Peasant Revolts in an Era of Globalization: Bringing Political Economy Back in

Introduction

The prediction that peasants were doomed to extinction was one of the great miscalculations of the 20th century. Today, Latin America’s peasantries have firmly established not only their capacity for resilience in the face of devastation of their livelihoods, but also, moreover, their strength as political forces at the forefront of the struggle against neoliberal globalisation. Their protests have brought governments to their knees, as well as providing a chief driving force behind the emergence of a new wave of left-leaning governments across the subcontinent. Yet three decades of neoliberal policy in the rural periphery have brought a significant transformation of the socio-economic character of these actors, and have moreover been contested with new types of political strategy. This new context demands a new type of critical analysis, capable of accounting for the dramatic changes to peasant livelihoods that have taken place in the neoliberal era, as well as the emergence of peasant movements, their political character, organisational forms, aims and strategy.

As theorists explore the dynamics of contemporary peasant movements, they are simultaneously grappling over the direction that critical theory should take. At the one end of the spectrum stand the various formulations of modernisation theory, which enjoyed predominance in the 1950s and 1960s and continues to have a number of adherents today. The approach presumed that the ‘backwards’ or ‘pre-capitalist’ set of production relations that characterised rural Latin America were destined to be irreversibly overturned with the development of the productive forces in agriculture. As economic development brought industrialisation and urbanisation, so behaviours of third world peasantries would adapt in the same way as those of their western forbearers, with the newly created urban masses embracing a new set of values, consumption trends and organisational forms. These presumptions permeated the ideas of many Marxist writers of the time from Hobsbawm to Bartra, and persist in many of the arguments of contemporary authors such as Henry Bernstein. The Marxist variant of modernisation theory predicted that the process of capitalist development would be accompanied by the disappearance of the peasantry as a class, with some sectors emerging as capitalist farmers and the rest joining the ranks of the rural and urban proletariat. By analogy, this economic transformation would translate into a new political direction for these actors, with peasant struggles being absorbed into workers’ unions and political parties.

At the other end of the spectrum stands poststructuralist theory, which by the 1980s and 1990s had risen to dominate most disciplines across the social sciences and humanities. Poststructuralist critique emerged as a direct attack on many of the presumptions of modernisation theory, in both its Marxist and non-Marxist variations. It took aim at three interrelated targets. The first was the economic determinism underlying modernisation theory, which saw social phenomena as unfolding according to a historical-teleological scheme, foretelling a straightforward transition from the backwards peasant society to the modern capitalist one. Against such deterministic schemas, it was argued that the messy, sticky realities of rural social relations could not be accounted for by the mechanical, unilinear laws of progression from one mode of production to another. From this, the second critique took aim at the notion of ‘class reductionism’ said to operate in Marxist class analysis, in which the identification of groups like peasants or workers was primarily based on their structural class categories. Objective, or structural class-based referents could never be identified as the chief determinants of the political character of social groups. From this, the third attack insisted that political identity, and the formation of strategies and demands of peasant movements could not be derived from objective relations to means of production.

The ultimate evidence for this was taken to be the emergence of ‘new’ rural social movements in Latin America, who do not mobilise on class-based matters such as peasant- or worker- based demands, but issues such as ethnicity, gender, identity and human rights. Based on this analysis, poststructuralist theory shifted academic focus from socio-economic trends and macro-processes to micro-level explorations of diverse historical contingencies, culture and locality. The dimension of subjective experience – the only aspect of social reality to which we have direct access – became the subject matter par excellence of a new wave of research agendas on peasant movements, and budding scholars took to the fields to explore the discursive construction of identity amongst these ‘new’ actors.

