The
Agrarian Problem and the Indian Problem
Those
of us who approach and define the Indian problem from a Socialist point of view
must start out by declaring the complete obsolescence of the humanitarian and
philanthropic points of view which, like a prolongation of the apostolic battle
of Las Casas, continued to motivate the old pro-Indian campaign. We shall try
to establish the basically economic character of the problem. First, we protest
against the instinctive attempt of the criollo or mestizo to reduce it to an
exclusively administrative, pedagogical, ethnic, or moral problem in order to
avoid at all cost recognizing its economic aspect. Therefore, it would be
absurd to accuse us of being romantic or literary. By identifying it as
primarily a socio-economic problem, we are taking the least romantic and
literary position possible. We are not satisfied to assert the Indian’s right
to education, culture, progress, love, and heaven. We begin by categorically
asserting his right to land. This thoroughly materialistic claim should suffice
to distinguish us from the heirs or imitators of the evangelical fervor of the
great Spanish friar, whom, on the other hand, our materialism does not prevent
us from admiring and esteeming.
The
problem of land is obviously too bound up with the Indian problem to be
conveniently mitigated or diminished. Quite the contrary. As for myself, I
shall try to present it in unmistakable and clearcut terms.
The
agrarian problem is first and foremost the problem of eliminating feudalism in
Peru, which should have been done by the democratic-bourgeois regime that
followed the War of Independence. But in its one hundred years as a republic,
Peru has not had a genuine bourgeois class, a true capitalist class. The old
feudal class—camouflaged or disguised as a republican bourgeoisie—has kept its
position. The policy of disentailment, initiated by the War of Independence as
a logical consequence of its ideology, did not lead to the development of small
property. The old landholding class had not lost its supremacy. The survival of
the latifundistas, in practice, preserved the latifundium. Disentailment struck
at the Indian community. During a century of Republican rule, great
agricultural property actually has grown stronger and expanded, despite the
theoretical liberalism of our constitution and the practical necessities of the
development of our capitalist economy.
There
are two expressions of feudalism that survive: the latifundium and servitude.
Inseparable and of the same substance, their analysis leads us to the
conclusion that the servitude oppressing the indigenous race cannot be
abolished unless the latifundium is abolished.
When
the agrarian problem is presented in these terms, it cannot be easily
distorted. It appears in all its magnitude as a socio-economic, and therefore a
political, problem, to be dealt with by men who move in this sphere of acts and
ideas. And it is useless to try to convert it, for example, into a
technical-agricultural problem for agronomists.
Everyone
must know that according to individualist ideology, the liberal solution to
this problem would be the breaking up of the latifundium to create small
property. But there is so much ignorance of the elementary principles of
socialism that it is worthwhile repeating that this formula—the breaking up of
the latifundium in favor of small property—is neither Utopian, nor heretical,
nor revolutionary, nor Bolshevik, nor avant-garde, but orthodox,
constitutional, democratic, capitalist, and bourgeois. It is based on the same
liberal body of ideas that produced the constitutional laws of all
democratic-bourgeois states. In the countries of Central and Eastern
Europe—Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Poland, Bulgaria, et cetera—agrarian laws have
been passed limiting land ownership, in principle, to a maximum of five hundred
hectares. Here, the Great War razed the last ramparts of feudalism with the
sanction of the capitalist West, which since then has used precisely this bloc
of anti-Bolshevik countries as a bulwark against Russia.
In
keeping with my ideological position, I believe that the moment for attempting
the liberal, individualist method in Peru has already passed. Aside from
reasons of doctrine, I consider-that our agrarian problem has a special
character due to an indisputable and concrete factor: the survival of the
Indian “community” and of elements of practical socialism in indigenous
agriculture and life.
If
those who hold a democratic-liberal doctrine are truly seeking a solution to
the problem of the Indian that, above all, will free him from servitude, they
can turn to the Czechoslovakian or Rumanian experience rather than the Mexican
example, which they may find dangerous given its inspiration and process. For
them it is still time to advocate a liberal formula. They would at least ensure
that discussion of the agrarian problem by the new generation would not
altogether lack the liberal philosophy that, according to written history, has
governed the life of Peru since the foundation of the republic.
Colonialism—Feudalism
The
problem of land sheds light on the Socialist or vanguardist attitude toward the
remains of the viceroyalty. Literary perricholismo does not interest us except
as an indication or reflection of economic colonialism. The colonial heritage
that we want to do away with is not really the one of romantic damsels screened
from sight behind shawls or shutters, but the one of a feudal system with its
gamonalismo, latifundium, and servitude. Colonial literature—nostalgic
evocation of the viceroyalty and its pomp—is for me only the mediocre product
of a spirit engendered and nourished by that regime. The viceroyalty does not
survive in the perricholismo of troubadors and storytellers. It survives in a
feudalism that contains the germs of an undeclared capitalism. We decry not our
Spanish but our feudal legacy.
Spain
brought us the Middle Ages: the Inquisition, feudalism, et cetera. Later it
brought us the Counter Reformation: a reactionary spirit, a Jesuit method, a
scholastic casuistry. We have painfully rid ourselves of most of these
afflictions by assimilating Western culture, sometimes obtained through Spain
itself. But we are still burdened with their economic foundations embedded in
the interests of a class whose hegemony was not destroyed by the War of
Independence. The roots of feudalism are intact and they are responsible for
the lag in our capitalist development.
The
land tenure system determines the political and administrative system of the
nation. The agrarian problem, which the republic has not yet been able to
solve, dominates all other problems. Democratic and liberal institutions cannot
flourish or operate in a semi-feudal economy.
The
subordination of the Indian problem to the problem of land is even more
absolute, for special reasons. The indigenous race is a race of farmers. The
Inca people were peasants, normally engaged in agriculture and shepherding.
Their industries and arts were typically domestic and rural. The principle that
life springs from the soil was truer in the Peru of the Incas than in any other
country. The most notable public works and collective enterprises of
Tawantinsuyo were for military, religious or agricultural purposes. The
irrigation canals of the sierra and the coast and the agricultural terraces of
the Andes remain the best evidence of the degree of economic organization
reached by Inca Peru. Its civilization was agrarian in all its important I
aspects. Valcarcel, in his study of the economic life of Tawantinsuyo, writes
that “the land, in native tradition, is the common mother; from her womb come
not only food but man himself. Land provides all wealth. The cult of Mama Pacha
is on a par with the worship of the sun and, like the sun, Mother Earth represents
no one in particular. Joined in the aboriginal ideology, these two concepts
gave birth to agrarianism, which combines communal ownership of land and the
universal religion of the sun.”[1]
Inca
communism, which cannot be negated or disparaged for having developed under the
autocratic regime of the Incas, is therefore designated as agrarian communism.
The essential traits of the Inca economy, according to the careful definition
of our historical process by Cesar Ugarte, were the following:
Collective
ownership of farmland by the ayllu or group of related families, although the
property was divided into individual and non-transferable lots; collective
ownership of waters, pasture, and woodlands by the marca or tribe, or the
federation of ayllus settled around a village; cooperative labor; individual
allotment of harvests and produce.[2]
Colonization
unquestionably must bear the responsibility for the disappearance of this
economy, together with the culture it nourished, not because it destroyed
autochthonous forms but because it brought no superior substitutes. The
colonial regime disrupted and demolished the Inca agrarian economy without
replacing it with an economy of higher yields. Under the indigenous
aristocracy, the natives made up a nation of ten million men, with an
integrated government that efficiently ruled all its territory; under a foreign
aristocracy, the natives became a scattered and anarchic mass of a million men
reduced to servitude and peonage.
