agrarian social moviments and forms of consciousness

Society for Latin American Studies

Agrarian Social Movements and Forms of ConsciousnessAuthor(s): John GledhillSource: Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 7, No. 2 (1988), pp. 257-276Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of Society for Latin American StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3338292 .Accessed: 07/04/2011 10:00

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Society for Latin American Studies

Agrarian Social Movements and Forms of

Consciousness

JOHN GLEDHILL

Department of Anthropology, University College, London

Interest in 'social movements' which are not simple expressions of class

opposition is nothing new in Latin America. For decades, anthropologists and historians have dedicated themselves to the study of rural 'millenarian' movements and to urban phenomena ranging from syncretic religious move? ments to barrio organisations focused on specific demands for urban services. There have always, of course, been those who have argued that

everything should ultimately be understood in terms of class, and that move? ments which emphasise other identities and realities reflect problems of 'false

consciousness', which are a legacy of the colonial era and the uneven nature of capitalist development. Today, however, 'social movements' are in vogue everywhere and it is generally argued that their Latin American manifesta?

tions, like their North American and European manifestations, are some?

thing 'new' (Slater (ed.), 1985). In this paper I combine discussion of contemporary developments with a

retrospective historical view in order to offer a critical examination of some of the theoretical and political tendencies which are emerging from the 'New Social Movements' literature. It is important to begin by recognising that part of the impetus towards what is rapidly becoming a 'social movements

industry' in academia has come from intellectual tendencies within advanced

capitalist societies, despite the fact that one of the leading exponents of the

self-styled 'post-Marxist' view of social movements in Europe, Ernesto

Laclau, happens to be of Latin American origin.

OLD WORLD PERSPECTIVES ON THE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?

The European 'New Left' of the late 1960s has been succeeded by a newer

Left, whose central orientation is what Ellen Meiksins Wood (1986) defines as 'the retreat from class'. Class is displaced from analytical centrality in social analysis and the platform of radical politics in the late capitalist epoch is redefined: 'radical democratisation' supercedes socialisation of the means of production. These theoretical and normative shifts are premised on rejec? tion of the classical Marxian claim that what is fundamental to the capitalist mode of production in world-historical terms, is its constitution of the

'proletariat' as the 'universal class', the first social revolutionary force in

history capable of abolishing class society as such. 1980s theorists are hardly the first to have become disillusioned about the

revolutionary potential of the 'core' working class. Faith in the inevitability of

258 BULLETIN OF LATIN AMERICAN RESEARCH

a mechanical collapse of capitalism under the weight of its own socio- economic contradictions was already a minority view among the Left in Lenin's day. But the real break with traditional Marxist assumptions took

place in the 1960s, which brought to prominence both the work of the Frank- furt School, in particular Marcuse, and various 'Third Worldist' positions which posed the breaking of the imperialist chains of the capitalist world

system as a necessary precondition for renewing the possibility of socialist revolution in the metropolitan countries. Many based their case on a theory of global capitalism which asserted that sustaining capitalist accumulation and relatively high living standards in the 'core' was contingent on the

exploitation of the periphery. Arguments for and against this position are now well rehearsed, but what is strikingly different about the 'new revision- ists' of the 1980s is their general lack of interest in questions relating to the

political economy of capitalism (Gamble, 1987, pp. 114-115). Some versions of the argument against a class based radical politics rest on

the assertion that capitalism has demonstrated its ability to provide a relative material prosperity for a majority of the working class (Kitching, 1983). Others, including Laclau (1987), take the view that socialist parties and trade unionism are in decline in the advanced capitalist countries because the

'working class' is shrinking in line with the proportional decline of manu?

facturing as a source of employment. This is not a million miles away from the

'post-industrial society' model of Daniel Bell (1973), and there are striking echoes of the 1950s and 1960s 'plural societies' paradigm in 'post-Marxist' analyses (Navarro, 1988, p. 431). There is no compelling reason to think that Social Democracy and trade unionism were leading European societies in the direction of a socialist society in the Marxist sense (Przeworski, 1985; Przeworski and Sprague, 1986). But there are pitfalls in swallowing the notion of 'post-industrial society' without troubling oneself with the issues which lay at the heart of Marxian theory: the dependence of capitalism on the

production of surplus value and an objective concept of 'exploitation' in which increasing rates of exploitation are perfectly consistent with rising material consumption standards and, for that matter, participation in the

ownership of capital. Marx sought to demonstrate that the whole of capitalist society, including the bourgeoisie, become 'prisoners of necessity': the

imperatives of accumulation are naturalised through alienation and placed beyond normal consciousness. Abandoning this perspective may, interalia, close off certain obvious ways of criticising existing socialisms. It can also be debated whether notions of class identity and class models of society are of

declining significance among modern European and American workers

(Navarro, op. cit., p. 435). The abandonment of class models by the theorists of the New Social

Movements is, however, premised on a significant theoretical claim: that there is no theoretically acceptable way of moving from an 'objective' specification of the place of social agents with respect to capitalist relations of

production and processes of accumulation, on the one hand, to their

ideological orientations and political behaviour, on the other. Even if it can be demonstrated through such 'objective' analysis that it is in the material interests of particular social agents to overthrow capitalism, the political

AGRARIAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS 259

consciousness of real people is, and always has been, shaped by identities and interests other than those of class. To a considerable extent this position was

already anticipated in the work of theorists who continued to see themselves as Marxists, in particular Nicos Poulantzas (Poulantzas, 1975; Cutler et al., 1977, pp. 189-206).