Notwithstanding the claims made by these theorists to be acting in defence of the powerless, it soon became clear that the approach had led theoretical enquiry into something of an intellectual cul-de sac. As an analytical framework, it fails to account in any meaningful way for the broader macro-structural conditions that laid the groundwork for the emergence of these movements. The over-emphasis on the internal or micro-dynamics of identity and culture had pried these movements free of the socio-economic relations in which they were enmeshed. What the analysis had failed to comprehend was that subjective experiences are not merely free floating historical contingencies, and they cannot be understood independently of the concrete structural determinations from which they emerge – and which they in turn impact back on. This analytical omission is particularly relevant given the context of neoliberal globalisation. The extensive transformations to relations of property and production that have taken place in Latin America’s rural peripheries in recent decades are not ‘discursive constructs’ but dynamic and concrete forces, undermining the livelihoods of peasants and fundamentally transforming the way they relate to each other and to outside forces.

The challenge that befalls studies of today’s peasant movements is that of understanding the dynamics of how the dramatic transformations of peasant livelihoods have not signalled the ‘death of the peasantry’– as modernization theory had predicted; far from it, these processes have given rise to a new wave of peasant movements. These dynamics cannot be explained as the unfolding of a predetermined schema, overriding all interventions from different agencies, actors’ consciousness and interventions. Yet nor is it an open canvas. The task for contemporary scholars of peasant movements is that of developing an analytical lens suitably adjusted for examining changes in rural social relations that have taken place in recent years, and for understanding how and why it is the peasantry that has led the resistance struggle against neoliberalism and globalisation in Latin America.

Towards a new Research Agenda

The three books under review here are amongst the most important recent attempts to move studies of peasant movements beyond the theoretical entanglements of both modernisation theory and poststructuralism. As such, they stand at the forefront of a new research agenda in critical theory attempting to understand peasant movements in the 21st century from a political economy approach. The authors all adopt frameworks that attempt to re-ground peasant politics in structural and economic processes without thereby falling into the trappings of economic determinism. They have all constructed historical-political analyses that relate the struggles of peasant movements to macro-historical outcomes; yet each book has undertaken this challenge using a very different approach. Against the presumptions of modernisation theory, all three authors emphasise the resilience of the peasantry, and the centrality of these agents as leading political forces in Latin America today. However, they also emphasise that contemporary peasant movements are of a very different sort than their mid-20th century equivalents. To explain this change, they emphasise the dramatic impact of neoliberalism on peasant livelihoods, and the productive transformations in the Latin American countryside as major conditions of the emergence and scope of today’s new movements. Finally, these books all explore what is new about today’s peasant movements, in what way they are distinct from the peasant struggles of the past, and the successes and contradictions of their political character and strategy.

This review essay will assess the new research agenda adopted by these authors for exploring the dynamics of neoliberalism, the persistence and transformation of the peasantries and the emergence of new peasant movements. I focus on the authors’ case studies of Brazil’s Movimento de Trabajadores Sim Terra (MST) and Mexico’s Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). I identify the original contribution of each work to the field, highlighting the main insights, and providing a critical analysis of their main arguments, drawing comparisons and elucidating the difference between the theories where possible. Finally, I examine the political projects implied in the theories of each author in their characterisation of the scope, aims and strategies of 21st century peasant revolts.

Zibechi

Of the three books, it is Zibechi’s Territories in Resistance (2012) that is most concerned with the internal and subjective dimensions of the new peasant movements: the reconfiguration of power relations within communities, as well as their cultural and organisational traits and relationship to other groups and the state. In this exploration of new movements of peasants and marginalised communities in Latin America, Zibechi purports to move critical analyses away from the economistic presumptions behind modernisation theory. His argument stresses the need to look beyond the relations of production in favour of an approach that seeks to ‘get inside the process of construction of these subjects’ (Zibechi, 2007: 10) as a means of understanding the emergence, strategy and aims of contemporary peasant movements.

