The Long Revolution of the Global South. Samir Amin

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ role of the institutions, as well as mechanisms for managing access to the land and the means of production. I do not rule out complex and mixed solutions, specific to each country. Private property in land could be accepted—at least where it is established and considered legitimate. Its redistribution can—or should—be reconsidered where necessary through agrarian reforms (in sub-Saharan Africa, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya). I do not even necessarily, in all cases, rule out opening controlled spaces for the establishment of agribusiness enterprises. But the main point lies elsewhere, in the modernization of peasant family production and the democratization in the process of managing its integration into the national economy and into globalization.

      I do not have a blueprint to propose here. I am satisfied highlighting some of the large problems that such a reform raises. The democratic question is the main focus of the response to the challenge we are examining. This is a complex and difficult question that cannot be reduced to the insipid rhetoric of good governance and multiparty elections. The question includes an undeniable cultural aspect: democracy pushes for the abolition of “customs” that are hostile to it—prejudices about social hierarchies, and above all the treatment of women. It includes legal and institutional components: the construction of systems of administrative, commercial, and private law that is consistent with the objectives of social construction and the establishment of adequate institutions (preferably elected!). But above all, when all is said and done, the progress of democracy will depend on the social power of its defenders. The organization of peasant movements is, in this sense, absolutely irreplaceable. It is only insofar as the peasantry is able to speak for itself that advances in the direction of what is called “participatory democracy”—as opposed to reducing the problem to the dimensions of “representative democracy”—will open up.

      The question of relations between men and women is a no less essential dimension of the democratic challenge. When we speak of the (peasant) family farm, we are obviously referring to the family, which up to now, and almost everywhere, has been characterized by the structural submission of women and the over-exploitation of their labor power. A democratic transformation will not happen in these conditions without women’s organized movements.

      Attention should also be focused on the question of migrations. “Customary” rights generally exclude “foreigners”—that is, all those who do not belong to the clans, lineages, and families that make up a village community—from rights to the land, or restrict access to it. Migrations caused by colonial and post-colonial development have sometimes taken on dimensions that shake up the idea of the ethnic “homogeneity” of particular regions affected by such migration. The emigrants—whether originally from outside a particular state, like the Burkinabe in Côte d’Ivoire, or, although formally citizens of the same state, of an “ethnic” origin foreign to the regions where they settled, like the Hausa in the Nigerian state of Plateau—see their rights to the land they have cultivated challenged by narrow-minded and chauvinistic political movements, which benefit from external support. To defeat such “communitarianisms” ideologically and politically, and to unequivocally condemn the para-cultural rhetoric underlying them, has become one of the imperative conditions for authentic democratic advances.

      All of the preceding analyses and proposals only concern the status of property and regulations for access to the land. These questions are a major focus in debates on the future of agricultural and food production, peasant societies, and the individuals making up those societies. But they do not deal with all dimensions of the challenge. Access to the land falls short of any potential for social change if the peasant beneficiary is not able to access the necessary means of production under acceptable conditions (credit, seeds, inputs, access to markets). National policies and international negotiations that focus on defining the frameworks in which prices and incomes are determined are another component of the peasant question.

      I will limit myself here to outlining two major conclusions and proposals I have reached:

      We cannot accept treating agricultural and food production and the land as ordinary “commodities” and, consequently, accept the necessity of including them in the globalized liberalization promoted by the dominant powers (the United States and the European Union) and multinational capital. The agenda of the WTO, which is a direct descendent of the GATT since 1995, must purely and simply be rejected. We must seek to convince public opinion in Asia and Africa—beginning with peasant organizations, but also all social and political forces that defend the interests of the working classes and the nation, particularly the requirements of its food sovereignty, and all those who have not given up a development project worthy of the name—that the negotiations conducted within the framework of the WTO agenda will result in catastrophe for the peoples of Asia and Africa. These simply threaten to ruin more than two and a half billion peasants of the two continents, offering them no alternative other than migration into shantytowns and imprisonment in concentration camps, the construction of which has already been anticipated for these potential migrants. We cannot accept the maneuvering of the major imperialist powers (the United States and Europe) that work together within the WTO in their attack on the peoples of the South. We should be aware that these powers, who unilaterally attempt to impose “liberal” provisions on the countries of the South, always make sure to exclude themselves from such provisions by maneuvers that can only be described as systematic cheating.

      Asian and African peasants were organized in the earlier stage of their peoples’ liberation struggles. They found their place in powerful historical blocs that created the right conditions for victory over the imperialism of that era. Sometimes these blocs were revolutionary (China and Vietnam) and thus had their main rural base in the majority classes of middle, poor, and landless peasants. Elsewhere, they were led by the national bourgeoisie, or the strata that aspired to be such and had their rural base in the rich and middle peasant classes, isolating the large landowners and the “traditional” leaders who were in the pay of the colonizers.

      This stage has now passed. The challenge of the new collective imperialism of the triad will only be met if historical blocs are formed in Asia and Africa that are not remakes of the earlier ones. To define the nature of these blocs, as well as their strategies and immediate and longer-term objectives in these new conditions, is the challenge confronting the so-called alternative globalization movement. This challenge is much more serious than what a large number of these movements involved in current struggles could imagine. New peasant organizations exist in Asia and Africa that drive current struggles. Often, when political systems make the formation of formal organizations impossible, social struggles in the country are conducted by “movements” without leaders, or at least obvious ones. These activities and programs, when they exist, need to be analyzed more. What peasant social forces do they represent, whose interests do they defend? Is it the majority of peasants? Or is it minorities who aspire to find their place in the expansion of globalized capitalism? We should avoid quick responses to these complex and difficult questions. We should beware of condemning some organizations and movements because they do not mobilize the peasant majorities around radical programs. This would amount to ignoring the requirements for organizing broad alliances and formulating a strategy of stages. But we should also beware of subscribing to the rhetoric of “naive alter-globalization,” which often sets the tone in forums and encourages the illusion that the world is moving in the right direction solely because social movements exist. This rhetoric, it is true, emanates more from numerous NGOs—of good intentions, perhaps—than from peasant and worker organizations.

       2. Electoral Democracy or Democratization of Societies?

      There is no authentic democracy without social progress. Democracy is both a requirement in itself and a means for the working classes to assert their rights and demands.

      Democracy in the general sense involves recognition of the legitimacy of different views of the relations between the individual and society, and the concomitant legitimacy of diverse interests and the institutions necessary to promote their implementation. As such, it is an imperative condition for human emancipation. We cannot imagine such emancipation without a concomitant emancipation СКАЧАТЬ