santa María, one of Arturo’s cousins from a neighbouring community was helping him clear his field before planting because Arturo had lent him money the previous year to cover the expenses of his father’s illness.

Maize, because it is a food crop crucial for the diet and the culture of indigenous people, is at the centre of a variety of solidarity and reciprocity practices that link production, subsistence and kinship relations. Cattle ranching is a very different type of agricultural activity, since cattle are mainly, if not exclusively, destined for the market. Cattle ranching is often presented as the epitome of commercial agricultural activity because it requires more investment than subsistence agriculture, and, by diverting peasants from food production, it encroaches on their subsistence. Moreover, cattle ranching is seen as an activity that has other broader negative effects on the subsistence of peasant families. Since it requires substantial amounts of land, cattle ranching tends to encourage processes of land accumulation through which tenants and peasants gradually lose their access to land. Also, by requiring less labour than other agricultural activities, it reduces off-farm employment opportunities for peasants, which are crucial to many peasant families, either as complementary income to buy consumption goods or as money inflow to invest in agricultural activities. Hence, cattle ranching is an activity that leads, on the one hand, to the expulsion of peasants from the countryside and, on the other, to the deeper market integration – and thus monetization of the agricultural activities – of those peasants who are able to insert themselves in the circuit of cattle ranching.

Many scholars (Leyva Solano and Ascencio Franco 1996; Ascencio Cedillo 1996; Villafuerte et al. 1997; Márquez Rosano 1996) have identified the rapid growth of cattle ranching in the 1970s and the dramatic price decline in the sector in the 1980s as among the main processes contributing to the current economic crisis in Chiapas. If at the beginning the growth of cattle ranching was mainly a phenomenon headed by large private landowners who benefited from generous government subsidies (Villafuerte et al. 1997: 12, 51), they were quickly followed by ejidatarios who sold their calves to private ranchers. By 1991, throughout Chiapas, of the number of production units reporting to be raising cattle, 80.5 per cent were ejidos (CIACH et al. 1997: 57). Within the ejido sector of Chiapas, ejidos from the Lacandona jungle were those in which cattle ranching grew at a faster pace, the number of heads of cattle growing by 12.62 per cent between 1971 and 1991 in Ocosingo – the largest municipality in the Lacandona jungle – in comparison to 4.81 per cent for the rest of the state (Ascencio Cedillo 1996: 75). In 1990, in the same municipality, half of the bovine herd was in the hands of ejidatarios (ibid.: 68). In addition to state support for cattle ranching, this trend can be explained by some of the features of peasant agriculture in the jungle. Since land fertility diminishes very rapidly, and because after a few years of cultivation and rotation often the only option is to turn milpa land into pasture, cattle raising represents one of the few agricultural activities that can be carried out on low-fertility land. This growth of cattle ranching in ejidos in the Lacandona jungle can also be seen as part of the diversification of the survival strategy of subsistence peasants, whereby cattle ranching represents a commercial activity generating monetary income to buy needed consumption goods.

The crisis in cattle ranching of the mid-1980s, triggered by the policy of market liberalization of the Mexican state, did not stop the process of expansion of cattle ranching in the Lacandona jungle. In contrast to the rest of the state, where the annual rate of growth of cattle ranching diminished, cattle ranching continued to grow in the Lacandona jungle because it was not determined by the profitability of the activity but rather by the need for money to buy consumption goods, a need which is relatively constant.