One of the original aspects of Zibechi’s argument lies in his adaptation of a framework broadly derived from world-systems theory in order to explore the distinct social and organisational configurations of social movements from the developmentalist period to neoliberalism. He emphasises the contrast between the social base, strategies and aims of movements across these two distinct world-historic periods. The former, he argues, were of a centralised and stable character; they formulated unified, class-based demands, which were articulated through political parties. In contrast, those of today emerge against a background of marginalisation, fragmentation and flux. For Zibechi, this is a consequence of the transformation of productive structures that has taken place under neoliberalism, or what he calls the ‘de-territorialisation of production’ (2012: 15). The argument is reminiscent of currently influential notions of ‘precarisation’ of working classes captured in Standing’s Precariat or Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. This framework provides the key to understanding why struggles for territory and autonomy are the prevailing form adopted by today’s marginalised masses.

Zibechi’s original use of this theoretical model has been a pathbreaker for studies on contemporary peasant movements in Latin America. Yet the framing of this argument within a universalised account of the world-historic move from developmentalism to neoliberalism across Latin America suffers serious limitations. Nowhere does Zibechi attempt to describe the historical processes that have given rise to this transition: why the changes took place, the forms of the transition, the contestations of various actors and changes in the balance of forces. This means that the structural and productive transformations that provide the background to this book are not seen as dynamic processes evolving over time; rather, the forces at work appear at once detached and overbearing, somehow irrevocably determining the course of social and political circumstances.

For this reason, the reader should exert a degree of caution in accepting the basic tenets of this theory. We might ask, for example, whether the dividing line between the unified and centralised social forces of the past and the fragmented subjects of today is, in fact, such a useful framework for analysis as Zibechi would have us believe. As far back as the 1960s, Latin American social scientists had observed that the population explosion and rapid urbanisation of that period had generated a mushroom in slums and shantytowns, a dynamic Quijano had called the ‘marginal pole’. Is the fragmented nature of Latin America’s impoverished masses really such a novelty? Without offering any data or concrete historical analysis of social change and the trajectories of different types of movements, the primary thesis of this book is being presumed rather than demonstrated, and the reader is asked to accept the argument’s premises as a matter of faith.

Zibechi argues that today’s peasantries have been dispersed into new spaces, to the margins of cities or continuous migrational flows. In this context, these new social agents struggle against the processes of dispersion and fragmentation by means of the re-construction of territories, and through these practices they acquire new ‘forms of power and meaning’ (2012: 14). These territorial struggles became the new means through which oppressed and excluded populations were able not only to ‘ensure their survival, both materially and spiritually’ (2012: 14–15), but also to ‘create new social relations’ that are somehow ‘outside the claws of the market’. For this reason, the search for land and the construction of territory has become the most important feature of new movements, alongside other factors such as autonomy from the state, self-government and autonomy, education, indigenous intellectuals, the re-valorisation of culture, changes in gender roles and participatory working relations based on co-operativism (2012: 15–17).

The book explores the dynamics of nine case studies from a number of countries, emphasizing the significance of territoriality, autonomy, identity, the role of women and relations of production in the new social movements for these movements. He emphasises the role of each of these features in maintaining the internal coherence of peasant movements, to protect difference and alternative culture. For this reason, the concerns of the book are the need for the construction of autonomous, local, decentralised power institutes based on relations of territorial coexistence and traditional knowledge ‘as something distinct from the hegemonic world’ (2012: 74). These autonomous communities are not essentialised; he argues that divergences in national political and economic circumstances have meant that the importance of territoriality and autonomy is different for the two groups. Whereas for the EZLN, it is a question of defending indigenous ‘culture and cosmovision’ as distinct from the ‘hegemonic world’, for the MST it is a question of resisting the pressures of agro-business through the construction of alternative productive systems based on self-sufficiency, co-operative ownership and agro-ecology.

His analysis stresses the importance of withdrawing from the global system of production and governance, and constructing spaces autonomous from capitalism and the state as a primary source of resistance to capitalism. This strategy stands in contrast to the movements of the post-War period, whose unification and centralisation had acted as a mechanism for the state and capital to penetrate and neutralise them. Zibechi’s focus in turn underlies a clear political project: these groups must stand autonomously of the matrix of capitalism and the state. The notion is another version of the contemporary expressions of anarchism as the strategy of ‘anti-power’ or ‘counter-hegemony’ propelled to fame in the late 1990s most prominently by John Holloway. Zibechi’s powerful capacity for analysing the internal organisational strengths and socio-cultural composition of the movements is one of the major strengths of the book. These features, and their interaction with other actors and institutes, in turn explain the successes and shortfalls of the movements and their mobilization strategies.

