Development, Part 4
La
Via Campesina
The main attached documents (and linked downloads below), are from a
farmer called Rob Sacco. Together they comprise 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, Part 1 and Part 2.
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