‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

The vanishing exception: republican and reactionary specters of populism in rural Spain

ABSTRACT

In contrast to the dominant European tendency, the 2008 economic crisis and the ensuing austerity in Spain led to the emergence of left populist movements that have kept authoritarian populism at bay. However, those progressive movements have made few inroads in the countryside, potentially ceding this ground to reactionary politics. But if the specter of reaction haunts the countryside, I also suggest that this specter coexists with emancipatory possibilities. To examine these, I discuss a rural protest movement against extractive practices that developed in the early 2000s. This movement, I argue, provides valuable insight into how feelings of abandonment can be given a class-conscious, popular democratic expression.     

The new technology,class formation and class action in the Indian countryside

The central aim of this article is to try and assess, on the basis of the existing evidence, what influence, if any, the technological innovations that have been introduced into Indian agriculture since the mid‐1960s have hadupon class formation and class action in the Indian countryside. An attempt is made, further, to suggest, if only briefly, the significance of this for urban class formation and class action. The nature of the new technology and some of its implications for the labour process in agriculture are identified and it is held that the distinction between biochemical innovations and mechanical innovations, to the extent that those who make it argue that technological innovation can be limited to the former, is a false one. It is stressed that partly because of the intensified time constraint brought about by the application of biochemical innovations the pressure to mechanise is likely to be strong, as mechanisation becomes increasingly profitable. The evidence reveals that the new technology has meant certain class‐in‐ itself changes. It has hastened the social differentiation that was already in motion, although in complex ways that have yet to work themselves out fully. Some of the characteristics of a process of partial proletarianisation are noted and the’ nature of the emerging rural proletariat and of new relations between rural labourers and dominant classes analysed. What these changing structural features have meant with respect to the class consciousness and class‐for‐itself action of the rural proletariat is given attention, and the indeterminate nature of the outcome indicated by the contrast between north‐west India (where class action has been relatively weak) and the Tanjore district of Tamil Nadu (where the organised power and militancy of agricultural labourers have achieved substantial success). The growing emergence of a rich peasantry as a class‐in‐itself and a powerful class‐for‐itself is treated and some of the political implications of this drawn, especially in relation to Indian state power and its class basis.     

Violence,agrarian radicalism and electoral politics: Reflections on the Indian people's front

I am concerned here with the political responses of peasants on the social and economic margin and of agricultural labourers. The argument is that there is in India a vital and dynamic peasant activism happening at many levels of social and economic interest including among the rural poor. I want to understand these phenomena in Indian terms and in local terms, in other words, what is happening in the fields and villages where most Indians live. This raises the fundamental issue of the language or idiom in which agrarian politics, that is the politics of dissent, is expressed and the equally important question of who is listening and what is or is not being done in response. I develop these ideas around the experience of the Indian People's Front in the last decade, specifically in Bihar, while focussing on the arena of electoral politics which the IPF entered seriously in 1989.     

Does a commodity economy enrich the few while ruining the masses? Differentiation among petty commodity producers in guatemala

In this paper I discuss the way in which rural artisans in one municipio of Guatemala organize production and how this organization impedes the differentiation of the artisanal population into owners and workers. I show that categories of owners and workers exist in the municipio, but that these categories do not reproduce themselves as classes; instead, they reproduce each other through the life cycle. In order to explain this phenomenon, I look at internal relations of production, the external environment of large‐scale capital, and the role of migration and the stale in the creation of a permanent Guatemalan proletariat and in the creation of an undifferentiated artisanal economy.     

After servitude: bonded histories and the encumbrances of exchange in indigenizing Bolivia

Since 2006, Bolivia has undertaken a dramatic program of state reform aimed at overcoming the injustices of the nation’s colonial and neoliberal past. In the process, rural practices and sensibilities originating in the former hacienda system have assumed new importance, arising as volatile sites of state intervention and political critique. Like eighteenth-century Bourbon administrators, state reformers today express concern with agrarian patronage, which, they argue, facilitates continued land dispossession and reproduces a particularly servile Quechua-speaking peasantry. Yet, despite reform efforts, hacienda-based ties remain crucial to rural life, structuring acts of redistributive exchange and providing a relational medium by which former landlords attempt to make amends for past violence. By taking seriously the moral and political dimensions of post-hacienda patronage, this contribution challenges dominant frameworks of indigenous justice to foreground the reconciliatory possibilities of exchange relations rooted in a bonded past.     