Underlying his examination of Mexico’s EZLN and Brazil’s MST, there is a clear presumption that peasant communities occupy a space that is outside of, and in opposition to capitalism, governed by a qualitatively different set of social erlaitons he calls ‘non-capitalist social relations in movement’ (2012: 111). The claim raises a number of questions regarding the nature of social relations of production in peasant societies: is it possible for these relations to stand outside of and beyond capitalist relations? And if so, how? The dilemma here is that despite the fact that this claim forms a crucial component of the argument, Zibechi provides no further exploration of the dynamics of what is meant by this notion, nor the possible contradictions it entails. For example, with respect to land ownership, he provides little concrete analysis on whether the peasants of Mexico and Brazil persist on individual land plots and family enterprises, or collectivised units, nor how these relations have changed under neoliberalism. Similarly, the inequalities in access to markets and capital experienced between different peasant groups are not explored. Capitalist relations would appear as merely a menacing backdrop to peasant societies, not as forces which themselves have penetrated and transformed these groups. Certainly there is no simple answer to the issue of the nature of social relations operating within contemporary peasant movements. Yet in failing to provide any closer inspection of the relations of property, production and power operating within peasant movements, the argument that they must be seen as non-capitalist operates only at the rhetorical level, and concrete analysis is replaced with uncritical romanticism.

Petras and Veltmeyer

Of the three books it is Petras and Veltmeyer’s Social Movements in Latin America (2011) that contains the most comprehensive attempt at macro-level political economy analysis, drawing on a combination of theories of imperialism, critical development and the paths of agrarian change to explain the emergence of contemporary peasant movements. The authors have led the way in calling for investigations of the dynamics of contemporary peasant movements to be re-situated back to the realm of historical materialism at a time when this line of research has withdrawn steadily into the sanctuaries of local level case studies of everyday resistance. For them, the question of why peasant movements have been the most prominent social actors on the left is not to be answered through an exploration of the construction of their identity, shared attitudes and beliefs, or the ability of subjective will alone to resist the pressures of change. Rather, they argue that we must look to the particular road taken by capitalist development and imperialism in the neoliberal era, transformations in relations of property and production amongst peasant producers and the processes of exclusion and marginalisation it entails, as well as the forms of response to these circumstances taken by the peasantry and other social forces. Their analysis adopts many notions from Marxist and development theory without falling into the presumption common to these schools that historical processes are products of the laws of motion of capital accumulation. Rather, this is an account of the political, social and economic forces at work in various historical conjunctures, which are understood as processes conditioned by the subjective choices and responses of actors.

The strongest feature of the theoretical model is their use of class analysis, which sets the study apart from the purely ‘structural’ understanding of class relations prevalent amongst many authors within the Marxist tradition. The framework is more comprehensive than the world-systems theory advanced by Zibechi insofar as it combines analysis of the political and economic processes behind the emergence and unfolding of the neoliberal order with a study of the dynamics of popular resistance: the way that popular protests may impact on the system, causing it to change, re-mutate and appear in a new form. The study is thus ambitious in both its temporal and spatial dimensions, and allows the authors to address a number of issues that are generally bypassed in other studies of the genre.

