Subaltern Resistance in Latin America: A Reply to Tom Brass

Abstract

The valorization of peasants and/or forms of cultural or ethnic difference by subaltern studies that Tom Brass critiques has to do with the relation of Marxism and modernity. Is Marxism essentially a historicism based on the imposition of a normative model of modernity, in which peasants are destined to disappear under the aegis of the ‘development of the forces of production’, or does it point rather to understanding and mobilizing, in whatever form they may take, the contradictions produced by both colonialism and capitalist modernity? Lenin argued that in the stage of capitalism he identified as Imperialism, the ‘national question’ displaced the contradiction between capital and labour within individual capitalist nation-states as the main contradiction; the argument of subaltern studies is that in the new stage of capitalism, if indeed it is correct to speak in those terms, the question of peasants and difference may likewise be a ‘main’, as opposed to secondary contradiction.