In
this respect, demographic data are the most convincing and decisive. Although
the Inca regime may be censured in the name of modern liberal concepts of
liberty and justice, the positive and material historical fact is that it
assured the subsistence and growth of a population that came to ten million
when the conquistadors arrived in Peru, and that this population after three
centuries of Spanish domination had fallen to one million. Colonization stands
condemned not from any abstract, theoretical, or moral standpoint of justice,
but from the practical, concrete, and material standpoint of utility.
Colonization,
failing to organize even a feudal economy in Peru, introduced elements of a
slave economy.
The
Policy of Colonization: Depopulation and Slavery
It
is easy to explain why the Spanish colonial regime was incapable of organizing
a purely feudal economy in Peru. It is impossible to organize an economy
without a clear understanding and sure appreciation, if not of its principles,
at least of its needs. An indigenous, integrated economy develops alone. It
spontaneously determines its own institutions. But a colonial economy is
established on bases that are in part artificial and foreign, subordinate to
the interests of the colonizer. Its normal development depends on the
colonizer’s ability either to adapt himself to local conditions or to change
them.
The
Spanish colonizer conspicuously lacked this ability. He had an exaggerated idea
of the economic value of natural wealth and absolutely no idea of the economic
value of man.
With
the practice of exterminating the indigenous population and destroying its
institutions, the conquistadors impoverished and bled, more than they could
realize, the fabulous country they had won for the king of Spain. Later, a
nineteenth-century South American statesman, impressed by the spectacle of a
semi-deserted continent, was to prescribe an economic principle for his epoch:
“To govern is to populate.” The Spanish colonizer, completely alien to this
criterion, systematically depopulated Peru.
The
persecution and enslavement of the Indian rapidly consumed resources that had
been unbelievably underestimated by the colonizers: human capital. As the
Spaniards found that they daily needed more labor for the exploitation of the
wealth they had conquered, they resorted to the most antisocial and primitive
system of colonization: the importation of slaves. The colonizer thereby
renounced, on the other hand, an undertaking that the conquistador had thought
feasible: the assimilation of the Indian. The Negro race he imported had to
serve, among other things, to reduce the demographic imbalance between white
and Indian.
The
greed for precious metals—entirely logical in a century when distant lands
could not send Europe any other product drove the Spaniards to engage principally
in mining. Therefore, they sought to convert to mining a people who had been
essentially agricultural under the Inca and even before, and they ended by
having to subject the Indian to the harsh law of slavery. Agricultural labor,
under a naturally feudal system, would have made the Indian a serf bound to the
land. Labor in mines and cities was to turn him into a slave. With the mita,
the Spaniards established a system of forced labor and uprooted the Indian from
his soil and his customs.
The
importation of Negro slaves, which supplied laborers and domestic servants to
the Spanish population on the coast, where the viceroyal court was located,
helped mask its economic and political error from Spain. Slavery was injected
into the regime, corrupting and weakening it.
In
his study of the social situation in colonial Peru, Professor Javier Prado,
whose premises I naturally do not share, reached conclusions that deal with an
aspect of precisely this failure of colonization:
The
Negro, considered as commercial merchandise and imported to America as a human
labor machine, was to water the earth with the sweat of his brow, but without
making it fruitful. It is the pattern of elimination followed by civilization
in the history of all peoples. The slave is unproductive in his labor, as he
was in the Roman Empire and as he has been in Peru. In the social organism he
is a cancer that erodes national sentiments and ideals. In this way, the slave
has disappeared from Peru, leaving behind barren < fields and having taken
revenge on the white race by mixing his blood with the latter’s. By this
vicious alliance, he debased the moral and intellectual judgment of those who
were first his cruel masters and later his godfathers, companions, and
brothers.[3]
The
colonizer was not guilty of having brought an inferior race—this was the
customary reproach of sociologists of fifty years ago—but of having brought
slaves. Slavery was doomed to fail, both as a means of economic exploitation
and organization of the colony and as a reinforcement of a regime based only on
conquest and force.
Coastal
agriculture still has not rid itself of its colonial defects, which derive
largely from the slave system. The coastal lati-fundista never has asked for
men, but for labor, to till his fields. Therefore, when he ran out of Negro
slaves he found their successors in Chinese coolies. This other encomendero
type of importation, like that of the Negroes, conflicted with the normal
formation of a liberal economy consistent with the political order established
by the War of Independence. Cesar Ugarte recognizes this in his study of the
Peruvian economy when he states flatly that Peru needed “men,” not “labor.”[4]
The
Spanish Colonizer
Colonization’s
inability to organize the Peruvian economy on its natural agricultural bases is
explained by the kind of colonizer that came to Peru. Whereas in North America
colonization planted the seeds of the spirit and economy then growing in Europe
and representing the future, the Spaniard brought to America the effects and
methods of an already declining spirit and economy that belonged to the past.
This thesis may seem overly simplified to those who look only at its economic
aspect and who are, unknowingly, the survivors of old-fashioned scholarly
rhetoric. They share the common weakness of our historians: an incomprehension
of economic reality. For this reason, I was glad to find in Jose Vasconcelos’
recent book, Indologia, an opinion that has the virtue of coming from a
philosopher who cannot be accused of too much Marxism or too little Hispanism.
If
there were not so many other causes of both a moral and physical order that
amply explain the apparently reckless spectacle of the enormous progress of the
Saxons in the North and the slow, aimless pace of the Latins in the South, a
mere comparison of the two property systems would suffice to explain this
contrast. In the North, there were no kings to dispose of another’s land as
though it were their own. Without any special favors from their monarchs and in
a sort of moral rebellion against the king of England, the colonizers of the
north proceeded to develop a system of private property under which each one
paid the price of his land and occupied only as much as he could cultivate. In
place of encomiendas, there were farms. In place of a military and landed
aristocracy descended from a servile and murderous nobility, there developed a
democracy that at first followed only the French precepts of liberty, equality,
and fraternity. The men of the north conquered virgin forest, but the general
who led them to victory against the Indians was not allowed to take possession,
in our tradition, “as far as the eye can see.” The newly won lands were not
turned over to the king for him to give away at his discretion and thereby
create a nobility with double morals: a lackey of the sovereign and an insolent
oppressor of the weak masses. In the north, the republic, which coincided with
a great expansionist movement, set aside a large part of the land and created
vast reserves barred to private business. It did not use them to create duchies
or to reward patriotic services, but to promote popular education. In that way,
as the population increased, the rising value of the land paid the rising costs
of education. When new cities arose in the middle of the desert, their lots
were not distributed among favorites; they were put up for public sale, after
first being subdivided according to an overall plan for the new city, with the
condition that no one person could purchase many lots at once. This wise and
just social system is the source of North America’s strength. Because we did
not act similarly, we have fallen far behind.[5]
Feudalism
is, as Vasconcelos implies, a blight inflicted upon us by colonialism.
Countries that were able to cure themselves of it after independence have
progressed; those that are still afflicted are backward. We already have seen
how feudalism and slavery are related evils.