The primary problematic addressed in the book is why it is the peasantry, and not the working class, that has emerged as the chief oppositional force to the current political and economic order. On the one hand, in a critique of the policy agenda of the World Bank, they argue that the neoliberal project in Latin America has provoked a crisis in peasant economies, generating a new wave of marginalisation and dispossession (2011: 83). On the other, however, imperialist forces have succeeded in destroying not only the material advances made by workers, but also their capacity for collective resistance through repression and structural transformation (2011: 33–52). This means that the dispossession of peasants under neoliberalism has not translated into a straightforward process of rural-urban migration, with peasants leaving agriculture to join the ranks of the proletariat – as modernisation theory had predicted. Rather the destruction of national production under neoliberalism has generated a mass of what Lenin had once termed ‘semi-proletariats’. These are peasants who have been separated from the means of production, yet have failed to be fully integrated into the labour market. It is because of this dynamic that today’s peasants have failed to break their connection to agrarian society despite continuing in conditions of rural impoverishment (2011: 60–63). It is these groups that form the bulk of the social base of today’s peasantries.

Taking a case study from Brazil, they provide a detailed account of the transformations in relations of property, production and power that have taken place under neoliberalism. They demonstrate that whilst a handful of fortunate peasants succeeded in adapting to these new conditions by converting to become capitalist farmers, albeit with limited access to capital and technology, the more dominant tendency has seen producers increasingly compelled to sell their labour power at well below the costs of reproduction, pushing them into debt and bankruptcy. The outcome has been a crisis of impoverishment, marginalisation and dispossession in peasant economies. Yet, in contrast to Zibechi, Petras and Veltmeyer exert caution in positing the novelty of this dynamic: dispossession and marginalisation have long been recurrent themes in the history of capitalist development. What is new, however, is that the context of the destruction of the productive forces under neoliberalism this process has been ‘stalled’ (2011: 57) and thereby accentuated.

The scope of this book is ambitious, attempting to describe broad economic processes across very diverse regions, whilst accounting for patterns and divergences within this model and the way different socio-political forces have interacted over time. However, such an expansive project inevitably faces a number of dilemmas. Can such a sweeping account of structural transformations and rural mobilisations provide sufficient explanation of the major divergences in national and local trajectories of agrarian change? In many places there is a marked disparity between the all-encompassing claims made by the authors and the use of evidence to support these claims. The authors are careful to substantiate their arguments with data from key resources or examples from at least one country in Latin America, but at times there is a degree of ambiguity as to whether the supporting data is reflective of broader trends across the subcontinent, or only relevant to one country. At different stages in the progression of the book’s argument, the authors draw examples from different countries, but do not always discuss whether the examples used are applicable to the other countries of the region. For example, their argument regarding the formation of a semi-proletarianised peasantry is supported with just one detailed case study of the changes in the relations of property and production in neoliberal Brazil (2011: 70–71). Whilst the implication of the argument is clearly that this model has relevance to the diverse national trajectories of agrarian change in the other countries of Latin America, this presumption is more problematic than the authors are willing to accept. This issue is particularly critical in the more controversial aspects of their argument. For example, the claim that the new left has failed to implement any significant policies for the redistribution of society’s wealth and resources presents a strong challenge to general consensus on this topic, yet the argument is supported only with very brief references to some of the policies of the Bolivian, Chilean, Ecuadorian and Brazilian governments (2011: 153–156).

One of the major strengths of the book is its account of the way in which large-scale peasant mobilisations have proven to be decisive forces in changing the balance of power at key historical conjunctures in the course of Latin American development. This has been the motive behind the particular focus of the authors’ research on peasant movements: for them, it is a question of identifying the forces capable of confronting capitalism and the state, and mounting significant social mobilisations with the aim of achieving major structural changes to the world order.

It is because of this wider political project that the authors are fiercely critical of the local-level or ‘no-power’ route to change advocated by Zibechi and others. In a position at loggerheads with the bulk of fashionable literature in this field, the authors criticise the reversion to strategies of autonomy and local development as a retreat from confrontational class politics that is perfectly in line with the aims of neoliberal governance and facilitated by the co-optation tactics of NGOs- dubbed the ‘agents of imperialism’ (2011: 126–140). Yet the authors’ tenacious stance on the issue of the local or everyday politics of peasant resistance has, in fact, led them to make a key omission. Specifically, the authors’ field research has focussed on the impact of peasant movements on the macro-level processes of social change, looking at strategies for mass mobilisation and the confrontation with central political power structures. Yet this emphasis leads the authors to forego many important questions with regards to the local-level, or subjective dimensions of peasant political activity day-to-day political practice: the choices, aims and actions of peasants involved in the movements, leaves many holes in this account. This oversight is reflective of a broader problem with adopting a framework that operates chiefly at the national or global level: it seems an inappropriate fit for understanding the political dynamics of groups that operate outside of the political and economic centres, and have been marginalised from the main circuits of capital accumulation.

