The New Agrarian Movement

Abstract

One of the most heated debates in Mexico during the 1970s was over its agrarian structure, peasant differentiation, and the character of struggles in the countryside. This issue has been in the forefront of Latin American discussions of the agrarian question. Scholars from other countries have frequently turned to the Mexican case for theoretical inspiration in pursuing analyses of agrarian classes and political processes in their respective homelands. The seeming paradox which ignited the debate is this: In some regions rural workers seem to behave as peasants while in other areas peasants seem to behave as workers.1 According to Leninist theory, workers are supposed to struggle for wages, better working conditions, unionization and, ultimately, for socialism. Authors in this tradition saw the need for a vanguard party to lead the workers in line with their class position in production relations. Others, inspired by Chayanov, thought that rural workers were really peasants by virtue of their general access to land. In Mexico the two positions have been labeled, respectively, proletarista (or descampesinista) and campesinista. Each tends to assign a central revolutionary role to either the agricultural proletariat (proletaristas) or to the peasantry (campesinistas). They stress either wage labor or access to land as the main determinants for the character of struggles -proletarian or peasant.2 My own interpretation of the process of political class formation is that the process of political class formation is mediated by prevailing forms of culture and state intervention in addition to the causal link with class positions in production relations. Morever, it is the agricultural semiproletariat which has been at the center of agrarian struggles rather than the proletariat or the peasantry themselves. It is the semiproletariat