The
Spaniard did not have the Anglo-Saxon’s conditions of colonization. The United
States is considered to be the creation of the pioneer. Spain, after the epic
of the conquest, sent us practically nothing but nobles, priests, and
adventurers. The conquistadors were of heroic stock; the colonizers were not.
Those who thought the wealth of Peru lay in its precious metals converted
mining into a factor in the liquidation of human resources and the decline of
agriculture by using forced labor. Accusations are even found in civilismo
literature. Javier Prado writes that “the state of agriculture in the viceroyal
period was absolutely deplorable, due to the absurd economic system maintained
by the Spaniards,” and that the system of exploitation was responsible for
depopulating the country.[6]
The
colonizer who worked mines instead of fields had the mentality of a gold
prospector. He was not, consequently, a creator of wealth. An economy, a
society, are the work of those who colonize and bring to life the land, not of
those who extract treasures from its subsoil. The history of the flowering and
decay of many colonial populations in the sierra, determined by the discovery
and abandonment of mines quickly exhausted or discarded, fully demonstrates
this historical law in Peru.
Perhaps
the only true colonizers sent to us by Spain were the Jesuit and Dominican
missionaries. Both orders, but especially the Jesuits, created several
interesting production centers in Peru. The Jesuits introduced religious,
political, and economic elements into their enterprise, not to the same extent,
but using the same principles, as in Paraguay, where they carried out their
most famous and extensive experiment.
These
religious activities were consistent not only with Jesuit policy all over
Spanish America but with the tradition of monasteries in the Middle Ages. One
of the roles of the monastery in medieval society was economic. In a warlike
and mystic era, they undertook to preserve the techniques of the arts and
crafts, refining and elaborating materials; this later served as a basis for
bourgeois industry. Georges Sorel is one of the modern economists who best
define the role of the monastery in the European economy. In his study of the
Benedictine order as the prototype of the monastery-industrial enterprise he
writes: “At that time, it was very difficult to find capital; for the monks it
was a simple matter. Donations from wealthy families rapidly furnished them
with great quantities of precious metals, thereby facilitating primitive
accumulation of capital. On the other hand, monasteries spent very little and
their rules required them to practice a strict economy that recalls the frugal
habits of the first capitalists. For a long time, monks were in a position to
engage in operations that would increase their fortune.” Sorel tells us how
after having rendered distinguished services to Europe that are universally
recognized, these institutions swiftly declined, and how the Benedictines
“stopped being workers gathered together in an almost capitalist workshop and
became bourgeois retired businessmen who thought only of a life of pleasant
leisure in the countryside.”[7]
This
aspect of colonization, like many others of our economy, has not yet been
studied. It has fallen to me, a convinced and declared Marxist, to point it
out. I believe this study is essential to the economic justification of any
measures adopted by future agrarian policy concerning the properties of
monasteries and religious orders, because it will conclusively establish that
then-right of ownership, along with the real titles on which it rested, has
actually expired.
The “Community”
Under the Colonial Regime
The
Laws of the Indies protected indigenous property and recognized its communist
organization. Legislation relative to Indian “communities” did not attack
institutions or customs that were not opposed to the religious spirit and
political character of colonization. The agrarian communism of the ayllu, once
the Inca state was destroyed, was not incompatible with either one. To the
contrary. The Jesuits took advantage of indigenous communism in Peru, in
Mexico, and, on a still larger scale, in Paraguay, for purposes of religious
instruction. The medieval regime, in theory and practice, reconciled feudal
property with community property.
Recognition
of the “communities” and of their economic customs by the Laws of the Indies
not only shows the realistic wisdom of colonial policy but is absolutely
adjusted to feudal theory and practice. The provisions of the colonial laws on
“communities,” which maintained the latters’ economic mechanism with no
trouble, reformed customs contrary to Catholic doctrine (trial marriage, et
cetera) and tended to convert the “community” into a cog in the administrative
and fiscal machinery. The “community” could and did exist for the greater glory
and profit of king and church.
We
know that this legislation was mostly on paper. Indian property could not be
adequately protected because of colonial practices. All evidence agrees on
this. Ugarte makes the following statements:
Neither
the farsighted measures of Toledo nor other measures that were tried out on
different occasions prevented a large part of indigenous property from falling
legally or illegally into the hands of Spaniards or criollos. One of the
institutions that facilitated this plunder was the encomienda. By law, the
encomendero was in charge of collecting taxes and of the organization and
conversion to Christianity of his tributaries. But in actual fact, he was a
feudal lord, owner of lives and haciendas, for he disposed of Indians as if
they were trees in a forest and, if they died or disappeared, he took
possession by one means or another of their land. In brief, under the colonial
agrarian regime, many indigenous agrarian communities | were replaced by
individually owned latifundia farmed by Indians within a feudal organization.
These great feudal properties, far from being split up over the years, became
concentrated and consolidated into few holdings, because real estate was
subject to innumerable encumbrances and perpetual assessments that immobilized
it, like primogeniture, religious bequests and payments, and other entailments
on the property.[8]
Feudalism
similarly let rural communes continue in Russia, a country that offers an
interesting parallel because in its historical process it is much closer to
these agricultural and semi-feudal countries than are the capitalist countries
of the West. Eugene Schkaff, in his study of the evolution of the mir in
Russia, writes:
Since
landlords were liable for the taxes, they wanted every peasant to have
approximately the same area of land so that each one would ’ contribute with
his labor to pay the taxes; to make sure that these taxes would be paid, they
established joint responsibility, which was extended by the government to the
rest of the peasants. Land was redistributed as the number of serfs varied.
Feudalism and absolutism gradually transformed the communal organization of the
peasants into an instrument of exploitation. In this respect, the emancipation
of the serfs brought no change.[9]
Under
the system of landlords, the Russian mir, like the Peruvian community, was
completely denaturalized. The area of land available for community families
became more and more inadequate and its distribution increasingly faulty. The
mir did not guarantee the peasant enough land to support himself; on the other
hand, it guaranteed the landlord a labor supply for his latifundium. When
serfdom was abolished in 1861, the landlords found a way to replace it by
making their peasants’ lots so small that they could not raise enough food to
live on. Russian agriculture thus kept its feudal character. The latifundium
owner turned the reform to his advantage. He had already realized that it was
in his interest to assign lots to his peasants, provided that they were less
than subsistence size. There was no surer means of shackling the peasant to the
land and, at the same time, of keeping his emigration down to a minimum. The
peasant was forced to work on the landlord’s latifundium not only because of
the miserable existence he wrested from his miniscule plot of land but also
because the landlord owned pastures, woods, mills, water, et cetera.
The
coexistence of “community” and latifundium in Peru is, therefore, fully
explained both by the characteristics of the colonial regime and by the
experience of feudal Europe. But the “community,” under this system, was
tolerated rather than protected. It was subject to the despotic law of the
latifundium, and the state could not possibly intervene. The “community”
survived, but in a condition of servitude. Previously, it had been the very
nucleus of the state, which assured it the energy necessary to the welfare of
its members. Colonialism petrified it within the great property that supported
a new state, alien to its destiny.
The
liberalism of the laws of the republic^ powerless to destroy feudalism and
create capitalism, later denied the “community” the formal protection that it
had been granted by the absolutism of colonial laws.