The authors certainly recognise that different groups of peasants will not respond in the same way to the macro-level structural changes they identify. Rather, they lay out a framework that schematises three rational options for action from peasants in the face of crisis. These may be economic, in the form of capitalist farming (for the privileged few) or migration (for the many), or political, in the form of resistance (2011: 55–56). The model is intriguing and raises a number of questions about peasant behaviour: the role of economic rationality, self-interest, tradition and community values. Yet, despite the fact that the authors’ position on these issues should provide a key explanatory feature of their central argument, these ideas are not explored further and remain untested in this book, for example with reference to field research. Rather, these considerations are glossed over with sweeping statements such as: ‘For whatever reason, the peasantry in its diverse forms was able to more actively respond’ (2011: 60), without offering any further considerations in this regard.

This means that whilst the reader is provided with a powerful analysis of the macro-processes that have provided the conditions of the antagonism between the peasantry and the forces of neoliberal globalisation in Latin America, the book is thin on descriptions of the micro-level dynamics of agrarian change and the formation of peasant movements. The reader is offered little in terms of closer understanding of subjective or local-level processes: peasant behaviour, the experience of the processes of change, the hopes and aims of peasants in social movements and the thought processes behind their engagement in political activity. It appears that exploring these issues would entail acknowledging the value of ethnographic and cultural studies to a greater degree than authors are willing to admit. It would require closer investigation of the dynamics of the internal politics of the groups in question, and subjective features such as the relevance of culture, intentions and experience to the formation of peasant movements.

To include this micro-level line of analysis would also provide important considerations for understanding a number of issues raised by the authors themselves. These include questions of why there has been such a high degree of diversity between the paths of agrarian change and peasant resistance in different times and places, as well as other issues such as the formation of political alliances, leadership and the organisational and emotional capacity of the participants in these movements to carry out prolonged mobilisation. As it stands, however, this book is unable to account for these dynamics. In this respect, the book provides a detailed examination of the broader conditions of impoverishment and the destruction of previous collective organisations under neoliberalism, whilst the subjective dimensions of why and how these movements have been formed remain obscure.

Vergara-Camus

Of the authors examined here, it is only Vergara-Camus who situates his study within an elaborate and carefully constructed literature review. This frames a comprehensive and systematic comparative case study of the roads of capitalist development in Mexico and Brazil, and the land struggles of the EZLN and the MST. The book, Land and Freedom (2014), combines a rich historical analysis of the distinct historical trajectories of agrarian change of Brazil and Mexico with a micro-level analysis of the transformations in peasant livelihoods in the neoliberal era. This analysis provides the background for an exploration of the way these structural forces have interacted with the everyday preoccupations of peasant families in the different contexts of Brazil and Mexico, which in turn explains the emergence of these new peasant movements at particular historical conjunctures, as well as their distinct political character. Unlike the work of Petras and Veltmeyer, this book is not attempting an all-encompassing account of the macro-structural or global processes at work behind the rise of peasant movements in Latin America, but a national- and local-level analysis of the historical trajectories of the development of capitalist property relations and commercial agriculture in Brazil and Mexico.

The importance of Vergara-Camus’ methodological approach lies in its vindication of the value of structural analysis in understanding the particular dynamics behind the formation of any peasant movement. It recognises the systemic laws at work in the development of capitalism, whilst accounting for the particularities of two distinct historical processes, and the significance of the empirical diversities between the two. The challenge is assumed with an exploration of the emergence and evolution of the distinct set of relations of property and production under capitalism and their diverse expression within different social formations, without in any way commiting the error of presuming that an account of broad, macro-structural processes is sufficient to explain the emergence of peasant movements in particular times and places.