Classical writers like Rosa Luxemburg would scarcely need 1980s theorists to tell them that fragmentation of the 'working class' constituted a

problem. She was also well aware of the limitations of trade union organisa? tions and the problem of the cooptation of social democratic political move? ments under capitalism. Luxemburg placed her faith in praxis: in particular, she argued that the 'mass strike' produced a mutual reinforcement of the workers' economic and political struggles, through the 'mental sediment' which outlasted particular episodes of action, producing the 'intellectual, cultural growth of the proletariat' (Luxemburg, 1986, p. 38). As far as the

post-Marxists ofthe 1980s are concerned this kind of process is historically exceptional. It is no defence on the part of Marxists to argue that Marxism has

always recognised the need for specific historical investigations of concrete

reality, and the complexity of the factors which determine the growth of

revolutionary consciousness, not to mention the need for political leadership in shaping that consciousness. The argument is that Marxism is theoretically incoherent and has provided no acceptable theory of the links between

objective economic class position, ideology and political consciousness because no such theory is possible.

To Latin Americans, some of the considerations advanced in the Euro?

pean 'retreat from class' may seem irrelevant to the region's social realities,

particularly in an era of crisis. If, as Connolly (1985) argues, the root of the

problems and essential unity of the 'formal' and 'informal' sectors lies in the fact that peripheral capitalism is a low wage capitalism, then a 'material interest' argument for socialism cannot be dismissed too readily. On the other hand, as her own analysis demonstrates, individuals often shift from

wage-labour to forms of 'self-employment' in the course of the family development cycle, whilst different working members of the household will be involved in different forms of work at any one moment of time: this could

suggest that the fragmentation of class identity is even more of a problem in Latin America, particularly for those who try to link the formation of class consciousness to the socialising effects of the capitalist labour process. If we turn to the countryside, anticipation of problems raised by discussion of the New Social Movements are readily apparent. Following the lead of Roger Bartra, De Janvry has argued in classical Leninist fashion that a substantial

proportion of a rural population being progressively squeezed by 'functional dualism' could ultimately be deflected from 'backward-looking' attempts to recover peasant status, towards alliance with the urban proletariat and an

'objectively correct' proletarian position (De Janvry, 1981, pp. 267-268). But there have long been expressions of dissent from this judgement on

campesino demands for land. Within the modern literature on Mexico, some have emerged from 'circulationist' Marxist perspectives, others from a neo-

Chayanovian position (Hewitt, 1984, pp. 154-160). Neo-Chayanovians reject the idea that peasants and urban proletarians are moving towards a


common objective as the 'gravediggers of capitalism': for Arturo Warman, what is crucial is the anti-modernism of the campesino struggle, and the

prospect it offers humanity for an alternative to a bureaucratic, urban-biased, industrial socialism (Warman, 1972, p. 129).

Another sort of anticipation of part of the New Social Movements

perspective lies in arguments against the imposition of Eurocentric models on Latin American social reality: these would include some theorists who have attempted to fuse the traditions of Marxism with indigenismo, in

particular Mariategui. Many would, of course, argue that the new 'post- Marxism' is really just good old fashioned non-Marxism, dignified with this

peculiar, if fashionable, style of appellation in an attempt to lend legitimacy to what is essentially a capitulation to liberal politics (Wood, op. cit:, Geras,

1987). However, even if this is true, it scarcely invalidates the theoretical

arguments advanced apriori.

THE SUBSTANCE OF THE NEW SOCIAL MOVEMENTS PARADIGM

The 'post-Marxist' critique of class-based models is particularly trenchantly expressed in Ernesto Laclau's writing (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985; Laclau,

1985). Like all polemics, Laclau's discussion of 'classical' views sometimes crosses the boundary between heroic simplification and caricature. But the issues it identifies with are, I believe, real ones.

The critique has three elements. Firstly, in both orthodox Marxism and, one should stress, a great deal of non-Marxist social theory, the identity ofthe

agents participating in social conflicts is defined in terms of an 'empirical- referential' group unity. That is, particular struggles are labelled in terms of social structural categories?'peasant', 'bourgeois', 'proletarian' in the case of Marxist theories (Laclau, 1985, p. 27). Secondly, the existence and outcome of conflict is explained in terms of an underlying historical-teleological scheme: such as 'the transition from feudalism to capitalism'. This explana? tory practice objectifies the 'meanings' of struggles: explaining them does not

depend in any way on the content of the actors' consciousness?what the

meaning of their situations and actions is for them, or their subjective aims and aspirations?what they think they are doing and hope to achieve by doing it. It also, Laclau argues, constitutes a form of 'essentialist reductionism' based on a Eurocentric universalism (Laclau, op. cit., p. 30). Thirdly, this

general perspective produces a model of politics as the 'representation of interests'. In the last instance, the meaning of all political struggle is again given in social structural categories and this is how politics is ultimately explained.1 Whilst it might be hard to find many Latin American Marxists who would really debate an issue like: 'Was the revolution of such a year the democratic bourgeois revolution?' {ibid), sophisticated Marxist analyses like Enrique Semo's model of the 'long-cycle' of bourgeois revolution in Mexico clearly do rest on the explanatory procedures Laclau identifies

(Semo,1978).2 Laclau's alternative perspective firmly rejects such 'totalising' views of the

social. He argues that subjectivity is based on autonomous identifies:

'proletarian' identity is generally as multiple as that of any other stratum,


identity as a worker enjoying no dominance over other forms of identity as

consumer, resident ofa particular locality, affiliate of formal political parties, etc. Identities are not givens but discursive constructions: hegemony is not an external relation between homogenous, unified and preconstituted social

agents (Laclau and Mouffe, op. cit., p. 58), but a process by which social

agents are constructed through discourses (on ethnicity, gender, politics, etc), a process in which 'there is no a priori, necessary relationship between the [different] discourses' (Laclau, op. cit., p. 31). The influence of Foucault's view of power is apparent (Foucault, 1979; Alonso, in press): in place of

unifying totalities of power (classes and the state) and despite the conscious

attempts of dominant groups to impose 'discursive regimes' on society, only 'precarious and contingent links' are established between different dis? courses through 'articulatory practices' which head in the direction of 'fixity' and totalisation' only to be subverted again.