In regions where cattle ranching has become an important activity, subsistence peasants tend to dedicate on average five to seven hectares to this activity (Toledo 2000: 109). However, Zapatista families that have cattle are stuck at the lower and less lucrative level of the commodity chain. The great majority of them sell almost exclusively calves to local intermediaries. In turn, the intermediaries sell the calves to regional intermediaries or ranchers who then send them to Tabasco, where they are raised to adult age. Finally, the animals are sold as meat in the Mexico City market (Márquez Rosano 1996: 137). Peasants who own cattle in isolated Zapatista communities are in an even worse position, as they tend to sell their cattle to nearby indigenous ranchers who live in communities with better access to means of transportation. More importantly, most of the Zapatista families who own cattle, like the majority of subsistence peasants of the Lacandona jungle, do not manage this resource in the same way that they manage any other agricultural commercial product. For most of them, cattle function as an insurance policy in case of emergency, as a calf will be turned into money if needed. In the region of the Cañada of Santo Domingo in the northern fringes of the Lacandona jungle, a region known for its early integration into the cattle economy, I observed that most peasant producers did not use cattle under a strictly capitalist logic (see also ibid.: 66). First, the great majority of cattle owners do not have sufficient head of cattle to be able to sell them on a significant and regular basis. Márquez Rosano mentions that an average of one calf per year is sold by owners of three to four hectares of pasture (ibid.: 133). Secondly, this is the case because for the enormous majority of ‘peasant/ranchers’ who have fewer than five head of cattle, and who represent 14.1 per cent of all ejidatarios (Márquez Rosano and Legorreta 1999: 13), animals are used as an ‘insurance policy’ that they can cash in when they have to face extraordinary circumstances such as the illness of a family member (ibid.: 11). Cattle functions not as a commodity that can be turned into money and then capital to be invested, but simply as a money box.

In this sense, even if we have witnessed an increase in cattle ranching in the ejido sector since the 1970s (Ascencio Franco 1995; Solano Leyva and Ascencio Franco 1996; Villafuerte et al. 1997), the process of ‘ganaderización’¹⁸ of agricultural production does not appear to be a phenomenon that applies to the majority of peasants. Even according to the 1990 census, in only three of the thirty-one communities of the municipality of Altamirano was cattle ranching considered the main activity. In Las Margaritas it was only in one of the 174 communities that it was so considered. In Ocosingo, cattle ranching was the main activity in sixteen of 206 communities, while in Palenque the level of ganaderización reached the highest proportion, with thirty-two communities engaged in the process out of a total of 101 (INI 1995). In the municipality of Ocosingo, one of the strongholds of the EZLN, according to the census of 1990, 62 per cent of ejidatarios reported not having any cattle (Márquez Rosano and Legorreta 1999: 13). This proportion went up to 76.2 per cent when peasants with fewer than five head of cattle were added. Finally, according to various accounts of Zapatistas from the region in which Santa María is located, since 1994 cattle ranching seems to have lost even more predominance in the jungle because many producers sold their cattle owing to the uncertainty generated by the conflict and, additionally, because the traditionally larger buyers, the Ladino ranchers, left the region. These testimonies concur with the reduction of 40 per cent in the cattle herd of the community of Ubilio García, located in the same region as Santa María, observed by Márquez Rosano and Legorreta (1999: 19).

If the production and sale of commercial crops or cattle do not follow a strictly capitalist logic, the internal relations of production within a Zapatista household are even less capitalist. Zapatista families, like the great majority of indigenous peasant families in Chiapas, work the land traditionally with a simple machete and use very few modern techniques or inputs. Slash-and-burn agriculture, reliance on rain, land rotation where possible, and the use of home-grown seeds are the main features of the dominant method of farming. Pesticides and herbicides are the only modern inputs that peasants use. Because of the crisis in the countryside and the high levels of unemployment in Chiapanecan and Mexican cities, Zapatista peasants have been reducing the use of chemical pesticides and herbicides since their use implies a substantial monetary investment. Chemical insecticides and herbicides are used by the most well-off peasants. Those who still use pesticides use as little of them as possible, but they are slowly being replaced by agro-ecological substitutes. In our host community, some Zapatistas were using an organic fertilizer called ‘nescafé’ (known as Mucuna pruniens in Latin), which they grow between harvests.¹⁹ These practices coincide with the agro-ecological approach to farming (Altieri and Toledo 2011) and the Zapatistas have indeed been receiving the support of NGOs with this type of knowledge and techniques. These types of decision on production could also be placed under the umbrella of the concept of self-provisioning, understood as ‘reducing dependency on external resources while simultaneously enlarging and improving the stock of internal resources, including ecological capital [which] reduces monetary costs while overall levels of production are maintained or even slightly improved’ (Van der Ploeg 2010: 6). In my view, what was clearer from the fieldwork, however, was that agro-ecology or self-provisioning was more adopted for practical reasons and objectives, that of dealing with the lack of money or avoiding the need for money, than for ideological or cultural reasons. In a much more striking way than in the case of the MST settlers, Zapatista producers seem to be falling back on an agro-ecology of the poor.