Vergara-Camus provides detailed historical accounts of the emergence of the Zapatista and MST movements not as merely historical contingencies, but structured processes: an upshot of the process of agrarian change, the development of capitalism and state formation in Brazil and Mexico during the course of the 20th century. Whereas in Brazil, the early 20th century was characterised by the establishment of private property rights, land concentration and the development of commercial export agriculture, in Mexico this process was impeded by the establishment of the ejido system, which prevented the full commoditisation of land. This resulted in lower degrees of market penetration in Chiapas than many parts of rural Brazil. However, both the Mexican and Brazilian trajectories underwent major reconfigurations under the neoliberal restructuring of the 1980s. Peasants were subjected to the ‘market imperative’– forced to adapt to competitive export agriculture or die, which provoked a crisis of peasant agriculture and rural labour in both Brazil and Mexico (2014: 64–71). Vergara-Camus provides a detailed account of the dynamics of this crisis- the change in access to markets, credits and land for peasants, which account for the divergent trajectories of agrarian change taken in Brazil and Mexico.

Vergara-Camus emphasises the idea that the neoliberal restructuring of agriculture provided the conditions for the consolidation of a new form of peasant resistance. Yet the emergence of these movements in these particular regions can only be explained by reference to contingent local political and social factors (2014: 70–71). The author relies on three main explanatory pillars. The first is the role of the state, in particular the demise of corporatist structures owing to the implementation of neoliberal policies. The second is the absence of an ‘exit strategy’ for peasants pushed out of agriculture. This is because, in contrast the presumptions of modernisation theory, Latin American cities are not dynamic centres of productive and social development, but stagnant and highly exclusionary places. Finally, the author explores is the role of leadership and strategy in peasant organisations in conditioning the generation of the particular political form of response to the changes in peasant livelihoods. These three factors explain the apparent historical anomaly of the persistence of peasant movements despite the expansion of capitalist relations in the countryside, as well as the distinct political character of the resistance struggle.

One of the original contributions of Vergara-Camus’ research is the extensive exploration of the actors’ consciousness and the meaning of struggle for peasants (2014: 85–88). Based on years of carefully documented field research, this facet of the study allows the author to update previous notions of peasant rationality and values surrounding the longstanding debate of the ‘moral economy’ to acquire a new relevance given the dilemmas facing the peasantry today. His findings contribute a new dimension to the explanation of why peasants experiencing the squeeze of neoliberal policies do not see the urban exodus as a desirable option, emphasising the importance of the feelings of isolation, alienation and humiliation suffered by unemployed or marginalised peasants in Brazil and Mexico. This contrasts with the subjective dimensions of the peasant condition: the right to land and means of livelihood in the context of rural peripheries, which largely explain why peasants have repeatedly opted for rural resistance over urban migration.

Based on this analysis, Vargara-Camus concludes that the new peasant movements represent something very different than the age-old resistance of peasantries to industrialisation and modernisation. Rather, they are the revindication of a certain peasant or indigenous way of life, or a worldview that ‘clashes with most alienating forms of urban existence’ (2014: 88). Thus, he emphasises that the decision of peasants to opt for strategies of land-based resistance is more than simply a stubbornness to adapt to modernity and holding on to traditional values, but a decision based on their assessment of the conditions of the neoliberal city (2014: 88). These factors are expressed in different ways for the peasants of the MST than those of the EZLN. Whilst for the MST, it is framed more as a right for control over the products of their labour (2014: 87), for the Zapatistas it is framed as an indigenous form of autonomy. This conclusion carries the further political implication that the ability of peasant movements to take responsibility for their own social development forms a key component of contemporary peasant struggles.