It should be said that whilst this line of analysis may 'enable gender and

ethnicity [to] recover their specificity as dimensions of discursively and

politically organised subjugation' (Alonso, op. cit.), emphasis on 'discourses' and contingency may have its limitations if we persist in seeking to explain the historical appearance of particular hegemonic practices or the salience of

particular 'subject positions' in particular historical and social contexts. It is

interesting, for example, to compare Laclau's general statements with

Molyneux's discussion of the distinctions which might be made between

'gender interests' and 'women's interests' in relation to class factors, in her contribution to David Slater's volume (Molyneux, 1985). Yet even for Laclau all is not discourse, since he concedes that there are limits' to the flow of discursive practices in the world and is prepared to revive a form of

objectifying historical determination in diagnosing the New Social Move? ments' newness (Geras, op. cit., pp. 73-74). As far as Laclau is concerned, the development of late capitalist societies, with their increasing social

complexity, bureaucratisation and 'commodification', has led towards a

proliferation of social antagonisms but away from their expression as crises of a 'total' model of society (Laclau, 1985, p. 38). Given a lack of unitary and

totalising identities, Laclau argues, the particular demands relating to specific areas of social relations lead to a direct politicisation of the space occupied by the struggles concerned, rather than their 'representation' at a higher and distinct level of 'political' activity. The 'old' working classes were constituted

precisely as social categories to be represented by politicians, and thus, through the state. What the students of the 'New Social Movements' are

looking for is a 'decentred' world in which 'the political imaginary' ceases to be based on a 'totalising' vision of society and therefore has a more radically democratising potential (Laclau, 1985, pp. 38-39).

There is an interesting thrust towards a new kind of universalism in the literature on 'the New Social Movements', even as it challenges Eurocentrism and unilinear, teleological visions of the movement of world historical time. In their 'decentredness', Western Feminism, the Green Movement and so forth are seen as cognate, in a very general sense, with the struggles of the barrios and other 'popular' movements in Third World contexts, differences in class composition notwithstanding. It is not, indeed, constitutive of their


unity that the New Social Movements should have a 'progressive' political content. What constitutes 'progress' can perhaps only be the subject of

political argument in the world of discourses. But Laclau permits himself the

luxury of arguing for an objective 'potential' for advance towards 'freer, more democratic and egalitarian' societies subject to the forms of articulation... set up among the different democratic demands' (Laclau, 1985, p. 33). (An example of the 'unprogressive' articulation of discourses would be Le Pen's

appeal to some Communist voters in contemporary France.) All that seems to remain from this task of deconstruction is the notion that the New Social Movements constitute a unity in so far as they are for a more open and democratic society and are more democratic in their own organisation.

There seem to be some contradictions here: one cause of protest is that the state is doing nothing to provide parts of society with needed services, or, in

the western context, is retreating from its social responsibility to civilise

capitalism. This is one way in which the problems with which social move? ments are grappling in different parts of the world may be quite different and

there are obviously many others, as none of the theorists of the New Social Movements would perhaps really contest. What, however, emerges from the

attempt to identify the 'newness' of the New Social Movements in general is

the claim that they manifest disillusionment with, and relative independence of, political parties and the political process in the traditional sense.

To much of the Left this sort of thing is not hugely congenial. It implies rejection of the Leninist theory of the role of the party and the theory of proletarian revolution itself. It does not really look as if the New Social

Movements are going to make a social revolution. But it is the classical

conception of social revolution which is brought into question by the New

Social Movements, in so far as they are anti-statist and orientated towards the recuperation of human dignity and identity by the assertion of socio-

cultural roads to freedom against the 'massifying' thrust of contemporary society (Evers, 1985). These are not issues anyone can afford to ignore. If peasant movements lack a 'national vision', is this necessarily a bad

thing? Can we retain conventional dichotomies between 'millenarian' and

'political' movements without grounds for defining politically 'correct' forms of consciousness in terms of 'objective' class position? Should we not

accept that the creation of 'mass society'?however 'progressively' con-

ceived in terms of material social justice?is an essentially problematic undertaking?

The New Social Movements perspective therefore contains both a theoret? ical argument about how we should understand social movements?which

may be relevant to understanding 'old' as well as 'new' movements?and a

prescriptive message about the goals of 'progressive' politics. It is time to test these understandings against some empirical material.3

CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL MOVEMENTS IN MICHOACAN

Historically the Mexican state of Michoacan presents the paradox of having nurtured some of the most 'radical' and 'conservative' tendencies in Mexican

history. Its sons include the leaders of the Insurgency, Fathers Hidalgo and


Morelos, the most Jacobin of 19th century liberals, Melchor Ocampo, and 20th century radicals like Francisco Miigica and Lazaro Cardenas. Its

university, a colonial foundation, has served as a centre for the diffusion of

socially critical ideas throughout its long history. At the same time, parts of Michoacan are celebrated as the bastions of the most fanatical and conserva? tive Catholicism. The state produced 12,000 armed volunteers for the rebellion of the Cristeros against the post-revolutionary state in the period 1926-1929 (Meyer, 1976, p. 85). The Cristiada smouldered on in Michoa? can for some time after it had been extinguished elsewhere and many Cristero sympathisers, plus new recruits, aligned themselves with the cause of sinarquism in the 1940s.

Today the state of Michoacan remains a relatively poor, predominantly agricultural region, much of whose population have, as they put it, 'the custom of migrating to the United States'. It has experienced significant agri? business penetration and it does have one very significant urban industrial

development: the steel works and deep water harbour of Ciudad Lazaro Cardenas. Created by the national state and foreign capital as a regional 'growth pole', Lazaro Cardenas has given little economic stimulus to the

larger region in practice, although it has acted as a magnet for migration from

many parts of the country, urban and as well as rural, and a vast 'informal'

economy has emerged alongside the planned development. Lazaro Cardenas has certainly served as an enclave of 'proletarian' politics, in the form of trade union militancy of an anti-corporatist kind (Bizberg and Barraza, 1980;

Zapata and Bizberg, 1984). Strikes in the steel works were associated with a

deteriorating economic situation within the enterprise (and the presence of

young but qualified workers recruited from older urban centres). Economic demands fused with 'political' orientations and the strikers received material

support from the colonias populares, mobilised around their own demands for urban services (Nava, 1987, pp. 49-52).