The War
of Independence and Agrarian Property
We
shall now examine the problem of land under the republic. In order to define my
points of view about this period as regards the agrarian question, I must
emphasize an opinion that I already have expressed about the character of the
War of Independence in Peru. Independence found Peru to be backward in the
formation of its bourgeoisie. The elements of a capitalist economy were less
developed in our country than in other countries of America, where the struggle
for independence could count on an emerging bourgeoisie.
If
the War of Independence had been a movement of the indigenous masses or had championed
their cause, it would necessarily have had an agrarian cast. It is already
clearly demonstrated that the French Revolution especially benefited the rural
class and depended on it to prevent the return of the old regime. This
phenomenon, furthermore, seems in general to be true of bourgeois as well as
Socialist revolution judging by the more precise and enduring results of the
overthrow of feudalism in Central Europe and czarist Russia. Although mainly
the urban bourgeoisie and proletariat have directed and carried out both kinds
of revolution, the peasant has been the immediate beneficiary. Particularly in
Russia, the rural class has gathered the first fruits of the Bolshevik
revolution, because there was no bourgeois revolution to destroy feudalism and
absolutism and to initiate a liberal democratic regime.
But
achievement of these objectives by a liberal democratic revolution presupposes
two conditions: the existence of a bourgeoisie that knows where it is going and
why; and the existence of a revolutionary spirit in the peasant class and,
above all, of a declaration of the peasants’ right to land, in defiance of the
power of the landowning aristocracy. In Peru these conditions existed even less
than in other countries at the time of the War of Independence. The revolution
had triumphed because the peoples of the continent had been obliged to join
together against Spanish rule and because world political and economic
circumstances were in its favor. The continental nationalism of the Spanish
American revolutionaries and the enforced association of their destinies
combined to bring the most backward abreast of the most advanced peoples in
their march toward capitalism.
In
his study of the Argentine and, therefore, of the American revolution,
Echevarria classifies society in the following manner:
American
society was divided into three classes with conflicting interests and without
any moral or political bond. The first class was comprised of the lawyers,
clergy, and authorities; the second class was made up of those who became rich
through monopolies or good luck; the third class contained the workers, known
as gauchos and compadritos in the Rio de la Plata, cholos in Peru, rotos in
Chile, and leperos in Mexico. The Indian and African castes were slaves who
lived outside of society. The first class, with the power and privileges of the
hidalgo, produced nothing and enjoyed a life of ease; it was an aristocracy
largely composed of Peninsular Spaniards and included very few criollos. The
second class also lived in comfort, peacefully engaged in industry or commerce;
it was the middle class that sat on the municipal council. The third class was
the only one that contributed manual labor to production and it was made up of
artisans and every kind of proletariat. American descendants of the first two
classes who had received some education in America or in Spain were the ones to
raise the banner of the revolution.[10]
The
struggle for independence in many cases united the land-holding nobility and
the bourgeois merchants, either because the former had been indoctrinated with
liberal ideas or because it regarded the revolution as only a liberation
movement from the Spanish crown. The peasant population, which in Peru was In-’
dian, did not participate directly or actively in the war, and the
revolutionary program did not represent its claims.
But
this program was inspired by liberal ideology. The revolution could not exclude
principles that supported agrarian reform founded on the practical necessity
and theoretical justice of freeing the land from its feudal shackles. The
republic introduced these principles into its statutes. Peru did not have a
bourgeoisie to apply them in accordance with its economic interests and its
political and legal doctrine. Although the republic—following the course and
dictates of history—was established on liberal and bourgeois principles, the
practical effects of independence on agricultural property could not help but
be limited by the interests of the large landowners.
Therefore,
the disentailment of agricultural property required by the basic policies of
the republic did not attack the latifundium. And if, on the one hand, the new
laws in compensation ordered the distribution of land to the Indian, on the
other hand, they attacked the “community” in the name of liberal precepts.
Thus
was inaugurated a regime that, whatever its principles, made the condition of
the Indian to some extent worse instead of better. And this was not the fault
of the ideology that inspired the new policy, which, rightly applied, would
have ended feudal control of land and converted the Indian into a small
landowner.
The
new policy formally abolished the mita, the encomienda, et cetera. It included
a series of measures that signified the end of the Indian’s serfdom. But since
it nevertheless left the power and force of feudal property intact, it
invalidated its own measures for protecting the small landowner and farmer.
Although
the landholding aristocracy in principle forfeited its privileges, in fact it
maintained its position. It continued to be the dominant class in Peru. The
revolution had not really raised a new class to power. The professional and
business bourgeoisie was too weak to govern. The abolition of forced labor,
therefore, never became more than a theoretical declaration because it did not
touch the latifundium, and servitude is only one of the aspects of feudalism,
not feudalism itself.
The
Agrarian Policy of the Republic
During
the period of military caudillos that followed the War of Independence, a
liberal policy on agricultural property obviously could not be developed or
even be formulated. The military caudillo was the natural product of a
revolutionary period that had not been able to create a new governing class. In
this situation, power was taken over by the military leaders of the revolution,
who, on the one hand, enjoyed the prestige of their 1 wartime achievements and,
on the other, were in a position to keep themselves in the government by means
of armed force. Of course, the caudillo could not remain aloof from the
influence of class interests or of opposing historical currents. He was
supported by the spineless liberalism and rhetoric of the urban demos and by
the colonial conservatism of the landowning class. He was sanctioned by the
city’s lawmakers and jurists and by the writers and orators of the latifundium
aristocracy. In the contest between liberal and conservative interests, there
was no direct and active campaign to vindicate the peasant, which would have
compelled the liberals to include the redistribution of agricultural property
in their program.
A
true statesman, not one of our military bosses of this pe- J riod, would have
heeded and dealt with this basic problem.
The
military caudillo, furthermore, seems organically incapable of so sweeping a
reform, which first and foremost requires an informed legal and economic mind.
His tyranny creates an atmosphere that is hostile to new legal and economic
principles. Vasconcelos makes this observation:
On
an economic level, the caudillo is always the main support of the latifundium.
