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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