Consumer food subsidies in India: Proposals for reform

In recent years, an important item on the agenda of economic reformers in India has been to reduce the scale of food subsidies, by means of targeting the system of public distribution of food (PDS). A recent World Bank study makes concrete suggestions for reform of the PDS and these are examined critically in this article. Specifically, 1 argue against narrow targeting and in favour of broad targeting or near‐universal provision of the PDS. I also argue that a strong and effective system of procurement needs to be maintained and this requires the continuation of an organisation such as the Food Corporation of India. The lesson from Kerala is that strong political support is essential for establishing and maintaining an effective system of food security.     

Seed wars and farmers’ rights: comparative perspectives from Brazil and India

Drawing on interviews with Indian and Brazilian farmers’ rights activists, lawyers, agronomists and plant breeders, this article aims at better understanding how farmers’ rights are protected on paper and implemented on the ground in these two countries. Brazil and India offer important case studies because they are biologically megadiverse countries, and because small farmers represent an important segment of the rural economy. In this article, I show that India has adopted an ownership approach to farmers’ rights, while Brazil leans towards a stewardship approach. Based on an examination of the progress made in enforcing these rights, I further argue that the stewardship model adopted by Brazil is more conducive to the realization of farmers’ rights, and I explore why this is the case. Finally, I show how farmers’ rights provisions in the Brazilian and Indian legislations represent fragile gains that could be curtailed by several bills currently under discussion in the field of seed and plant variety protection.     

the <Emphasis Type="Italic">conditions</Emphasis> of politics: low-caste women's political agency in contemporary north Indian society

In this article I analyse the structural and cultural conditions of low-caste women's political agency in urban north India. Whereas in Western feminist political theory, the sexual division of labour is considered to be a key constraint for women's political participation, I show how this has a secondary relevance in the context analysed. I argue that issues concerning the division of labour are intertwined with and subject to those of male consent and support for women's activities. I illustrate how it is often the supposedly ‘oppressive’ household boundaries rather than alternative outer spaces that, under a series of enabling circumstances, initiate women's political activities. Against this backdrop, I show how Indian women activists’ political agency is shaped by men's role, and how agency's relational nature is embedded in women's lifecycles, everyday practices and cultural expectations; in essence, in overall gendered agency. Comparative analyses between Western and non-Western models of political participation and discourse have only just begun. In this respect, I contribute to this nascent field in the following directions: not only do the arguments I present in this article challenge the individualistic Western subject of political action, but they also complicate the idea of the resulting empowerment as a culturally constructed process whose understanding arises from the dialectics between insider and outsider values.     

The Brazilian quilombo: ‘race’, community and land in space and time

More than a century after the abolition of slavery in Brazil, the term ‘quilombo’ continues to evolve new meanings, not all of them associated with its common definition as a runaway slave community. In this article, I discuss the significance of quilombo in its diverse social, political and historical contexts, demonstrating how changes in the uses and meanings of the term reveal broader trans-historical, juridical, political and metaphorical processes. I argue that quilombola communities should not be conceptualized as a racial category, but rather as a system of social organization and a right. Specifically, I show how the term quilombola is currently a way actors identify with Afro-descendants in order to achieve political recognition. I also describe how contemporary practices involving quilombos reveal historical tensions over land conflicts between historically marginalized rural black communities, private interests and governmental authority. I draw on evidence from field research in southern Brazil to illustrate my understanding of how quilombos work.     

Food sovereignty and new peasantries: on re-peasantization and counter-hegemonic contestations in the Basque territory

This paper contributes to debates about the potential of re-peasantization and its contribution to food sovereignty with a case study from the global North, where such questions are relatively under-studied. I examine how Euskal Herriko Nekazarien Elkartasuna (EHNE)-Bizkaia, a Vía Campesina member organization from the Basque Country (Spain), advances food sovereignty through re-peasantization. I also analyze the motivations of new peasants engaged in agroecology, their understandings of food sovereignty, and the challenges that they face. Using a Gramscian political ecology framework, I argue that whereas re-peasantization contributes to a shift from corporatist to counter-hegemonic struggles, the political-economic and biophysical contexts structure agroecological production in ways that limit the extent to which new peasantries can become ‘agents of their own history’. I conclude that closer attention to peasants’ messy practices of making a living is needed to address questions of political agency.     

