Subject: AUT: RE: Re: ORG: Colombia and Ireland
Date: Wed, 27 Oct 1999 18:20:48 +0100


George: But what are the interests of the peasants? There is no real
future for the peasants. To suggest that the class interests of the
peasants is being advanced by FARC is to say that FARC support the
extinction of the peasantry since the Colombian peasantry have no future
and are ultimately --like all peasantry-- doomed to extinction

Not if they see you coming first George :-).

Neither under capitalism nor communism is there any future for the
peasantry. Communal based farming means an end to the peasantry

There is a surprising amount of crap talked about peasants, usually by
folks from the more stalinoid end of othodox marxism, where they are
seen "petty bourgeois reactionaries", to be "liquidated" at the first
opportunity to get cracking on the 5 year plan. This is based on a
profound ignorance of the real social conditions of "the people of the
land" (being the original derivation of paysan/peasant). Firstly there
is a lazy, eurocentric assumption that the term designates agricultural
producers operating under  modern capitalist conditions of
land-ownership. Why this should be the case is never explained. In
actual fact many land-peoples still do not operate under fully
capitalist land-ownership structure long established in (most of)
Western Europe. For instance many Mexican indiginous land-peoples hold
land in the ejidos system (which I'm sure there are plenty of people on
this list who can explain better than me) a form of more or less
state-recognised communal ownership of land (the attempted privatisation
of which, is indicated as one of the root causes of the present conflict
in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico). If George is suggesting that the
Zapatistas should be preaching the virtues of extinction to Chiapaneco
peasants, he should say so louder.

Leaving aside George's dogmatic stupidities, based as they are on the
total rejection of class analysis as evidenced by his use of the totally
reactionary and anti-definitional terms the "masses" and "bourgeoisie"
(e.g. the classic "petty bourgeois masses" appearing recently - is the
petty bourgeois massive or is it the masses who are petty bourgeois - as
some of the more extremist western "Third World First" maoists used to
advocate). We recall that where agricultural land was collectivised in
Spain  '36, no one suggested that the collective members were any less
peasants for all that. The slogan "all land to the peasants that work
it" was initially raised in Russia by the Anarchists, before being
adopted temporarily by the Bolsheviks. As expressed for e.g. in
Maximoff's "Programme of Anarcho-Syndicalism", anarchists have always
advocated that the necessary exchanges between peasantry and the urban
proletariat (food for manufactured goods and services) must be done
voluntarily by mutual agreement on both sides, as opposed to the forced
requisitions by armed force adopted by the Red Army. Of course we would
like to see the divisions between town and country, worker and peasant
broken down, but that does not include the forcible liquidation of
non-proletarian societies be they european-style peasants, tradtional
communal agriculturers, herders or even our few remaining
hunter-gatherer socities. We must also recognise that despite the
advances in modern biology, botany and agricultural science, a
substantial amount (if not most) of the knowledge necessary for
food-production and the other human uses of the biota (e.g. medicines)
still remains with them alone. The history of great agricultural
disasters of this century (e.g. Stalin's USSR, Mao's Great Leap Forward,
the Khmer Rouge's Year Zero, Britain's post war Ghanaian Groundnut plan,
etc.) have proven that top-down authoritarian attempts to take food
production off the peasants and replace them with urban labour-power
combined with industrial machinery and the "appliance of science" will
simply not work.

I would be interested to find out a bit more about the patterns of
land-ownership and usage in Colombia outside the government-controlled
urban areas and how these affect the political and economic situation of
the rural population in the face of competing state and paramilitary
demands.



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