Although he sometimes declares himself to be an enemy of property, there is
almost no caudillo who does not end up as an hacendado. The fact is that
^military power inevitably leads to -land appropriation, whether by soldier,
caudillo, king, or emperor; despotism and the latifundium go together. This is
natural. Economic, like political, rights can only be preserved and defended
within a regime of liberty. Absolutism always means poverty for the many and opulence
and abusive power for the few. Only democracy, with all its defects, has been
able to take us closer to the best achievements of social justice—at least,
democracy as it is before it degenerates into the imperialism of republics that
are too wealthy and that are surrounded by decadent peoples. In any event,
among us the caudillo and military government have cooperated in the
development of the latifundium. Just a glance at the property titles of our
great landowners would reveal that almost all owe their wealth first to the
Spanish crown and later to concessions and illegal favors granted to the
influential generals of our false republics. Benefits and concessions have been
granted over and over again without any regard for the rights of entire Indian
or mestizo populations, who were helpless to assert their ownership.[11]
A
new legal and economic order must be, in any case, the work of a class and not
of a caudillo. When the class exists, the caudillo acts as its interpreter and
trustee. His policy is no longer determined by his personal judgment but by a
group of collective interests and requirements. Peru lacked a middle class
capable of organizing a strong and efficient state. Militarism represented an
elementary and provisional order that, as soon as it could be dispensed with,
needed to be replaced by a more advanced and integrated order. It could not
understand or even consider the agrarian problem. Elementary and immediate
problems absorbed its limited action. Castilla was the military caudillo at his
best. His shrewd opportunism, slyness, crudeness, and absolute empiricism
prevented him from adopting a liberal policy until the very end. Castilla
realized that the liberals of his time were a literary group, a coterie, not a
class. Therefore, he cautiously avoided any act that would seriously oppose the
interests and principles of the conservative class. But the merits of his
policy lie in his reformist and progressive leanings. His acts of greatest
historic significance—the abolition of Negro slavery and of forced tribute from
the Indians—expressed his liberal attitude. Since the enactment of the Civil
Code, Peru has entered a period of gradual organization. It is hardly necessary
to point out that the Code signified, among other things, the decline of
militarism. Inspired by the same principles as the republic’s early decrees on
land, it reinforced and continued the policy of disen-tailment and
redistribution of agricultural property. Ugarte, taking note of the progress
made by national legislation on land, remarks that the Code “confirmed the
legal abolition of the Indian communities and of the entailments; it introduced
new legislation establishing occupation as one of the means of acquiring
ownerless land; in its rules on inheritance, it tried to favor small property.”[12]
Francisco
Garcia Calderon attributed to the Civil Code effects that it actually did not
have or, at least, that were not as drastic and absolute as he believed. “The
constitution had destroyed privileges and the civil law dividing up properties
ended the unequal division of inheritances. This provision resulted,
politically, in the death of the oligarchy, the aristocracy, the latifundium;
socially, in the rise of the bourgeoisie and the mestizo; economically—by
dividing inheritances equally—in the formation of small properties, previously
blocked by the great estates of the nobility.”[13]
This
was undoubtedly the intention of the codifiers of rights in Peru. However, the
Civil Code is merely one of the instruments of liberal policy and capitalist
practice. As Ugarte recognizes, the Peruvian legislation “proposes to encourage
the democratization of rural property, but by the purely negatived means of
removing obstacles rather than by giving the farmers positive protection.”[14]
Nowhere has the division, that is, redistribution, of agricultural property
been possible without special expropriation laws that have transferred
ownership of the land to the class that works on it.
Notwithstanding
the Code, small property has not flourished in Peru. To the contrary, the
latifundium has been consolidated and extended. And only the property of the
Indian “community” has suffered the consequences of this twisted liberalism.
Large
Property and Political Power
The
two factors that kept the independence movement from taking up the agrarian
problem in Peru—the extremely rudimentary state of the urban bourgeoisie and
the extra-social situation, as Echevarria defines it, of the Indian—later
prevented the governments of the republic from developing a policy aimed in
some way at a more equitable distribution of land.
During
the period of the military caudillo, it was the latifundia and not the urban
demos that grew stronger. With business and finance in the hands of foreigners,
the emergence of a vigorous urban bourgeoisie was not economically possible.
Spanish education was absolutely incompatible with the ends and needs of
industrialism and capitalism; instead of technicians, it trained lawyers,
writers, priests, et cetera. Unless the latter felt a special vocation for
Jacobinism or demagoguery, they joined the clientele of the landowning class.
In turn, business capital, almost exclusively foreign, had no choice but to
deal and associate with this aristocracy, which, moreover, tacitly or
explicitly continued to dominate political life. In this way, the landholding
aristocracy and its adherents became the beneficiaries of the fiscal policy and
the exploitation of guano and nitrate. In this way, this group was compelled by
its economic role to assume the function of the bourgeoisie in Peru, although
it did not lose its colonial and aristocratic vices and prejudices. And in this
way, the urban bourgeoisie—professionals and businessmen—were finally absorbed
by civilismo.
The
power of this class—civilistas or neogodos—was to a large measure derived from
ownership of land. In the early years of independence, it was not exactly a
class of capitalists, but a class of landowners. As a landowning rather than an
educated class, it was able to merge its interests with those of foreign
businessmen and creditors and by this token to negotiate with the state and to
traffic in the country’s natural resources. Thanks to the properties it had
received under the viceroyalty, it possessed business capital under the
republic. The privileges of the colony engendered the privileges of the
republic.
Therefore,
this class naturally and instinctively held the most conservative views on land
ownership. The continued extra-social condition of the Indians, on the other
hand, meant that there were no peasant masses ready to fight for their rights.
These
have been the principal factors in the preservation and development of the
latifundium. The liberalism of republican legislation was passive in its
attitude toward feudal property and only took action against communal property.
Although it could do nothing to the latifundium, it could do a great deal of
damage to the “community.” When a people are traditionally communist,
dissolving the “community” does not help to create small properties. A society
cannot be transformed artificially, still less a peasant society deeply
attached to its traditions and its legal institutions. Individualism has not
originated in any country’s constitution or civil code. It must be formed
through a more complicated and spontaneous process. Destroying the
“communities” did not convert the Indians into small landowners or even into
free salaried workers; it delivered their lands to the gamonales and their
clientele and made it easier for the latifundista to chain the Indian to the
latifundium.
It
is claimed that the key to the accumulation of agricultural property on the
coast has been the need for an adequate water supply. According to this
argument, irrigated agriculture in valleys formed by shallow rivers has caused
large property to flourish and medium and small property to wither away. But
this is a specious argument, with only a grain of truth. The overrated
technical or material reasons on which it is based have affected the
accumulation of property only since the establishment and development of
large-scale commercial agriculture on the coast. Before coastal agriculture
acquired a capitalist organization, the factor of irrigation was not important
enough to determine the accumulation of property. It is true that the scarcity
of irrigation water, because of the difficulties of its widespread
distribution, favors the large landowner. But this is not what has kept
property from being subdivided. The origins of the coastal latifundium go back
to the colonial regime. The depopulation of the coast owing to colonial
practices was at the same time one of the consequences of and one of the
reasons for large property. The labor problem, which has been the only problem
of the coastal landowner, is rooted in the latifundium. Landowners sought to
solve it with the Negro slave in the colonial period and with the Chinese
coolie in the time of the republic. A vain effort. The earth cannot be
populated and, above all, made fruitful with slaves. Thanks to their policy,
the great landholders own all the land possible, but they do not have enough
men to till it and bring it to life. This is the defense of the large property;
but it is also its misfortune and its weakness.
The
agrarian situation in the sierra, on the other hand, shows the fallacy of the
above argument. The sierra has no water problem. Abundant rainfall allows the
latifundium owner and the communal farmer to grow the same crops. Nevertheless,
property is also accumulated in the sierra. This circumstance proves that the question
is essentially a socio-political one.
The
development of commercial crops for an export agriculture in the coastal
plantations appears to be wholly dependent on the economic colonization of the
Latin American countries by Western capitalism. British businessmen and bankers
became interested in these lands when they saw the possibility of using them
profitably for the production of sugar, first, and cotton, later. From a very
early date, a large part of agricultural property was mortgaged to foreign firms.
Hacendados in debt to foreign businessmen and lenders served as intermediaries,
almost as sharecroppers, for Anglo-Saxon capitalism in order to guarantee that
their fields would be cultivated at minimum cost by wretched laborers bent
double under the whip of colonial slave drivers.
But
on the coast, the latifundium has reached a fairly advanced level of capitalist
technique, although its exploitation still rests on feudal practices and
principles. The yields of cotton and sugar cane are those of the capitalist
system. Enterprises are heavily financed and land is worked with modern
machines and methods. Powerful industrial plants operate to process these
products. Meanwhile, in the sierra, yields are usually not higher for
latifundium lands than for communal lands. And if we use an objective economic
standard and judge a production system by its results, this fact alone
hopelessly condemns the land tenure system in the sierra.