However, despite – or perhaps because of – the painstaking efforts made by the author to construct a meticulous literature review, there is one startling omission that represents a major flaw in this study. Despite the fact that transformations to the peasantry in the neoliberal era form the central object of this investigation (2014: 66–69), the reader is offered little description of the phenomenon of neoliberal globalisation beyond its national- and local- level features. In doing so, it would seem the study has almost entirely overlooked the crucial point for understanding the contemporary relationship between peasantries and capital accumulation: that agrarian relations of peripheral societies are no longer primarily determined at the local level of farms and rural communities, nor even through the nation state, but through giant ‘food empires’ of highly concentrated capital upstream and downstream in the world food system. The author rather breezily rejects the frameworks for understanding the transnational dynamics of the agrarian question provided by other authors (2014: 36-37), yet fails to provide any alternative characterisation beyond the level of the nation-state. How has the global integration of production and trade reconfigured social relations amongst peasant communities, providing new motivations for their protests and placing new restrictions on the outcomes of their struggles? The omission of these questions from this work seems particularly relevant considering that neoliberalism is supposedly one of the key referent points of this study.

The author’s failure to account for the global political and economic power structures that have brought about the changes examined in this study not only makes this a rather ‘light’ version of structural analysis, but also proves problematic for another dimension of this account: that of the peasant alternatives for development. There is no doubt that the author’s proposal for an exploration of alternative development in terms of the changes to the ‘social relations of production and reproduction within peasant communities’ (2014: 17) provides a a more thorough analytical approach than many of the the vaguely defined notions of community-based development and empowerment that commonly dominate this field. Chapter 4 of this volume documents an impressive amount of research into the social relations of production, and the processes of commodification of land within the MST and Zapatista communities. Yet the place of these relations within global relations of power, property and production, and thereby their capacity to offer any real alternative, is subject to little interrogation. This oversight is symptomatic of the blinkers placed on this study by an excessive concern with the micro-level processes of capitalist development and transformations in the peasantry and the subjective dimensions of rural resistance; the forest has been hidden amidst the trees.

With regards to the question of the political strategy of peasant movements, whilst Petras and Veltmeyer and Zibechi occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, Vergara-Camus stands in the middle ground. In a pertinent adaptation of Gramscian analysis, he argues that the marginality of these movements is at once their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. Whilst their location outside of the ‘nuclei of capital accumulation’ has placed them in a good position to maintain decommodified relations of property and production at the local level, they are, however, less well situated to take on the role of ‘a hegemonic class within civil society’ (2014: 299), which is a question of leadership and alliance building. This in turn frames the political strategy advocated by the author: that peasants must engage in a war of position in which political actions aim towards ‘a long-term process understood as a moral and intellectual reform of society in which the working class is transformed from a subordinate class into a leading class, and ultimately a hegemonic class’ (2014: 86) alongside strategies for structural transformation. This nuanced resolution of the question of peasants and social revolution today would perhaps be unsatisfactory for Petras and Veltmeyer’s bolder stance.

Conclusion

The volumes discussed here make significant contributions to our contemporary understanding of Latin American peasant movements. All three have vindicated the ability of political economy and historical materialist analyses to account for the apparent historical anomaly of the persistence of the peasantry in a way that avoids the deterministic or functional presumptions of the previous era. The authors have all attempted to resolve the commonly presumed antinomy between macro-theoretical generalisation and historical specificity by examining this phenomenon in historically and temporally specific conjunctures, but in very different ways. To a large degree, each of these authors explore different facets of the contemporary dynamics of neoliberalism and peasant movements and in this respect the studies may be seen as complementary rather than competing. For Petras and Veltmeyer, it is a question of understanding the particular historical path of imperialism and capital accumulation in Latin America, and identifying the forces of resistance generated at any given conjuncture; for Zibechi, it is one of exploring the dynamics of fragmentation and dispersion, as well as organisation and internal coherence amongst the marginalised classes; and for Vergara-Camus, the micro-level processes of agrarian change and class formation in comparative case studies. Together, their work has demonstrated that the field of peasant studies remains fertile territory for exploring a broad range of questions of the global and local, structure and agency and political strategy amongst Latin America’s new social movements.