Development, Part 4
La Via Campesina
The main
linked download, below, today, is from a farmer called Rob Sacco. It is a 2005 letter
from the bundu in reply to an e-mail that was printed by a friend and carried
up to Sacco in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe.
Sacco is a
defender of the people’s history of Zimbabwe as he sees it. He seems
suspicious of nearly everyone else, but he is articulate and serious and
obviously a practical person. He writes of “development by marginal
adjustment”, which sounds right, for peasants.
La Via
Campesina means “the way of the peasant”.
While
taking a swipe at the SACP for being “workerist” (which is certainly a bad
mistake, but how would he know?) Sacco lays out his assessment:
“…the transfer of 10 million hectares plus of
the best land from a post-colonial class perpetually externalizing wealth, to
the mass of an African peasant class, and to an African petty bourgeoisie,
generating indigenous wealth from the ground up, constitutes a genuine
revolution.”
Sacco is
not shy to defend the peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie. This is an example
the Communist University needs for our current purposes. We need an
advocate for the interests of the other masses, the ones that the working class
needs as allies, so as to form an overwhelming popular majority, together.
If we are
to be allies, we must be capable of understanding peasants and petty bourgeois
in their own terms, and we must be able to learn from them.
Sacco has a
sense of place and a pride in his ability to bring forth nourishment for people
from the land, by work and by skill and by knowledge and experience.
There is a
lot of personal history in this piece, and a lot of political history of
structures and institutions, and even a cat that breaks a bottle of whisky.
This is all quite typical of the peasant approach to life, which is always as
much of a narrative as it is a collective.
The picture
is of farmers in Mozambique.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Peasant Revolution
in Zimbabwe, Rob Sacco, 2005, reply to Bond.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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