In Chapter 3, I argued that the MST and the EZLN were much more than mediators between the state and their members because MST settlers and Zapatistas participate in the maintenance of alternative power structures based on a form of popular power that resides within communities and is sustained by participatory practices. In this chapter, I have argued that these ‘autonomous rural communities’ can maintain their level of political autonomy because their access to land provides a material base upon which they can reproduce their household, in the first instance by securing food production. This stepping stone, however, plays a different role in the case of the members of the EZLN and those of the MST.

The focus on subsistence and self-reliance can be said to shape almost all of the production decisions of Zapatista peasants. Even though they resort to the market for the purchase of consumer goods, their agricultural practices are still organized around the production of use-value and the use of family labour. In many circumstances, monetary transactions are avoided and replaced by practices of reciprocity and solidarity among kin. Based on Wood’s distinction, most Zapatista subsistence peasants are not market-dependent or even market-oriented, but not because peasant production is inherently organized around subsistence goals. In the jungle their focus is subsistence because of the regional context, which limits the expansion of capitalist relations and because the form of land tenure impedes the emergence of the imperative of market competition. In contrast, Zapatistas from the highlands and north of Chiapas are more market-oriented (not market-dependent) than their comrades from the jungle because, among other things, the size of their plot does not allow them to produce enough to cover the food needs of their family. They thus have to rely more on the market for their subsistence. MST settlers are more market-oriented than Zapatista subsistence peasants. Living in a much more capitalist countryside, the needs of Brazilian settlers are far more monetized than those of Zapatista subsistence peasants. One of the main differences between MST settlers and Zapatista peasants resides in the type of access they have to the market and the type of market in which they are involved. On the one hand, MST settlers, often after the first few years of settlement, are able to enter the market through their integration within marketing networks controlled by multinationals, entrepreneurial cooperatives or MST cooperatives. Hence, MST settlers end up being relatively quickly involved in the decidedly capitalist market of soybean or milk production. In addition, the need to repay state credits imposes a kind of imperative of competition, which can, however, be mediated in different ways. On the other hand, Zapatistas, since they live in regions where infrastructure tends to be very deficient, are not integrated within the same market as other producers. They tend to be integrated within the local market, a market that is not strictly a capitalist one, even though it is linked to and is determined by the capitalist market.

In the case of neither the MST nor the EZLN does monetization lead to full commodification of agriculture, mainly because land is not commodified, but also because prioritizing food production is a conscious decision of MST settlers and Zapatista peasants. Because of their personal experiences with the market, both as producers or as wage labourers, MST settlers and Zapatista subsistence peasants have emphasized subsistence and food self-sufficiency as a fundamental objective informing their decisions regarding agricultural production. Furthermore, in both cases, internal relations of production are not commodified and are organized around the use of family labour. However, guaranteeing subsistence, although it is an important achievement, is not sufficient to ensure the well-being and development of MST settlers and Zapatista ejidatarios. In order to create more political space for their development alternative, the MST and the EZLN have tried to build alliances with other political actors to confront neoliberal policies implemented by the Brazilian and the Mexican states. I will look at these politics of alliances in the next chapter.