The
“Community” under the Republic
We
have already seen how the formal liberalism of republican legislation only
acted against the Indian “community.” The concept of individual property has
had almost an antisocial function in the republic, because of its conflict with
the existence of the “community.” If the latter had been dissolved and
expropriated by a capitalism in vigorous and independent growth, it would have
been considered a casualty of economic progress. The Indian would have passed
from a mixed system of communism and servitude to a system of free wages.
Although this change would have denaturalized him somewhat, it would have
placed him in a position to organize and emancipate himself as a class, like
the other proletariats of the world. However, the gradual expropriation and
absorption of the “community” by the latifundium not only plunged him deeper
into servitude, but also destroyed the economic and legal institution that
helped safeguard the spirit and substance of his ancient civilization.[15]
During
the republican period, national writers and legislators have shown a fairly
uniform tendency to condemn the “community” as the residue of a primitive
society or the survival of colonial organization. This attitude sometimes has
been due to the pressures of gamonalismo and sometimes to the individualist and
liberal thought that automatically dominated an overly literary and emotional
culture.
Dr.
M. V. Villaran, an able and effective representative of this school of thought,
has written a study that indicates the need to carefully revise its conclusions
concerning the Indian “community.” Dr. Villaran theoretically maintains his
liberal position by advocating the principle of individual property, but he
accepts in practice the defense of the “communities” against the latifundium by
recognizing that they have a function that the state should protect.
But
Hildebrando Castro Pozo’s book Nuestra comunidad indigena demonstrates that the
first integrated and documented defense of the Indian “community” had to be
inspired in socialist thought and be based on a concrete study of its nature
carried out according to the research methods of modern sociology and
economics. In this interesting study, Castro Pozo approaches the problem of the
“community” with a mind free of liberal I prejudices and prepared to evaluate
and understand it. He reveals that, despite the attacks of a liberal formalism
serving the interests of a feudal regime, the Indian “community” is still a
living organism and that, within the hostile environment that\ suffocates and
deforms it, it spontaneously shows unmistakable potentialities for evolution
and development.
Castro
Pozo maintains that “the ayllu or community has conserved its natural
peculiarity, its character as an almost family institution that continued to
harbor, after the conquest, its main constituents.”[16]
In
this he agrees with Valcarcel, whose statements about the ayllu appear to some
to be too colored by his ideal of an Indian renaissance.
What
are the “communities” and how do they operate at present? Castro Pozo
classifies them in the following way:
First—agricultural
communities. Second—agricultural and livestock communities. Third—communities
of pasture lands and watering places. Fourth—communities that have the use of
the land. It should be borne in mind that in a country like ours, where a
single institution acquires different characteristics according to the
environment in which it has developed, no one type is actually so distinct and
different from the others that it can be held up as a model. On the contrary,
all the types have some characteristics in common. But since circumstances
combine to impose a given kind of life in customs, work systems, properties,
and industries, each group has predominant characteristics that make it
agricultural, livestock, livestock with communal pastures and water, or
usufructuary of the land which unquestionably belonged to the ayllu.[17]
These
differences have developed, not through the natural evolution or degeneration
of the ancient “community,” but as a result of legislation aimed at the
individualization of property and, especially, as a result of the expropriation
of communal lands for the latifundium. They demonstrate, therefore, the
vitality of the Indian “community,” which invariably reacts by modifying its
forms of cooperation and association. The Indian, in spite of one hundred years
of republican legislation, has not become an individualist. And this is not
because he resists progress, as is claimed by his detractors. Rather, it is
because individualism under a feudal system does not find the necessary conditions
to gain strength and develop. On the other hand, communism has continued to be
the Indian’s only defense. Individualism cannot flourish or even exist
effectively outside a system of free competition. And the Indian has never felt
less free than when he has felt alone.
Therefore,
in Indian villages where families are grouped together that have lost the bonds
of their ancestral heritage and community work, hardy and stubborn habits of
cooperation and solidarity still survive that are the empirical expression of a
Communist spirit. The “community” is the instrument of this spirit. When
expropriation and redistribution seem about to liquidate the “community,”
indigenous socialism always finds a way to reject, resist, or evade this
incursion. Communal work and property are replaced by the cooperation of
individuals. As Castro Pozo writes: “Customs have been reduced to mingas or
gatherings of all the ayllu to help some member of the community with his
walls, irrigation ditches, or house. Work proceeds to the music of harps and
violins and the consumption of several quarts of sugar-cane aguardiente,
packages of cigarettes, and wads of coca.” These customs have led the Indians
to the practice—incipient and rudimentary, to be sure—of the collective
contract. Instead of individuals separately offering their services to
landowners or contractors, all the able-bodied men of the cooperative jointly
contract to do the work.
The
“Community” and the Latifundium
The
defense of the “community” does not rest on abstract principles of justice or
sentimental traditionalist considerations, but on concrete and practical
reasons of a social and economic order. In Peru, communal property does not
represent a primitive economy that has gradually been replaced by a progressive
economy founded on individual property. No; the “communities” have been
despoiled of their land for the benefit of the feudal or semi-feudal
latifundium, which is constitutionally incapable of technical progress.[18]
On
the coast, the latifundium has evolved in its crop cultivation from feudal
routine to capitalist technique, while the communist fanning of the Indian
“community” has disappeared. But in the sierra the latifundium has preserved
its feudal character intact and has put up a much stronger resistance than the
“community” to the development of a capitalist economy. In fact, when a
“community” is connected by railway to commerce and central transportation, it
spontaneously changes into a cooperative. Castro Pozo, who, as head of the
Section of Indian Affairs of the Ministry of Development, collected a great
deal of information on the life of “communities,” points to the interesting
case of the Muquiyauyo “community,” which, he says, combines the
characteristics of producer, consumer, and credit cooperative. “As the owner of
a magnificent electric plant on the banks of the Mantaro River, which furnishes
light and power to the small industries of the districts of Jauja, Concepcion,
Mito, Muqui, Sincos, Huaripampa, and Muquiyauyo, it has become a communal institution
par excellence. Instead of neglecting its indigenous customs, it has utilized
them to carry out the work of the enterprise. It has purchased heavy machinery
with the money saved on labor done by the cooperative, which even used women
and children to help cart building materials, just as in the mingas that worked
on communal construction.”[19]
The
latifundium compares unfavorably with the “community” as an enterprise for
agricultural production. Within the capitalist system, large property replaces
and banishes small agricultural property by its ability to intensify production
through the employment of modern farm methods. Industrialization of agriculture
is accompanied by accumulation of agrarian property. Large property seems to be
justified by the interests of production, which are identified, at least in
theory, with the interests of society. But this is not the case of the
latifundium and, therefore, it does not meet an economic need. Except for
sugar-cane plantations—which produce aguardiente to intoxicate and stupefy the
Indian peasant—the latifundium of the sierra generally grows the same crops as
the “community,” and it produces no more. Lack of agricultural statistics does
not permit an exact estimate of partial differences; but all available data
indicate that crop yields of “communities” are not on the average less than
those of latifundia. The only production statistics for the sierra are in wheat
and they support this conclusion. Castro Pozo, summarizing the data for
1917-1918, writes:
Communal
and individual properties harvested an average of 450 and 580 kilos per
hectare, respectively. If it is taken into account that most fertile lands are
in the hands of the large landowners, since the struggle for land in the south
has reached the point where the Indian owner is gotten rid of by force or by
murder, and that the ignorance of the communal farmer induces him to lie about
the amount of his harvest in fear of new taxes or assessments by minor
political authorities or their agents, it can readily be inferred that the
higher production figure for individual property is not accurate and that the
difference is negligible. Therefore, the two types of properties are identical
in means of production and cultivation.[20]
In
feudal Russia of the last century, the latifundium showed higher yields than
small property. The figures in hectoliters per hectare were as follows: for
rye, 11.5 against 9.4; for wheat, 11 against 9.1; for oats, 15.4 against 12.7;
for barley, 11.5 against 10.5; and for potatoes, 92.3 against 72.[21]
As
a factor of production, the latifundium of the Peruvian sierra turns out to be
inferior to the execrated latifundium of czarist Russia.
