Abstract
A major escalation of conflict has been underway in the past two years with the outbreak of war in Europe and the genocidal war in Palestine. This follows upon ongoing shifts of great magnitude in the world economy. We are certainly in a new phase of struggle against imperialism, and this fact must inform our analysis of popular movements. With this special issue, the Agrarian South Network (ASN) seeks to make a new contribution to the analysis of popular movements today.
The ASN has remained engaged over the past two decades in analyzing the social struggles that neoliberalism has spawned in the peripheries. The focus on rural social movements was the subject of our very first collective tricontinental research initiative, published in a book with the title Reclaiming the Land, in 2005 (Moyo & Eros, 2005, 2008). Research on social struggles has continued to be organized and published, with some of this work compiled in our most recent book, Gender in Agrarian Transitions (Tsikata et al., 2024). In this new special issue, we refocus our attention amidst the evident decay of the neoliberal order and the accelerated intensification of contradictions. This special issue is the result of the 15th Annual Summer School organized by the Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies in collaboration with the ASN in January 2023 in Harare. The theme of the summer school was “Popular Movements Today: Class Struggles in Rural and Urban Peripheries.” A brief contextualization of our present concerns is in order.
Since the 1960s, major transformations have been ongoing in the world economy. The emergence of the Third World as forged at Bandung entered its most critical phase with the radicalization of liberation struggles, leading to generalized decolonization. Alongside an autonomous Soviet bloc, this new correlation of forces presented an unprecedented and robust challenge to imperialism. But monopoly capitalism, despite its crisis, was still able to relaunch its expansionist global strategy. It did so by means of new forms of financialization, new leaps in technology and logistics, the generalization of global value systems, renewed militarization, and the escalation of competition over energy resources, minerals, and agricultural land. The outcome of this new phase of contradictions was, in the first instance, the neutralization of the Bandung movement after the initial advance of decolonization, followed by the integration of the Soviet bloc into the world economy and its disintegration.
Most of the world’s peripheral countries succumbed to new patterns of dependent integration under the control of monopoly-finance capital. The global neoliberal policy framework that prevailed consolidated the general transition to neocolonialism. But the contradictions between imperialism and the working people of the Third World continued to evolve and to intensify in a renewed phase of economic emergence in the peripheries as well as renewed radicalization of liberation struggles. The major shift in industrial production toward the East has undoubtedly been among the crucial elements of the tectonic shifts, whereby China has repositioned itself in the international division of labor as the factory of the world, and which has led to a new systemic fault line. China rowed against the neocolonial current by deploying its central planning system in expanding markets and by developing its productive forces at a rapid pace with substantial autonomy, even to the point of eradicating absolute poverty.
Yet, the conditions of work in most of the other regions of the periphery have continued to deteriorate drastically in the course of these global shifts. This remains the terrain of social struggle for the larger part of the South. The working people of the South remain trapped in a mode of accumulation whose result is a secular expansion of labor reserves and a deep crisis of social reproduction. This historical outcome is aggravated by the trends in global warming, whose effects will be most catastrophic among these same populations concentrated in tropical and semi-tropical regions. The particularities of struggles spawned by these conditions are as many as the struggles themselves, but the structural conditions are essentially shared everywhere.
As argued in our collective assessments published over the past decade, in Reclaiming the Nation and Reclaiming Africa, dependent integration and the tendency toward national disintegration have been two sides of the same coin (Moyo & Yeros, 2011, 2019). The rural exodus, especially, has continued to accelerate, swelling the ranks of the world’s labor reserves with grave consequences for national, regional, and global development. This fact alone will weigh very heavily on the twenty-first century. Limited absorption capacity in the urban peripheries has created a floating and marginalized population on a mass scale, living and working in perpetual informality and insecurity, among them, first and foremost, historically oppressed peoples and women. Our assessment has been reaffirmed in more recent collective research published in Labour Questions in the Global South, Farming and Working under Contract, and Gender in Agrarian Transitions (Jha et al., 2020, 2022; Tsikata et al., 2022). The deteriorating conditions in peripheral social formations have undermined the exercise of sovereignty itself. It has also rendered societies vulnerable to fundamentalist ideologies, across religious traditions, as well as imperialist encroachment and intervention.