Such situations raise two fundamental questions from the perspective offered by theorists of the New Social Movements.4 Firstly, to what extent is the kind of solidarity and development of 'consciousness' displayed in such contexts of practical struggle by different 'social sectors' (which are not

necessarily constituted by totally discrete sets of people) likely to lead to the

growth and diffusion of an over-riding 'proletarian' form of consciousness and social political orientation of a classical kind? Secondly, to what extent can such coalitions evade the processes of cooptation and incorporation in the long term, processes which are themselves divisive? At one level, the nature of the modern Mexican state places a premium on pursuit of objec? tives through 'independent' organisations and tends to promote the demands for 'democratisation'. However, at another level, it favours the pursuit of concrete objectives through the channels of patronage within the structure of the regime and turns 'autonomy' into a tactic of action, in so far as material demands are to be satisfied through the action ofthe state itself. To the extent that 'class politics' pursued through trade unionism is a demand for the state to civilise capitalism (via the effective political representation ofthe 'working

class'), its logic leads no further than social democracy (Gamble, op. cit., pp 121-122). It may also lead, depending on circumstances, to populism, or


simply to defeat. Revolutionary change from within capitalism seems to demand a fundamental challenge to models of 'development' and to the

problems of state power and political representation themselves. In the course of peripheral capitalist development, the countryside has

been a source of challenges of this type. There are two contemporary rural

developments in Michoacan which fit in particularly nicely with the New Social Movements theme. One is religious, a community founded by the Parish Priest 'Papa Nabor' in the early 1970s, and called 'The New Jeru- salem': it is dedicated to the cult of a living Virgin (Nava, op. cit., pp. 33-34). Numerous scandals surround this organisation, which does not welcome

ethnographic investigations. But it remains a fact that the community has become a major pilgrimage centre for thousands of people from the south of Michoacan and from other states. Millenarian dreams are therefore alive and well. The second development responds to the other side of Michoacan

schizophrenic political history and is an organisation called the Union de Comuneros-Emiliano Zapata (UCEZ). Dedicated to the pursuit of land

reform, the UCEZ is centred around the 'Indigenous Agrarian Communities' of the Meseta Tarasca zone of Michoacan. It has, however, also attracted and welcomed landless mestizos, and its activities have led to the recreation of

'Indigenous Communities' in places where an Indian population long appeared extinct. It has sought to create wide alliances with other forms of

popular struggle, including the militant Section 271 ofthe Sindicato Minero-

Metalurgico in Lazaro Cardenas (Nava, op. cit., p. 52). The UCEZ is

extremely serious in its project of trying to recreate Indigenous Communities in both their communal and their indigenous aspects: its ideology is 'communalist' and it is insistent on the undesirability of a uniform national culture. But what makes it possible for the UCEZ to actually secure land for its adherents is, of course, that it exists in the Mexico of the Institutional Revolution: the legal framework for agrarian reform is still enshrined in national legislation, even if the Mexican state has become extremely adept at

frustrating its exploitation. It is also clear that the UCEZ enjoyed the political patronage of the former state governor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, son of Lazaro Cardenas, who promoted it to serve his own demagogic ends and

political ambitions. Nevertheless, it does remain an organisation which has

yet to be coopted by the national state, and its programme is explicitly anti-

capitalist: it sees the long-term objective ofthe struggle as being the recapture of land and forest resources from the regional bourgeoisie in the interests of

undermining capitalist relations in general. The UCEZ programme is 'new' in the sense that it has been developed as a

specific reaction to the social problems of late capitalism, in the light of the manifest failure of previous agrarian reform to deliver solutions to the

problems of poverty and social justice. Its indigenista orientation is not

exclusionary and it is not a romantic or 'backward-looking' movement:

everyone concerned is aware that they are trying to recreate their lives on the basis of reconstructed social relationships and a reconstructed culture by obtaining possession of economic resources, something the UCEZ has in common with less 'politicised' livelihood orientated popular social move? ments (Redclift, 1987, pp. 166-170). Also, the leadership have no illusions


about the difficulties inherent in making these communities work. This is, of

course, the problem. It is one thing to unite people around the struggle for land, but more

difficult to create enclaves of social justice as 'red bases' for conquering the

larger social and political system. The political economy of Michoacan is a

complex unity, in which the poor are not exactly 'marginalised' in a structural

sense, since they are incorporated into labour markets and labour processes which are all integrated into the larger capitalist system. A good deal of rural

capitalist development has been based on neo-latifundism, the capture ofthe best lands in the land reform sector by entrepreneurs from outside the

agrarian communities. Both landless rural households and the households of land reform beneficiaries are inserted into complex networks of rural-urban and international migration in which economic survival is premised on diversification. As the current crisis is revealing, the regional economy is

heavily dependent on a myriad forms of 'informal' economic enterprise? ranging from currency speculation and the cocaine trade, through to out-

working for metropolitan urban enterprises and various kinds of artisan

production which served specialised markets, including some in the United States (Ramirez, 1986a; Zepeda, 1987). What must be stressed is that all these circuits of both capital and labour reproduction are heavily interdigi- tated and interdependent: this has resulted in the extreme social disarticulation of peasant communities. There is also the problem of the role of state

patronage as a 'disarticulator': one might think that in the present crisis, with the drastic reduction in state expenditure, such relations would collapse and that their collapse would in turn provoke an anti-statist reaction of frustrated

expectations, but this may only be partly true. The tentacles of the state and its agencies of popular representation now run very deep into every aspect of Mexican life. Since state agencies function in 'informal' ways as well as

according to their official norms, they add further levels of complexity to the

processes of social disarticulation. It is hard to see how one could recreate communities which could function autonomously.