The
“community,” on the one hand, is a system of production that keeps alive in the
Indian the moral incentives that stimulate him to do his best work. Castro Pozo
very correctly observes that “the Indian community preserves two great economic
and social principles that up to now neither the science of sociology nor the
empiricism of great industrialists has been able to solve satisfactorily: to
contract workers collectively and to have the work performed in a relaxed and
pleasant atmosphere of friendly competition.”[22]
By
dissolving or abandoning the “community,” the system of the feudal latifundium
has attacked not only an economic institution but also, and more important, a
social institution, one that defends the indigenous tradition, maintains the
function of the rural family, and reflects the popular legal philosophy so
prized by Proudhon and Sorel.[23]
The Work
System—Serf and Wage Earner
In
agriculture, the work system is chiefly determined by the property system. It
is not surprising, therefore, that to the same extent that the feudal
latifundium survives in Peru, servitude survives in various forms and under
various names. Agriculture on the coast appears to differ from agriculture in
the sierra less in its work system than in its technique. Coastal agriculture
has evolved rather rapidly toward a capitalist procedure in farming and in the
processing and sale of crops. But it has made little progress in its attitude
and conduct as regards labor. Unless forced to by circumstances, the colonial
latifundium has not renounced its feudal treatment of the worker.
This
phenomenon is not altogether explained by the fact that the old feudal lords
have kept their properties and, acting as intermediaries for foreign capital,
have adopted the practice but not the spirit of modern capitalism. It is also
due to the colonial mentality of a landholding class accustomed to regard labor
with the criteria of slave owners and slave traders. In Europe, the feudal lord
to some extent represented the primitive patriarchal tradition, so that he
naturally felt superior to his serfs but not ethnically or nationally different
from them. The aristocratic landowner of Europe has found it possible to accept
a new concept and a new practice in his relations with the agricultural worker.
In colonial America, however, the white man’s arrogant and deeply rooted belief
in the colored man’s inferiority has stood in the way of this transition.
When
not Indian, the agricultural worker of the Peruvian coast has been the Negro
slave and the Chinese coolie, who are, if possible, held in even greater
contempt. The racial prejudices of the medieval aristocrat and the white
colonizer have combined in the coastal latifundista.
Yanaconazgo
and indenture are not the only expressions of feudal methods that still persist
in coastal agriculture. The hacienda is run like a baronial fief. The laws of
the state are not applied in the latifundium without the tacit or formal
consent of the large landowners. The authority of political or administrative
officials is in fact subject to the authority of the landowner in his domain.
The latter considers his latifundium to be outside the jurisdiction of the
state and he disregards completely the civil rights of the people who live
within his property. He collects excise taxes, grants monopolies, and imposes
sanctions restricting the liberty of the laborers and their families. Within
the hacienda, transportation, business, and even customs are controlled by the
landlord. And frequently the huts that he rents to the laborers do not differ
greatly from the sheds that formerly served as slave quarters.
The
great coastal landowners are not legally entitled to their feudal or
semi-feudal rights; but their position of dominance and their vast estates in a
territory without industries and without transportation give them almost
unrestricted power. Through indenture and yanaconazgo, the large proprietors
block the appearance of free-wage contracting, a functional necessity to a
liberal and capitalist economy. Indenture, which prevents the laborer from
disposing of his person and his labor until he satisfies the obligations he has
contracted with the landlord, is unmistakably descended from the semi-slave
traffic in coolies; yanaconazgo is a kind of servitude in politically and
economically backward villages that has prolonged feudalism into our capitalist
age. The Peruvian system of yanaconazgo is identified, for example, with the
Russian system of polovnisckestvo, under which crops sometimes were divided
equally between landlord and peasant and sometimes only a third was given to
the latter.[24]
The
coast is so thinly populated that agricultural enterprises constantly face a
labor shortage. Yanaconazgo, by giving the scanty native population a minimal
guarantee of the use of the land, discourages emigration. Indenture attracts
the laborers of the sierra to coastal agriculture by offering them better pay.
This
indicates that, in spite of everything and although perhaps only superficially
or partially,[25]
the situation of the laborer on the haciendas of the coast is better than on
the haciendas of the sierra, where feudalism has remained all-powerful. Coastal
landowners are compelled to accept, albeit in a restricted and attenuated form,
the system of free labor and wages. The laborer keeps his freedom to emigrate
as well as to refuse his services to the employer who mistreats him. The
proximity of ports and cities and the accessibility of modern transportation
and commerce, furthermore, offer the laborer the possibility of escaping his
rural destiny and of trying to support himself in another way.
If
the agriculture of the coast had been more progressive and capitalist, it would
have sought a logical solution to the labor problem. The more enlightened
landowners would have realized that the latifundium as it now operates leads to
depopulation and that, therefore, the labor problem is one of its most obvious
v and inevitable consequences.[26]
As
capitalist technique advances in coastal agriculture, the wage earner replaces
the yanacon. Scientific farming—the use of machinery, fertilizer, et cetera—is
incompatible with routine and primitive agriculture. But the demographic
factor—“the labor problem”—is a serious obstacle to this process of capitalist
development. In the valleys, yanaconazgo and its variations guarantee the
enterprises a minimum of permanent workers. Furthermore, the family of the
native resident laborer or yanacon represents a source of future workers for
the hacendado.
The
large landholders themselves have recognized the advisability of
establishing—very gradually and cautiously—colonies of small property owners.
Part of the irrigated land in the Imperial Valley has been set aside for small
farms. The same principle will be applied to other irrigated zones. An
intelligent and experienced landowner recently told me that it was essential
for the large estate to have small farms nearby from which to draw labor, in
order not to have to depend on migrant workers or indenture. The program of the
Agrarian Subdivision Company is part of the official policy to gradually
establish small properties.[27]
But
since this policy systematically avoids expropriation or, more precisely,
large-scale expropriation by the state, for reasons of public interest or
distributive justice, and since its possibilities of development are for the
moment restricted to a few valleys, it is not likely that small property will
promptly and extensively replace yanaconazgo in its demographic function. In
valleys where plantation owners cannot contract a supply of labor from the
sierra on favorable terms, yanaconazgo in its various forms will coexist with
the wage earner for some time.
