Resistance, class struggle and social movements in Latin America: contemporary dynamics

ABSTRACT

This paper traces out the changing forms of the resistance associated with each advance in the capitalist development of the forces of production over the course of the neoliberal era in Latin America. The central argument is that the resistance to the forces of agrarian change and capitalist development over the past three decades has been mobilised by a succession of social movements, whose dynamics and changing forms can best be understood in terms of Marxist class theory. The central focus of the paper is on the current dynamics of the class struggle on the expanding frontier of extractive capital in South America in the context of what has been described as a ‘progressive cycle’ in Latin American politics – a cycle that to all appearances is coming to an end.

KEYWORDS:

• Agrarian change
• Marxist class analysis
• social movements
• Latin America
• extractive capitalism

Notes on contributor

Henry Veltmeyer is a research professor at Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas (Mexico) and Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies (IDS) at Saint Mary’s University (Canada), with a specialised interest in Latin American development. He is also co-Chair of the Critical Development Studies (CDS) network, and a co-editor of Fernwood’s Initiatives in Critical Agrarian Change series. Recent publications include Class struggle in Latin America: making history today (Routledge, 2017). Email: [email protected]

ORCID

Henry Veltmeyer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4967-0585

Notes

1 Reference here to ‘Latin America’ is contextualised in terms of certain dynamics of capitalist development associated with what we term the ‘new geoeconomics of capital’ (the advance of extractive capital). These dynamics have unfolded primarily in South America, particularly in the Andes (Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Venezuela), but also in Brazil and Mexico, the region’s biggest economies.

2 The concept of ‘civil society’ was formulated in the 1980s in the context of a movement to democratise the state–society relation. Here civil society, in the form of nongovernmental development organizations, was conceived of as an intermediary, a strategic partner in the project of international cooperation – ‘social participation’, in development discourse (vs. ‘political participation’ in democratic discourse). In the study of international development, however, it did not enter into the discourse until the 1990s in the context of a United Nations project designed to incorporate the ‘private sector’ of profit-seeking corporations into the development process (Mitlin 1998). In this context ‘civil society’ as a separate sphere encompassing all manner of nongovernmental or social organizations between the family and the state was conceptualised as a ‘third sector’ (neither public nor private). On this concept and associated dynamics see Veltmeyer (2008).

3 On this point see, inter alia, the general discussion and case studies on Argentina, Chile and Mexico regarding this ‘development’ provided by contributing authors to Petras and Veltmeyer (2017).

4 In the sense of neoliberalism as a form of capitalism, rather than as merely an ideology and economic doctrine, these peasant movements in the 1990s can be viewed as anti-capitalist as well as anti-neoliberal.

5 For an extended argument on this point and the following discussion see Petras and Veltmeyer (2006) and Veltmeyer (2005).

6 On this point see Lehmann (1978).

7 According to Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Klein and Tokman 2000) up to 90 percent of new jobs in the 1980s in the region were created in the informal sector. And a recent study into the dynamics of internal and international migration (Delgado Wise and Veltmeyer 2016, 131) showed a similar pattern for Mexico two decades on. From 2000 to 2010, Mexico’s labour force increased by 9.6 million while formal jobs in the structured or regulated ‘formal sector’ of the economy did so by a mere 2.1 million, which means a deficit of some 7.5 million jobs, an excluded workforce distributed as follows: the unemployed, 1.5 million; informal workers, 3.9 million; and migrants, 2.1 million.

8 Like the author, Otero views these ‘semi-proletarians’ (peasant workers unable to earn enough from their land to meet their basic needs, and forced to work part time for other ‘richer’ peasants) as key players in the complex process of class formation and political mobilisation.

9 I am not aware of the existence of any systematic class analysis of these communities and the political implications of their internal class division. For example, many rural communities are composed of both smallholding peasant farmers and rural landless workers who earn their income predominantly from labour. But how does this fact relate to a disposition towards resistance versus accommodation to the forces of capitalist development, which is to take one of the two pathways out of rural poverty offered by the agencies of development and international cooperation? And what connection, if any, does it have to Paige’s (1975) theory of peasant rebellion? That is, are the semiproletarianised inhabitants of the rural communities more likely to engage in class struggle than the smallholding peasant farmers? Unfortunately, without further research we cannot begin to answer to this question.

10 For Kearney (1996), peasants are polybians, individuals engaged in combined subsistence farming production, wage labour, and other non-agricultural income activities.

11 This strategy supported the response of many of the rural poor to the forces of capitalist development, namely seeking to diversify their sources of household income. The micro-projects funded by the World Bank and other organisations of ‘international cooperation’ played into this, as did migrant remittances and the social programme of conditional cash transfers to the poor – Bolsa Familia, in the context of Brazil’s Workers Party (PT) regime under Lula (Robles and Veltmeyer 2015).