However, this may not be the real strategy of the UCEZ. It has not been a

completely autonomous organisation politically. It has used the legal apparatus of land reform to secure its immediate ends?rather than relying on spontaneous land seizures alone?although these have occurred, particu? larly where it was possible to challenge the legal title ofthe holder ofthe land.

Interestingly enough, 'indigenous' social movements in contemporary Mexico generally seem to favour alliances with other social sectors, thereby maximising gains and reducing repression in comparison with those which have remained more isolated (Canabal, 1987). It might be better to describe the UCEZ as a regional movement striving to create itself a regional political base in order to obtain leverage on the national state. Its strategy is one of mobilisation in order to raise consciousness and promote radical mass

politicisation.


A GAME OF WINNERS WHO LOSE AND LOSERS WHO REMAIN UNDEFE ATED

The UCEZ is heir to a long tradition of building regional agrarian move? ments in Michoacan and I now turn to the lessons which might be drawn from the longer term history of agrarian social movements in the region. My purpose here is to bring out two central points. Firstly, I want to stress the sea

change brought about by the final formation of an effective national state

machinery in the 1930s: under the administration of Lazaro Cardenas, a

process of'mass incorporation' was finally consummated which changed the conditions for all future social conflict. The intractable problem faced by modern social movements is that the state itself becomes the primary locus of class conflict, making it extremely difficult to avoid the politics of incorpora? tion and cooptation. Both political and social change have terminated the era of 'classical' agrarian revolution and history suggests that intransigent agrarian movements, which avoid entanglements with other classes and

political forces, are doomed to defeat. Secondly, the history of Michoacan demonstrates the continuity, through different historical periods, of forces of

opposition to the state, centred, in this case, on religion. Michoacan has the reputation of having been relatively 'quiet' during the

Armed Revolution of 1910-1920. This is a rather misleading evaluation. It is true that, like most of the centre-north, there was less spontaneous agrarian unrest in this period than in some other regions: Michoacan was a place where other regions' armies fought their battles. The results were brutal and

devastating and this forms part of the historical matrix of subsequent events. Michoacan had not, however, been at all peaceful in the 19th century: it was the scene of violent conflict during the Insurgency, struggles which wiped out whole communities and involved the massacre of those representatives ofthe local landlord and merchant class who lacked the prudence to flee. Violence

erupted again during the Civil Wars provoked by the Liberal Reform later in the century.

Eruptions of extensive social conflict coincided with three phenomena, one

conjunctural, the other two structural. The conjunctural factor was a perceived weakening of the state and ruling class' capacity to apply coercive violence. The structural factors were, first, the processes of agricultural commercial- isation and second, resistance to the state itself. Different parts of Michoacan were affected by these processes at different times and in somewhat different

ways, but one can map a good deal of agrarian conflict onto zones where these

pressures were making themselves felt in different periods: quiet zones in a

particular period are generally those where the problem was resolved in an earlier round by the extinction/destruction ofthe communities concerned or their encapsulation into the new forms of agrarian class relationships. The

agrarian problem in Michoacan was not invariably about the expansion of

large landed estates at the expense of village communities: in some areas, there were no large estates and it was a matter of control of village land passing piecemeal to outsiders and the majority of the community becoming landless

(Garcia Mora, 1981, pp. 67-70; Ramirez, 1986b,pp. 126-127). The second structural factor?resistance to the encroachments of the state itself?was


either fiscal or administrative. Nineteenth century Michoacan produced a

good many rural social movements which were not agrarian in nature, and mobilised local populations across class lines, i.e. serrano movements in Alan

Knight's sense (Knight, 1980, p. 27,1986). These rural social movements were very heterogeneous. What lends them

unity is not a common set of demands, problems or forms of consciousness, but the conjunctural moment (Hamnett, 1986, p. 202), which produced the simultaneous eruption of disparate forms of protest, and the optical illusion of an extensive and unitary mass uprising. In the light of the contemporary significance of the UCEZ, I will pull one particular element out of this

complex and variegated pattern: the Indian community. There is no doubt from the historical evidence that Indian communities

possessed quite distinctive forms of consciousness. Mexico's 'Indians'

possessed their own forms of 'ethnicity' and preserved notions of their individual pre-hispanic identities deep into the colonial era (Lockhart, 1982). They also reworked their notion of identity and power in the light of a fusion of indigenous and Hispanic cosmologies. They became 'good Chris? tians', but they were Christians in their own terms and in their own way, a way that constitutes an endless reflection on the principles of power and the

meaning of their situation. There were countervailing tendencies in the evolution of relations of domination: on the one hand, pragmatic considera? tions forced the Indians to defend themselves through the courts and they were thereby forced to accept and interiorise some of the principles of

Hispanic domination, even as they contested it. On the other hand, they sought their own autonomous sources of power, by invoking the magic of ancient powers and identities against the current dispensation. What lay at the heart of all this was the community itself as the basis for identity within an ethno-stratified society.

Forces of dissolution did, however, develop within the community itself. In the later 19th century, triumphant Liberal regimes set about the process of

disentailing community land, with a view to creating a 'modern' society on the American model, a society which would be culturally homogeneous and have no room for estamental social categories or the hierarchic principle. Indian communities in Michoacan resisted disentailment as violently as one can

when, armed only with a pitchfork, one confronts an army equipped with firearms. In the 1870s, there were a number of attempts to form 'Agrarian Communities' uniting the populations of different villages on the basis of

recapturing control of community land from encroaching haciendas (San? chez, 1981, p. 34). However, it is clear that resistance was compromised by the existence of internal class divisions within the villages (Garcia Mora, op. cit., pp. 48-49). A minority of the Indian population welcomed disentail? ment and community leaders who took charge of the formal procedures of

disentailment, tended to abuse them and become caciques (Sanchez, op. cit:, Knight, 1986, p. 113). As the state grew stronger under the Porfiriato, armed resistance gave way to attempts to pursue the defence of the communities

through the courts again. But these were now futile, since there was no

possibility, under the new legislative order, of the community as such being recognised as a legal person.