Governing the Taiwanese countryside: Guanxi,power and agency

Over the past two decades, bottom-up rural development has become the prevailing approach in Taiwan. The rise of community-based projects for Foucauldian thinkers should be understood as new ways of thinking about governing social life, in which political authorities create ‘active’ rural citizens through the deployment of political technologies. Foucault's emphasis on the intimate association between power and knowledge has been taken further by actor-network theory (ANT) authors. However, ANT tells more empirical stories about the dissemination of power and the assemblage of actors. Although ANT has been readily employed in the studies of social sciences, it has been subject to severe criticism; on the one side, the death of man, on the other, the demiurgic. Echoing these comments, this paper argues that the process of translation is far more complicated than ANT authors have proposed. In the Chinese context, social interactions rely heavily on the social interaction model known as guanxi. With reference to an anthropological participant observation I conducted in a Taiwanese rural community, this paper demonstrates that guanxi practice functions as a mechanism for coping with political collective action.     

Geopolitical transformation in rural Mexico: toward new social and territorial boundaries in an indigenous municipality of central Mexico.

After decades of being one of the most loyal and reliable sources of PRI electoral votes, rural Mexico has become the arena of partisan political competition. The increasing political party rivalry in rural areas is not only related to a legal or formal institutional transformation at the national or sub-national level but to the ejido endogenous reconfiguration. Today local interest groups and supporters of opposition political parties are challenging the once hegemonic ejido authority, associated with the PRI regime, which since 1930 has ruled most Mexican rural villages. The ejido as a political institution is yielding many of its political functions to the empowered municipal government. As I will show in this paper, a major transition in rural Mexico is well under way, moving from agrarian toward municipal governance. The new political order challenges the ethnic and territory boundaries associated with the ejido rule forged in rural Mexico during the post-revolutionary era.     

The Agrarian question: the scholarship of David Mitrany revisited

This paper reassesses aspects of the scholarship of David Mitrany, who first in the 1920s and then in the late 1940s approached the ‘agrarian question’ – whether and if so how socialism is possible in a state where there is only a small manufacturing sector and therefore no significant industrial proletariat – from the perspective of countries in Central and Eastern Europe where, between the two World Wars, political parties representing small-scale agricultural producers won large numbers of votes in democratic elections. His 1951 book Marx against the peasant was his response to the failure of those parties to hold on to power, and their crushing by the Communist governments that took control from 1948 on. Mitrany showed that the populist tradition, the ideology of independent small farmers, came from similar roots to Marxism, and that Marx himself late in his life came close to endorsing it. Whether increased agricultural productivity is feasible without large-scale farming was the subject of intense debate among socialists in Europe from the 1850s onwards. It is on the agenda today in many underdeveloped countries where there are strong disagreements about the role of agriculture and rural development in development strategy.     

Educação do Campo [Education for and by the countryside] as a political project in the context of the struggle for land in Brazil

Latin American and Brazilian rural social movements believe that significant social transformation requires the collective construction of a political project of an historical character. Education is conceived as an historical–cultural and political project to transform the peasantry into an historical subject through emancipatory educational–pedagogical praxis. The Landless Workers Movement (MST), the most emblematic peasant movement in Brazil, has played the leading role in this debate, which also includes many other peasant organizations. The MST has identified education as the key element in forging an historical–political actor out of the landless peasantry. This is articulated through the struggle for education for rural peoples, and along a theoretical–epistemic axis that revolves around the emergent concept of Educação do Campo (‘Education for and by the Countryside’). I ask how the MST conceptualizes education, and what the role is of education in strengthening peasant resistance and sharpening the dispute between political projects for the countryside. I focus on the epistemic dimensions of the concepts of education and pedagogy in the trajectory of the MST in Brazil, and I examine Educação do Campo as an educational-political project and in terms of policy conquests in the political dispute between the rival political projects for the Brazilian countryside of peasants and capital.     