12 For a nuanced sociological analysis of the formation and mobilisation dynamics of MST as a grassroots social movement of landless or near-landless peasants or rural workers, the most dynamic and well-organised social movement in Brazilian history, see Wolford (2010).

13 Among the most significant rural movements in Latin America today (on this see Vergara-Camus 2014) are the MST, CONAIE, the Association of Indigenous Councils of Northern Cauca (ACIN) in Colombia, National Union of Regional Autonomous Peasant Organizations (UNORCA) in Mexico, the Rural Workers Association (ATC) in Nicaragua, and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) in Bolivia. With the exception of the ACIN, CONAIE and MAS, these peasant movements are affiliated with Via Campesina, headquartered in Honduras.

14 In August 2012, less than a month after a historic international seminar (‘Agrarian Reform and the Defense of Land and Territory in the 21st Century: The Challenge and Future’) that brought together thousands of delegates representing 26 countries from across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, there took place a gathering and historic meeting of some 5000 representatives of mass rural movements from across Latin America under the leadership of Joao Pedro Stédile who, it appeared, still believed that the divisions within the PT government provided a window of opportunity for advancing the class struggle for land and transformative social change – to unify the demands of all the movements so that they would have greater strength in numbers and unity (Robles and Veltmeyer 2015).

15 Vargas represented the indigenous nationalities of the Amazonian region, which had been thoroughly penetrated by the evangelical churches, and because their interests were tied more to territorial autonomy and ethnic cultural identity than the land, it was not too difficult for World Bank officials to ‘turn’ him away from the confrontational politics of the class struggle towards their ethnodevelopment strategy and local micro-project development approach. Vargas now heads PRODEPINE, an NGO that is well financed by the World Bank with a large staff that operates in the localities and communities of the rural indigenous poor so as to build on the social capital of the poor rather than mobilise the forces of resistance.

16 On this see, inter alia, Holloway (2002) and Burbach (1994).

17 In discussing the ‘global commons’ a distinction needs to be made between ‘land’, which, according to Walter Barraza (a representative of the Tonokote people – the camache (chief) of the Tonokote people of the Santiago del Estero province, Argentina), ‘relates to private property’ as a ‘capitalist concept’, whereas ‘territory includes … people who live in that place …  [with an] obligation to take care of its nature’. He adds that ‘[w]e native peoples live in harmony with our animal brothers, plants, water. We are part of the territory, which provides us with everything we need. Cutting forests down is like cutting a limb. They are coming for natural resources, while we live in harmony with those resources’ (Barraza 2017).

18 As Gudynas (2015) points out, notwithstanding the repeated invocation of David Harvey’s concept of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in literally hundreds of Latin American studies, the idea is nothing new. On the contrary, it has been formulated in different ways by many Latin American scholars over the years. However, although I am in agreement with Gudynas’ criticism of the concept as often applied to capitalism in the current Latin American context I nevertheless believe that although not new or an advance on Marx’s original formulation, the concept has some analytical utility and relevance for understanding the contemporary dynamics of capitalist development

19 On the field of ‘critical agrarian studies’ see Edelman and Wolford (2017).

20 And some of the movements themselves see the struggle in these terms. See, for example, CONAIE (2015), as well as the EZLN (2015) and for that matter the MST, whose land struggle precedes the current era of extractive capitalism.

21 There is a surprising lack of studies into what might be described as a ‘surplus extraction chain’ (the extraction of surplus value plus the value embodied in natural resource wealth), but several studies in Bolivia, a best case of inclusionary state activism and resource nationalism (see Veltmeyer 2014), suggest that in the case of the mining sector workers receive less than 10 percent of the value of the extracted resource on the world market, and that the state extracts a similar share in the form of ground rent (royalties and taxes). This means that from 60 to 70 percent of the economic value of the country’s minerals and metals is expropriated by outside economic interests. And a study by the author shows that in the case of Mexico – where there are no royalties on mined minerals and metals and the effective rate of taxation on exports is as low as two percent – this relation of economic exploitation is even greater (Bárcenas and Galicia 2011; Veltmeyer 2013).

22 On this see Dávalos and Albuja (2014).

23 The problem that Marxists have with this notion of ‘communities in struggle’ is that it is predicated on the assumption that people in a defined geographic space share not only a locality or territory but also a culture of solidarity that allows them to collect collectively in the common interest. As argued by O’Malley (2001), in many cases communities so understood do not exist; in actuality many so-called ‘communities’ are class divided and unable to act collectively. Thus, to constitute a community as an agency of collective action is a somewhat idealised notion with limited or dubious utility in social scientific analysis except as indirect reference to the production relations that members of a community necessarily enter into – relations in many cases to two different systems of production (capitalism, the peasant economy).

24 On Argentina see Giarracca and Teubal (2014), and on Brazil see Mendes Pereira and Alentejano (2017).