There were further outbreaks of violence and direct action, but the main

thrust of the community agrarian movement in the early phases of the revolu?

tion was to pursue the struggle through petitioning the central state. Many of

the leaders in this phase were representatives of the old Indian village elite, often highly educated people, whose social position was being eroded by the

political ascent of mestizo tradesmen and the creatures of Porfirian 'political chiefs' and landlords. Even such peaceful, constitutional action was in no

sense a 'soft option', as evidenced by the catalogue of assassination of

agrarian leaders in this period. In the 1920s and 1930s, a new type of regional agrarian movement

emerged under the patronage of radical state governors?first Francisco

Mugica and then Lazaro Cardenas. The agrarian programme of these new

organisations went beyond restoring land to 'indigenous' communities,

favouring the redistribution of land to mestizo peons on haciendas and

thereby implying the break-up of the system of great estates. The new

organisations also adopted the rhetoric ofthe international labour movement

and preoccupied themselves with larger social issues?the position of

women, and in particular, the promotion of 'rationalist' or 'socialist' educa?

tion. The first such movement, the Liga de Comunidades y Sindicatos

Agraristas de Michoacan, led by the Naranjeiio Primo Tapia (Friedrich,

1977), was already in some disarray, linked to internal divisions before Tapia was assassinated. The divisions were partly related to Tapia's use of his

position to settle local scores, but both they and his assassination were also

related to his attempt to forge alliances with other regional movements

outside the framework of the 'official' system: Tapia was killed on the orders

of President Calles, not local landlord interests (Hernandez, 1982, p. 21; Garcia Mora, op. cit., pp. 66-67). Still more significant is the history of the

organisation Lazaro Cardenas patronised during his term as state governor from 1928 to 1932, the Confederacion Revolucionaria Michoacana del

Trabajo (CRMDT). The CRMDT attempted to organise workers as well as peasants, but since

Michoacan scarcely had an urban proletariat, workers were to be found

primarily in the mines and on agricultural estates. Its leadership was

dominated by urban intellectuals, middle class professionals, tradesmen, artisans and a few small landowners. The local Communists initially spurned

it, but subsequently cooperated. Peasants were distinctly under-represented in the leadership (Hernandez, op. cit., p. 36). The CRMDT faced a situation

in which the social power of the landlord class and the Church was still

largely intact. The actual reform process was conducted through legal channels, in accordance with the constitution as it then stood. But the only

way to pursue this strategy was by capturing local and federal political offices

from agents of the local elite. The CRMDT therefore functioned primarily as

an instrument for consolidating political power, by any means, including violence. One of the necessary costs of achieving success was that Cardenas

promoted ruthlessly self-serving village bosses: a paradigmatic case was

Ernesto Prado of the Canada de los Once Pueblos, whose agrarismo was

merely a pretext for achieving the material benefits of the status of a broker


between community and higher levels of political representation (Ramirez, 1986b, p. 129).

A number of pathologies afflicted the movement because of the manner of its development. Firstly, a majority ofthe 'rank-and-file' ofthe movement did not share the wider ideological orientation of the radicals at the top, many of whom had little real understanding of rural people's lives. Secondly, the

primacy assigned to political control alienated people through its practical effects. Agrarian reform became associated with the violence of caciques and much of that violence was connected with settling vendettas and grabbing land: many of the early land reform communities existed in name only since the caciques and their clients appropriated the land for themselves. Thirdly, it became clear that Cardenas had sponsored the movement to serve his own

political ends?to demonstrate that he was a serious claimant to national

power because he could muster a regional mass following (Zepeda, 1985). By relying on Cardenas and the machinery of the state government to secure their objectives, the movement lost its autonomy.

Cardenas's successor as governor embarked on a campaign of subversion and repression of the CRMDT. But worse, when Cardenas became presi? dent, he over-rode the protests of the local leadership and incorporated the CRMDT's peasants in the National Peasant Confederation and the workers in the Mexican Labour Confederation, both organisations of state cooptation and political control. There was little 'grass roots' resistance to this process: the majority ofthe CRMDT's membership were orientated only to the move? ment's immediate aims and they were also embattled within their regional social context by aggressive forces of reaction. Thus, although it certainly embodied a range of very distinct 'subject positions' associated with the

segmental identities of its rank-and-file, it was ultimately the perceived (and objective) realities of power which set the limits on this movement's 'decentredness'. The only way out of this historical impasse was through a statist

process of modernising reform from above, an observation which might be valid for many other times and places.

It is important to stress that some of the forces of 'reaction' in Michoacan were themselves 'popular' and to question whether 'reaction' is an adequate definition of their position. The Catholic Church in Michoacan was?in the

main?strongly conservative, though elements of 'social Catholicism' at work in some parts of the state went beyond the doctrine of the 'Third Way' and identified themselves with genuinely popular social demands (Meyer, 1976,

p. 9; Tapia, 1986). But the Cristiada was no clerical or landlord plot: most landlords and clergy were horrified by the unexpected violence of the move? ment and quite incapable of controlling it. The Cristiada drew on various different sections of the rural underclasses?mestizo peons, small holders, some communal Indians?and it also drew on the forces of proletarianisa? tion: ammunition was run out to the Cristero forces by factory girls from Mexico City. The fact that the agrarian reformers had become state clients who were mobilised to fight the Cristeros, partly accounts for the animosity which developed between them: Cristeros often sought out and killed village agraristas, hanging them with a bag of earth round their necks: 'You want


land?here it is!' (Craig, 1983, p. 73). On the other hand, the Cristero forces also included a number of former agrarista leaders, whose attitude to social reform was one of criticising its current practice?as bossism and agrarismo

(Meyer, 1981, pp. 254-269). Jean Meyer has interpreted the Cristiada as a reaction to the state forma?