These global shifts have altered the terrain of class struggle on a world scale. Class struggle has always been multifarious. But the massive growth of labor reserves in the peripheries, straddling town and country, and international borders has established a new reality. It is not the case that a purity of class consciousness and organizational form may be postulated a priori within linear stages of development. In the peripheries, the struggles of working people today span a wide range of trajectories, stemming from the diverse realities of work and social reproduction and the diverse forms of oppression, including patriarchy and racial and caste supremacy, that serve to divide and rule these semi-peasant, semi-proletarian social formations. Working people wage diverse struggles: for land and territory for production, residence, and social reproduction; for markets and credit for petty production and distribution; for dignified work, wages, and pensions; for free basic social services and public infrastructure; for a healthy environment and safe and nutritious food; and for peace and protection from violence, whether perpetrated by the state, organized crime, or the enduring supremacist and patriarchal structures.
Our earlier collaborative work on social movements in Reclaiming the Land also showed that the neoliberal assault on the peasantry had not resolved the agrarian question but had intensified the struggle for land. This evidently applies to the urban question as well, where the expansion of urban populations has not been accompanied by the development of conditions for a fully and properly salaried workforce, thus intensifying land and other struggles there too (see the special issue on Social Movements in the Global South, 2018, Volume 7, Issue 2). It was further argued in Reclaiming the Land that rural movements had become organizing centers for the semi-proletariat, but that nonetheless these movements were very diverse in their ideologies, tactics, strategies, and internationalism. This diversity was compounded in many cases by the defeat and/or cooptation of liberation movements and communist parties in parliamentary politics and the nefarious workings of neoliberalism. Rural and other social forces were thus compelled to seek an “autonomous” path, but also one in which the NGOization of politics, very often under the aegis of international financiers, was an overwhelming force in itself. With few exceptions, which were noted in that research initiative (specifically the Zapatistas in Mexico, the FARC in Colombia, and the War Veterans in Zimbabwe), these organizing centers were facing strong forces of cooptation. These insights from Reclaiming the Land remain relevant today for both rural and urban movements.
A continuous assessment and reassessment of popular movements remains in order, including social movements, trade unions, and political parties, and in all their diversity, from the more organized to the more diffuse, from the armed to the unarmed. Such a reassessment 20 years later must take into account the evolving structural conditions, including the evolving rural–urban relations. However, it must also take into account the nature of the subjective conditions and the political dilemmas as they have evolved with the advance of fundamentalism, which has found fertile terrain in these bourgeoning labor reserves; in a number of cases, we have seen the rise of neofascism under the wing of foreign and domestic monopolies. Such organic transformations have been further undermining the exercise of national sovereignty everywhere.
The consequences for regional cooperation and international solidarity have been grave. In substantial swathes of the South, such as North Africa, the Sahel, the Horn, West Asia, and the Caribbean, state fracture and foreign occupation under imperialist forces or their proxies have again relegated countries to a semi-colonial situation—quite apart from the remaining colonial questions, such as that of Palestine. Throughout this period, the United States and its junior partners have retained or expanded their military presence in all corners of the earth, while their unilateral sanction regimes and destabilization campaigns have continued to present enormous challenges, from which popular movements have not been spared. The current conflict in Ukraine and the genocidal war in Gaza are the latest outbreaks whose dimensions are still to be measured but which have all the elements of an inflection point in these tectonic shifts.
The special issue consists of two parts. This first part includes five articles, one of which appears in our permanent special section on Third World Legacies.
The first article by Paris Yeros, entitled “A Polycentric World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the ‘Sixth Great Power’,” provides an overview of the systemic shifts within which social forces are situated. Drawing on what Marx termed the “sixth” great power among the five European “great powers,” Yeros argues that the intervention of popular forces remains fundamental to the current systemic transition. The article seeks to clarify the evolving character of the contradiction between imperialism and the working people of the Third World. It further draws on Samir Amin’s notion of “polycentrism” and argues that the current transition, marked by the protracted decline of the capitalist system, still presupposes “delinking” from the worldwide law of value and the forging of sovereign development paths on a popular basis. Such a transition, he argues, can only be fulfilled by the intervention of workers and peasants in the peripheries of the system. Key elements of the current systemic rivalry are discussed to shed light on the challenges, with a special focus on the expansion of labor reserves and the character of peripheral social formations today.
