LITMIR.BIZ

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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 of the mind. Democracy provides maximum opportunities for creativity in all areas. But democracy, in the more specific sense of a set of institutions that define and control its practices, is also a means either to facilitate or hinder the advancement of the people’s (the working/popular classes) interests. In this latter sense, we should then carefully distinguish the means of popular democracy from those of democracy reserved to the privileged. To describe democracy as “popular” could be taken for a pleonasm since demos means “people” in Greek. But the pleonasm is necessary because the democracy that the dominant ideology offers to us was designed and constructed to serve the privileged and not to promote the power of the popular classes.

      An authentic democracy is inseparable from social progress. That means it must combine the requirements for liberty with the no less important requirements for equality. These two values are not necessarily spontaneously complementary, but often in conflict. When liberty is combined with property, which is placed on equal footing and sanctified by the economic system, it reduces the space for realizing demands for equality. The property in question is that of a minority; in our era, it belongs to large financial oligopolies. In these conditions, the combination of liberty and property establishes the real power of a plutocracy, reducing democracy to ritual practices without any real significance. However, equality (or at least a certain amount of less inequality) can be—and often was in contemporary history—guaranteed by the government without great tolerance for the exercise of citizen freedoms. Combining liberty and equality is the essence of the challenge that confronts us today.

      The institutional democracy that the dominant ideology offers us is an obstacle to authentic democratic progress. Advances in democracy have always been produced by popular struggles, and such advances have always been more prominent in revolutionary periods.

      Democracy as we know it was not—and still is not—designed to encourage the expression of grassroot demands, but rather sets up obstacles that are difficult to overcome. Dominant recent tendencies in the institutionalized practice of electoral and representative democracy openly pursue the objective of reducing what their promoters call “the excess of democracy”! The dominant ideology links democracy with “freedom of markets” (that is, capitalism) and claims that they are inseparable: there can be no democracy without markets, thus no democratic socialism is conceivable. This is a tautological and ideological—in the vulgar and negative sense of the term—expression. The history of really existing capitalism as a globalized system demonstrates that this same truncated democracy has always been only the exception and not the rule.

      In the centers of capitalism, the progress of representative democracy has always been the result of popular struggles, held off for as long as possible by the power holders (property owners). It is an incontestable fact that such struggles have resulted in the expansion of suffrage (universal suffrage is recent), the strengthening of legislative power against the privileges of kings, aristocracies, and

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