tion process, a reaction to the creation of a Leviathan which imposed its alien will on a recalcitrant civil society. I think that this is an element of an explana? tion, despite the fact that the state against which the Cristeros fought was

certainly no Leviathan as yet. The 'government' of Mexico in the 1920s manifested itself primarily as an agency of violent expropriation. In the

period of armed revolution, whole communities fled to the refuge of the hills when they saw troopers approaching. Few rural Mexicans in this period identified themselves with either 'the State' or 'the Nation' (De la Peiia, 1986,

p. 34). In my view, the reaction represented by the Cristiada reflects three basic factors: Mexican Liberalism's failure to subordinate Church to State, the reinforcing effects of socio-economic, revolutionary and political violence on the transcendant ideological power of religion as a system of

meaning and the perception of the national state itself as an instrument of alien social classes, a perception which was not wholly 'incorrect'. The Cristiada broke out when Calles decided to close the Churches, an action

provoked by a conjunctural crisis in Church-State relations, but one which was made almost inevitable by the fact that the State could not complete its

conquest of civil society whilst the Church presented itself as a rival social

power. As a result of deft manoeuvering and a virtual 'spiritual reconquest' of its mass base at the end of the 19th century, Mexican Catholicism has

preserved its social power against secular ideologies (Tapia, op. cit.,

pp. 137-140). The rapid capitalist expansion of the Porfirian era created a social crisis which benefited the Church, in the context of the ensuing sustained revolutionary violence in which none of the social issues were

really being resolved. It is important to note that, in addition to 'politicised' violence, Michoacan

also suffered a particular form of banditry on an endemic scale in the period 1914-1926. The bandit forces were recruited in just the same way as 'revolu?

tionary' peasant movements: marginalised peasants from the hills joined the

group and then went back to their villages (Olivera de Bonfil, 1981, p. 106). But if its organisational quality was that of a 'social movement' rather than

'professional' banditry, it had no political or social programme beyond violence, rape and robbery applied to the humble as well as the rich. This

phenomenon might be seen as the product of social humiliation coupled with frustration at the unbroken power of the old Porfirian elite of the region: in a cruel and unjust world, where everything has become meaningless and all

promises prove false, becoming the hombre valiente defiant of all morality is one way of asserting a claim to being something. However, this was not the

mainstream, long term reaction: for most, it was a matter of clinging to a

principle of order: in an increasingly shattered and inhuman world, religion was strengthened as the fulcrum of sustaining a social identity and as a prin? ciple of transcendant order. This harmed the 'progressive' agrarian cause because it was also, particularly in Michoacan, a rigorously anti-clerical


cause. At the same time, the development of the agrarian movement in this

particular historical setting, created a degree of alienation through its ruthless and essentially authoritarian struggle for the levers of power.

Cardenista agrarian radicalism in Michoacan was not based on an organic link with the masses to whom it offered political representation: its develop? ment was strongly correlated with the wave of international migration which culminated in the forcible repatriation of millions of Mexicans from the north. The vast majority of Cardenista community activists were nortenos.

Migration was a major stimulus to the adoption of new political ideologies of an anarcho-sindicalist or socialist bent, and also of hostility to religion. It is

important to stress that the massive and 'authentic' peasant movement led by Emiliano Zapata in the state of Morelos in an earlier phase of the revolution,

fought under the twin banners of the Virgin of Guadalupe and Benito Juarez,

despite the fact that the communities of Morelos had fought the Liberal

governments responsible for the beginnings of disentailment of communal land and the final act in the history of their dispossession. Both the apparent 'political' affiliation and the identification with the Faith should be seen as

images of freedom and justice fashioned in terms of distinctive peasant understandings of the 'truth' embodied in these symbols, appropriated as their own symbols and not those of a national society. The same would be true of the kinds of understandings which motivated the comuneros of Michoacan to rise in revolt in the period of spontaneous agrarian struggles. The apparent continuity between the 1920s and 1930s, and earlier periods of agrarian conflict is partly an illusion: the roots of many of the conflicts lay deep in the past, but the forms which their politicisation took represented significant breaks, both with the past and with the forms of consciousness characteristic of the 'mass base' being 'represented' politically by the leader?

ship. In reality, neither appeals to universalising class politics nor 'national'

sentiment buttered many parsnips among a majority of rural people in Michoacan before the period of the Cardenas presidency. Lack of con? fidence in the pretensions of the national state and revolutionary politicians were reinforced by the actual experience of social reform to date. Even if one was lucky enough to receive land, and was not being brutalised by a village cacique, one was left to cultivate it without any practical help from one's

political patrons. The local economy had been devastated by the revolution and the Cristiada, and these were times of enormous lack of confidence in the future: this was one of the reasons for the mounting tide of emigration to the

USA, along with brute violence. The Cardenas regime created a financial and technical infrastructure for

the land reform sector. During his election campaign Cardenas travelled over

16,000 miles and was the first President to penetrate what upper class Mexicans at that time called 'the hinterland' of rural communities in search of votes. He was, people tell me, generally accompanied by a man with a satchel full of billetes on these peregrinations, but one should not under-estimate the

impact his personal presence made, even on those who continued to reject his ideas. Cardenas continued face-to-face contact with the masses through? out his presidency. Through his personal role and more importantly, through


his radical restructuring of the state machine as an organ of mass incorpora? tion, Carcjenas established the first truly effective national state in Mexico's

history. Through the extension of agrarian reform, the successful implanta- tion of a state education system and the cooptation of all agencies of popular struggle, the Cardenas regime finally conquered control over Mexican

society, and the revolutionary cycle ofthe past 100 years was closed. It was a sufficient, but far from complete triumph. The Cardenista did not

abolish the social power of private capital and possessed no real autonomy, simply a limited room for manoeuvre based on its control of the recently tranquilised masses (Hamilton, 1982). Resistance to the new dispensation continued, partly because land reform did not solve rural socio-economic

problems, but in many cases, including Michoacan, possibly even exacer- bated them.