Praveen Jha, in his article on “Growing Restiveness of the Peasantry in Contemporary India: Context and Challenges,” brings focus to the farmers’ movement in India, one of the most important mass mobilizations in the country and in the south in recent years. Jha situates the rise of the movement in the current neoliberal conjuncture, which has drastically altered the economic landscape of the peasantry and deepened the agrarian crisis of the countries of the Global South, including India. It is argued that the roots of India’s agrarian crisis can be traced to the transition from dirigiste to a neoliberal macroeconomic policy regime, consummated in 1991. Its most gruesome manifestation has been high and ever-rising farmers’ suicides. Factors such as substantial compression of rural development expenditures, increasing input prices, vulnerability to world market price fluctuations due to greater openness, inadequate crop insurance, and substantial weakening of the provisioning for credit, along with the governments’ apathy to the demand for remunerative prices for farm produce, are among the obvious causal correlates of the contemporary agrarian crisis in the country. Jha shows that an important consequence has been the steady build-up of peasant resistance, particularly over the past decade, leading up to the recent mass protests. Given their scale, intensity, and tenacity, they have been widely hailed as among the most significant resistance movements within the country and across the world against the machinations of corporate power and the interests of big business. This article addresses some of the primary features of the farmers’ movement in India and the contradictions and challenges with which it has been contending.
Max Ajl’s article entitled “Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I” illuminates the current struggle in Palestine, which has escalated to an entirely new phase with the armed insurrection led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, and the genocidal war that has ensued against Palestinians in Gaza. This conflict has polarized North–South relations like no other in recent history and will have a direct effect on the next phase of this global contradiction. In this first part of the article, Ajl considers the US-Israeli attack on Palestine in general, and the Gaza Strip in particular, in world-historical and regional contexts. Ajl argues that, in contrast to a range of theories that resort to liberal theories of international relations, economism, or methodological nationalism when theorizing accumulation in general or Arab region accumulation in particular, the Arab-Iranian region is under a regime of US-imposed de-development that seeks to dismantle strategic obstacles in the region through war and sanctions. This process encountered an obstacle amidst Iranian-linked regional militias and standing armies. Ajl argues that these forces need to be understood by revisiting the role of political sovereignty in emancipatory transitions.
Bosman Batubara, Guntoro, Noer Fauzi Rachman, Herlily, and Joko Adianto, in their article “Land Occupation, Re-occupation, and Housing Cooperative: Commune Formation by Jakarta Urban Poor,” highlight the tension between direct actions and electoral politics to explain the formation of an urban poor settlement, often referred to as a kampungkota, an emerging term for settlements beyond the modern, planned part, in North Jakarta, Indonesia. The authors interpret kampungkota as a commune and unpack the process of commune formation with reference to the experience of Kampung Akuarium into three different but interconnected parts. The first is direct action through land occupation by the urban poor in the 1980s; the second is a direct re-occupation after the 2016 eviction and the joining-up of the settlers with a wider urban poor organization (the commune of communes); and the third is the rebuilding and legalization of the commune, which is collectively managed through a housing cooperative, facilitated by a political contract in the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial election.
In our section on Third World Legacies, Karlo Mikhail I. Mongaya writes on the legacy of Roger Felix V. Salditos, who was among seven Filipino revolutionaries summarily executed by police and military forces in San Jose town, Antique, in the central Philippine island of Panay, in 2018. In his article entitled “Roger Felix Salditos and Agrarian Class Struggles in Panay Island, Philippines,” the author brings to life the contributions of Saliditos, better known by his pen names Mayamor and Maya Daniel, which he used to sign his paintings and poetry. Salditos was a revolutionary intellectual who spent the better part of his life as a cadre of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) since he left the seminary in 1979. Mongaya examines the underground literary and political writings of Salditos to shed light on the long history of agrarian class struggles of peasants and Tumandok indigenous peoples in one of the Philippines’ top food-producing regions. Salditos’s narratives highlight the role of Panay as the only place where the Huk peasant rebellion took root outside Luzon in the 1950s, recalling important episodes of revolutionary contestations on the island amid changing conditions under the Marcos dictatorship and the class offensive of neoliberalism. Despite Salditos’s partisan character and focus on local and superstructural dimensions, his writings provide an important perspective on the persistence of one of the world’s longest-running rural-based insurgencies, notwithstanding the end of the classical era of peasant wars of the twentieth century and shifting spaces for agrarian contestations in the new century.
This part of the special issue also includes two book reviews, one written by Meghna Goyal on Satyaki Roy’s Contours of Value Capture: India’s Neoliberal Path of Industrial Development (2020) and the second by Nivedita Sharma and Gurpreet Singh on Ashok Pankaj’s Inclusive Development Through Guaranteed Employment: India’s MGNREGA Experiences (2023).
We look forward to your engagement with the issues raised and, as always, invite you to contribute your own work and perspectives.