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Abstract
Taking its cue from debates on‘the death of the peasantry’ in Latin America, this article attempts to focus on the constitution, transformation and recomposition of peasantries within the contemporary dynamics of neoliberalism. It does so by tracing the historically uneven and combined development of capital accumulation in Mexico and how this has impacted on the regional conditions of state formation in Chiapas, which has shaped the novel form of resistance articulated by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln). The article explores the historical and contemporary dynamics of changes to production relations that have transformed the peasantry in Chiapas, Mexico. As a result, the thesis about the inevitable disappearance of the peasantry is challenged to assert the relevance of renewed conditions of class struggle embodied in the novel and purposeful agency of the ezln. It is argued that the recomposition of class struggle and resistance reflected in the resurgence of peasant movements such as the ezln is an essential feature of the contradictions of global capitalism within the contemporary age of neoliberalism.
Notes
1 See Latinamerica Press (7 September 2005): 12, www.lapress.org, accessed 16 March 2006.
2 For an analysis of Gramsci's account of questions of uneven and combined development, see Morton Citation2007a. On the manner in which Gramsci's theory of uneven and combined development relates to different debates on historical questions about constituting ‘the international’ and contemporary questions about constituting modern geopolitics, see Morton Citation2007b and Morton Citation2007c.
3 It should be made clear that Gramsci's view of the peasantry as a class was not typical of historical materialist theory at the time. Both Lenin Citation1899/1964 and Kautsky Citation1899/1988, for example, emphasise the tendency of internal differentiation among peasants that developed along class lines rather than holding that the peasantry constitute a class distinct from agrarian capital and wage labour. That this generates tensions within the argument about understanding paths of agrarian change and the dissolution of the peasantry cannot be pursued within the present argument (for contemporary commentaries, see Washbrook Citation2007).
4 A specific convention associated with citing the Prison Notebooks is adopted throughout this article. In addition to giving the reference to the selected anthologies, the notebook number (Q) and section (§) accompanies all citations to enable the reader to trace the specific collocation of the citations. The concordance table used is that compiled by Marcus Green and is available at the website of the International Gramsci Society, www.italnet.nd.edu/gramsci.
5 For a more critical analysis of Ruiz see Krauze Citation1999: 65–73].
6 Amnesty International, ‘Mexico: Torture with Impunity’ (London: Amnesty International, AMR 41/04/91) and Amnesty International, ‘Mexico: The Persistence of Torture and Impunity’ (London: Amnesty International, AMR 41/01/93).
7 Report by an Independent Delegation to Mexico, Chiapas, Before It's too Late … (March 1998), 20. This consisted of an eight-person team formed with the help and advice of the aid agencies cafod, Trocaire, Save the Children Fund/uk, sciaf and the Polden Puckham Charitable Trust that visited Chiapas, 13–23 March 1998.
8 Coordinación de Organismos no Gubernamentales por la Paz de Chiapas (conpaz), Centro de Derechos Humanos Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, y Convergencia de Organismos Civiles por la Democracia, Militarisation and Violence in Chiapas (Servicios Procesados, a.c., 1997).
9 See Report by an Independent Delegation to Mexico, Chiapas, Before It's too Late … , 19.
10 For a more detailed examination of this intellectual's role as a passive revolutionary in Mexico, see Morton Citation2003b.
11 The Times[London], ‘Doomed uprising rips veil from Mexican “miracle”’, (7 January 1994).
12 For a rebuttal see Dunkerley Citation2000: 20–38] and for a continuation of the debate see Panizza Citation2005 and Motta Citation2007.
13 The Economist (London), ‘Back to square one in Chiapas’, 5 May 2001.
14 What the notion of ‘counter’-hegemony has to say about state–civil society relations in both theory and practice is open to debate but these issues go beyond the confines of the present discussion. It is noteworthy that the term ‘counter’-hegemony itself was not used in Gramsci's writings but rather that he foresaw the transcendence of one hegemony by another, precisely in terms of struggles over hegemony. These could be ‘anti-state’ in the sense of creating social institutions that would replace those of capitalist society as part of the emancipatory endeavour [see Gramsci, Citation1977: 58, 80]. Whether this automatically leads to the conclusion that Gramsci and an array of revolutionaries (Lenin, Lukács) all attempted to discipline class struggle within ‘the Party as Knower’, as the bearer of class consciousness, is open to serious rejection [see Holloway, Citation2002: 84]. That the ezln have made statements renouncing the role of vanguards is clear and could lead one to collapse the struggle into an autonomist movement. As Marcos has stated, ‘Our weapons are not used to impose ideas or ways of life, rather to defend a way of thinking and a way of seeing the world and relating to it’, see Subcommandante Marcos, ‘I shit on all the revolutionary vanguards of this planet’, (9 January 2003); http://www.ezln.org.mx; accessed 12 November 2004. Alternatively, it could be argued that the ezln is a movement articulating a sophisticated hegemonic struggle that aims to transcend the very conditions and parameters of hegemony. ‘This revolution’, it is stated in the Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, ‘will not end in a new class, or class fraction, or group in power but in a free and democratic “space” of political struggle … [that] will be born on the stinking cadaver of the state-party system and presidentialism. A new political relationship will be born. A new politics whose basis will not be a confrontation between political organisations, but the confrontation of their political proposals with the different social classes, for on the real support of these classes will depend the title to political power, not its exercise.’ See ezln, ‘Second Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle’, (10 June 1994), www.ezln.org.mx; accessed 30 January 2001.
15 Subcommandante Marcos, ‘The Fourth World War Has Begun’, Le Monde diplomatique, (September 1997), English print edition, www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en; accessed 16 April 2000.
16 The Economist (London), ‘A Fresh Start for Chiapas’, 12 August 2000, pp. 53–4.
17 Subcommandante Marcos, ‘Letter to Vicente Fox’ (2 December 2000), www.ezln.org.mx; accessed 30 January 2001.
18 Carlos Monsiváis and Hermann Belinghausen, ‘Interview with Subcomandante Marcos’, La Jornada[Mexico City] (8 January 2001), www.ezln.org.mx; accessed 30 January 2001.