Agrarian structures and recent rural movements in Portugal

This paper has been conceived in two distinct parts. In the first, I will analyse the main changes which have occurred within the Portuguese agrarian structures over the past 25 years. I will rely for that purpose on an examination of the otherwise poor data provided by the Population Censuses of 1950,1960 and 1970, and by the Agricultural Surveys of 1952–54 and 1968; I will also mention briefly some changes in the productive structures, along with a constant reference to the massive rural emigration from the late 1950s onwards; finally, in the course of these analyses, I will try to clarify some theoretical points related to the ways in which I see the incorporation of agriculture into capitalism taking place. The picture which will come out of this first part provides the background against which a variety of social movements occurred in the rural areas of Portugal after the overthrow of the dictatorship by the Army in 25 April 1974; the analysis of these movements is the purpose of the second part of the paper, to which I will add a brief conclusion.     

The rural proletariat and the problem of rural proletarian consciousness

‘The rural proletariat’ has been employed as a sociological category to describe Caribbean populations for nearly 25 years, but confusion about such populations persists. Proletarianisation, the definition of rural proletariats, and the Marxist conception of consciousness, as applicable to such groups, are discussed in the following paper. The Cuban case is described to exemplify the European bias of some analysts, and the difficulties created by an uncritical transfer of western conceptions of class and of class consciousness to a colonial agrarian situation. A special effort is made to conceptualise the rural proletariat in terms of its relationships to the peasantry, and of the ‘concealment’ of landless workers in peasant communities.     

Jordanian women in education: politics,pedagogy and gender discourses

The ‘epistemic’ violence that has beset gender discourses in education refutes the claim that progress is measured by figures and numbers of Jordanian women in schools and the workplace. While such discourses demand to be contextualized, deconstructed and resisted, they also necessitate creating a link between political praxis and gender politics. My argument centres on the indispensable role critical discourse can play in locating these instances of ‘epistemic’ violence and revealing the manner in which the themes of constructed gender knowledge have been subjugated to the political praxis of each context. Interventions by donors and NGOs have more often than not been emasculated by the political considerations of governments and establishments. The result has been ‘disciplined’ gender politics in education, perpetuating traditional discursive practices, roles and stereotypes instead of acting as an emancipatory power. Human development reports and traditional literature on gender bias in education have failed to account for such discursive/power practices. In this paper, I shed light on the national, the international and the textual ‘knowledge’ that surrounds gender bias in education in a context like Jordan. I conclude by demonstrating the importance of the national and its discursive practices in reformulating approaches based on the international (human development reports) and the textual (literature on gender bias and stereotypes in education).     

Neo-feudalism in Latin America? Globalisation,agribusiness, and land re-concentration in Chile

This article traces the effects of globalisation on an export-oriented ‘hotspot’ in Chile's non-traditional agricultural export sector. Drawing on evidence from fieldwork carried out in 1994 and in 2004/5, the analysis examines the impact of neoliberal policy over the past two decades. Although the fruit export sector is seen as a key success story of the Chilean economy, and is an area to which small producers are often encouraged to ‘reconvert’, it is argued here that the outcome has been land re-concentration, marginalisation and proletarianisation. Small farmers become increasingly locked into dependent relationships with larger landowners and agribusiness, whilst others form a rural proletariat that serves these concerns. Whilst some commentators have labelled this process ‘semi’ or ‘neo’ feudalism, this article maintains that we are witnessing a deepening fragmentation of the peasantry driven by the continued development of capitalism. The gains of the earlier land reform period are being eroded as rural Chile differentiates and depeasantisation unfolds.     

The role of collective mobilization in the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India (1950–2005)

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the divergent performance of the rural economies of China and India after 1950 was a product of the different capabilities of the Chinese and Indian governments to mobilize the labor force and financial resources of the rural population. By mobilizing unpaid labor and the financial resources of the villagers through mediation by the collectives (before 1984) and local administrations (from 1984 to the abolition of agricultural taxation and compulsory rural labor mobilization in 2006), the Chinese state developed rural infrastructure and the quality of the labor force at a pace and geographical scope that was far beyond its limited fiscal capacity. Efforts by the Indian state to establish rural organizations with similar mobilization capabilities failed due to the effective opposition of well-entrenched political and economic interests in the countryside. Unable to mobilize the labor and financial resources of the villagers, the Indian government relied primarily on its limited fiscal resources, which produced a much slower development of physical infrastructure and labor force quality. These are the primary reasons why China’s rural economy developed much more rapidly than India’s, which contributed significantly to the divergence of their national economies in the post-1950 era.