Of particular significance was the support amassed by the sinarquista movement in the rural communities of the centre-north. Formally founded in

Leon, Guanajuato in 1937, the Union Nacional Sinarquista reached the

apogee of its power in the period 1940-1941: thereafter its coherence was reduced by the conflict between its public poUtical leadership and the secret

organisation known as La Base, the latter being the means by which the Church intervened in the direction of the movement (Aguilar et al., 1981,

pp. 163-166). Pressured into a more overt anti-government stance by its internal problems, the UNS provoked direct official repression in 1944.

Although it continued as a clandestine organisation, adopting a cellular structure where any individual knew only his immediate contacts and could not betray the larger movement, the UNS subsequently fragmented, losing half its members by the end ofthe decade.

However, it was a close run thing. The threat posed by sinarquism was

probably one of the chief factors which motivated the Mexican state to sign the Bracero agreements with the United States, and the ensuing epoch of contract labour in the north played a significant role in taking the steam out of the movement (Cross and Sandos, 1981, pp. 41-42), as did massive rural- urban migration to the metropolis, whose industrial economy was then in a

phase of expansion. (Much of this internal migration was also structured by political patronage motivated by political considerations.) Specific episodes of intra-communal violence, recounted to me in the course of fieldwork,

suggest that the spectre represented by sinarquism was not vanquished entirely, even during the years of its relative decline. Even today it is the UNS's modern successor, the PDM {Partido Democrata Mexicano), which once again represents the quintessentially 'campesino' face of the Right in

Michoacan, one of its areas of greatest strength nationally (Nava, op. cit.,

p.35).

CONCLUSION: A DECENTRED CONQUEST OF THE STATE?

Mexico today is very different to Mexico in 1950. The legitimacy of the ruling party is at its lowest ebb for decades and the entire social system, which the celebrated Mexican political 'system' was constructed to manage, is now very radically transformed. On the other hand, the state's 'penetration1 of its

society is vastly more profound now than in earlier periods. Mexican civil


society may, in reality, remain somewhat segmental. The maintenance and

development of centralised structures of national, political and economic

power of necessity rests on processes and agencies of intermediation which

manage a continuing process of negotiation between social sectors and the

state, and between local and central power (De la Pena, op. cit., pp. 47-48). Intermediation dilutes and segments conflict. The vast network of patronage relations which ultimately cements the edifice together does not fragment social power in a way that seems likely to further the possibility of 'radical democratisation' in the New Social Movements sense: it fragments popular power. There may be multiple loci of power and multiple points of resistance, but, to date at any rate, their proliferation seems to be the other side of the coin to the growing power of centralised forces.

Despite its flirtations with apparent objectivities like 'commodification', the 'post-Marxist' world of discourses seems to lead in the same direction as earlier revisions of western Marxism, in particular Gramsci: towards voluntarism. But it is no longer the voluntarism of the 'consciousness-raising' mass

party, but the decentred pluralism of social movements which demand 'open? ness' and an 'indeterminate view of society', which is the key to future

progress (Laclau, 1985, p. 39). This in a world in which one of the main factors in the radicalisation of middle class participants in the European Green and Anti-Nuclear movements has been the discovery of how re-

pressive, and beyond the domain of public scrutiny, are the structures of social and governmental power, this in a world in which capitalist states are

investing so heavily in destroying labour movements which, however bureaucratic and ossified they have become, still serve as potential agencies of popular power which might at least contest the terms of domination. 'Counter-discourses' may be proliferating, but so is repressive power. A movement like the UCEZ in Michoacan has clearly learned lessons from the

past and is attempting to orientate itself towards a broad coalition which will

provide an effective base from which to contest the direction of Mexico's

development. It sees its role precisely as one of 'articulating' different discourses and 'subject positions'. There is no question of avoiding all

entanglements with politicians or the state: it is rather a matter of attempting to manage such relations in a way which struggles against cooptation. However, the objective contradictions and structural constraints to be over- come in realising such a project remain formidable.

Some on the Left admire the alternative paradigm offered by the 'intransi?

gence' of the Sendero Luminoso movement in Peru, whilst ignoring the

essentially authoritarian nature of its practice: created by a group of provin? cial intellectuals faced with irreversible loss of social position in the face of the penetration of national economic and political agencies, the culture of absolutes which constitutes Sendero's ideology could be seen as a trans? formation of an essentially hierarchic provincial elite mentality (Degregori, 1985a, 1985b). The movement's appeal to the young and to women, and more transitory strengh in serrano peasant communities, is another example of the contingencies involved in the articulation of discourses, although it

possesses a logic which seems perfectly explicable in terms of social facts. But an example like Sendero?so reminiscent in many ways of Mexican


sinarquism despite the differences in the content of the two movements'

ideologies?suggests that the harder road being pursued by the UCEZ (and elements of the Left other than Sendero in Peru) is the only viable one. The New Social Movements are no real substitute for the difficult task of building democratic mass parties which can effect a fundamental transformation of the structures of social power.

NOTES

1. It is important to stress that this too is in no sense a unique property of Marxist approaches. The social categories underlying politics do not necessarily have to be socio-economic: they merely have to be irreducible. Ethnicity is frequentiy used in this way in the post-colonial world, producing debates about whether particular conflicts 'really' represent ethnic conflicts or class conflicts. Such debates reduce to the same logical structure of argument whatever position one adopts.

2. For my own view of the nature of Semo's 'long cycle', see Gledhill (198 7). On the importance of understanding the subjective side of class identities in analysing 'class struggle' in the 18th and 19th centuries, see for example, the comments made by Brian Hamnett on Mexican miners (Hamnett, 1986, p. 25).

3. Personal field research to which reference is made in the subsequent two sections was financed by the Economic and Social Research Council.

4. Kowarick's contribution to Slater's volume deals with similar phenomena in Brazil (Kowarick, 1985).

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