The
forms of sharecropping and tenant farming vary on the coast and in the sierra
according to regions, practice, or crops. They also have different names. But
within their diversity, they can generally be identified with precapitalist
methods of farming observed in other countries of semi-feudal agriculture, for
example, czarist Russia. The system of the Russian otrabotki presented all the
ways that exist in Peru of paying rent—by work, money, or crops. This can be
confirmed simply by reading what Schkaff has to say about this system in his
documented book on the agrarian question in Russia:
Between
servitude based largely on violence and coercion and free labor based on purely
economic necessity there extends a whole transitional system of extremely
varied forms that combine the features of the barchtchina and the wage earner.
It is the otrabototsch-nai system. Wages are paid either in money, where
services are contracted, or in produce or in land. In the last case (otrabotki
in the strict sense of the word), the landlord lets the peasant use his land in
return for the latter’s work on his estate. . . . Payment for work in the
otrabotki system is always less than the wages of capitalist free contracting.
Payment in produce makes landlords more independent of price fluctuations in
the wheat and labor markets. Since \ nearby peasants supply them with cheaper
labor, they enjoy a real local monopoly. . . . Rent paid by the peasant takes
several forms: in addition to his labor, the peasant is obliged to give money
and produce. If he receives a deciatina of land, he agrees to work a deciatina
and a half of the landlord’s estate, to give ten eggs and one hen. He will also
deliver his cattle’s manure; for everything, including manure, is used for
payment. Frequently, the peasant is even required “to do all that the landlord
demands of him,” to transport crops, cut firewood, and carry loads.[28]
In
the agriculture of the sierra exactly those features of feudal property and
work are found. The free labor system has not developed there. The plantation
owner does not care about the productivity of his land, only about the income
he receives from it. He reduces the factors of production to just two: land and
the Indian. Ownership of land permits him to exploit limitlessly the labor of
the Indian. The usury practiced on this labor—translated into the Indian’s
misery—is added to the rent charged for the land, calculated at the usual rate.
The hacendado reserves the best land for himself and distributes the least
fertile among his Indian laborers, who are obliged to work the former without
pay and to live off the produce of the latter. The Indian pays his rent in work
or crops, very rarely in money (since the Indian’s labor is worth more to the
landlord), and most often in mixed forms. I have before me a study made by Dr.
Ponce de Leon of the University of Cuzco that gives first-hand documentation of
all the varieties of tenant farming and sharecropping existing in that huge
department. It presents a quite objective picture—in spite of the author’s
conclusions about the privileges of the landlords—of feudal exploitation. Here
are some of his statements:
In
the province of Paucartambo, the landlord grants the use of his land to a group
of Indians on the condition that during the entire year they do all the farming
needed on the hacienda lands reserved to the owner. The tenants or yanacones,
as they are called in this province, are obliged to transport the plantation
crops to this city on their own animals and do domestic service in the hacienda
itself or more usually in Cuzco, where the landlords prefer to reside. ... In
Chumbivilcas, there is a similar arrangement. Tenants farm as much land as they
can and in exchange must work for the owner as often as he requires. ... In the
province of Anta, the landlord grants the use of his land on the following
conditions: the tenant furnishes the capital (seeds and fertilizer) and all the
labor needed to bring the crop to harvest, when he divides it equally with the
landlord. That is, each one collects fifty percent of the produce, although the
landlord has contributed nothing but the use of his land, without even
fertilizing it. But this is not all. The tenant farmer is required to attend
personally to the work of the landlord, receiving the customary wages of
twenty-five centavos a day.[29]
A
comparison of the foregoing with Schkaff’s report on Russia demonstrates that
none of the dark aspects of precapitalist property and work is lacking in the
feudal sierra.
The
“Colonialism” of Our Coastal Agriculture
The
industrialization of agriculture in the coastal valleys under a capitalist
system and technique has reached its present level of development thanks mainly
to British and American investment in our production of sugar and cotton.
Landlords have contributed little in industrial ability and capital to the
expansion of these crops. Financed by powerful export firms, they grow cotton
and sugar cane on their lands.
The
best lands of the coastal valleys are planted with cotton and sugar cane, not
exactly because they are suited to these crops, but because only these crops
are important at present to English and American businessmen. Agricultural
credit—absolutely dependent on the interests of these firms until a national
agricultural bank is established—does not promote any other crop. Food crops
intended for the domestic market generally are grown by small landowners and
tenant farmers. Only in the valleys of Lima, because of the proximity of
sizable urban markets, do large estates grow food crops. Often cotton and
sugarcane haciendas do not raise enough food to supply their own rural
populations.
Even
the small landowner or tenant farmer may be driven to plant cotton by these
interests that do not take into account the
One
of the most evident causes of the rise in food prices in coastal towns is the
displacement of traditional food crops by cotton on the farmland of the coast.
Commercial
aid is given to the farmer almost exclusively for raising cotton. Loans are
reserved, at all levels, for the cotton farmer. The production of cotton is not
governed by any consideration of the national economy. It is produced for the
world market, with no control to safeguard this economy against possible drops
in prices due to periods of industrial crisis or of overproduction of cotton.
A
cattle rancher recently told me that whereas a loan extended on a cotton crop
is Limited only by price fluctuations, a loan on a herd or ranch is entirely ad
hoc and uncertain. A cattle rancher on the coast cannot obtain a substantial
bank loan for expanding his business, and unless a farmer can put up as security
either a cotton or sugar-cane crop, he is no better off.
If
domestic consumption were met by the country’s agricultural output, this would
not be such an artificial situation. But the country still does not produce all
the food that the population needs. Our heaviest imports are in “foodstuffs”:
Lp. [libras peruanas] 3,620,235 in 1924. This figure, within total imports of
eighteen million pounds, reveals one of the problems of our economy. Although
we cannot stop importing foodstuffs, we can eliminate its leading items, for
example, wheat and flour, which reached more than twelve million soles in 1924.
For
some time, the Peruvian economy has clearly and urgently called for the country
to grow enough wheat for the bread of its people. If this had been accomplished,
Peru would no longer have to pay twelve or more million soles a year to foreign
countries for the wheat consumed in its coastal cities.
Why
has this problem of our economy not been solved? It is not just because the
state has failed to work out a policy on foodstuffs. Nor, I repeat, is it
because sugar cane and cotton are the best crops for the soil and climate of
the coast. A single valley, a single Andean tableland, if opened up with a few
kilometers of railway or roads, can supply the entire Peruvian population with
more than enough wheat, barley, et cetera. In the early colonial years, the
Spaniards raised wheat on that same coast until the cataclysm that changed the
climatic conditions of the littoral. Subsequently, no scientific and integrated
study was made of the possibility of reestablishing its cultivation. The
diseases that attack wheat grown on the coast went unchecked by the indolent
criollo until recently, when experiments carried out in the north on the lands
of the “Salamanca” demonstrated that there are varieties of wheat resistant to
disease.[30]
The
obstacle to a solution is in the very structure of the Peruvian economy, which
can only move or develop in response to the interests and needs of markets in
London and New York. These markets regard Peru as a storehouse of raw materials
and a customer for their manufactured goods. Peruvian agriculture, therefore,
obtains credit and transport solely for the products that benefit the great
markets. Foreign capital is one day interested in rubber, another in cotton,
another in sugar. When London can obtain a commodity more cheaply and in
sufficient quantity from India or Egypt, it immediately abandons its sup-’
pliers in Peru. Our latifundistas, our landholders, may think that they are
independent, but they are actually only intermediaries or agents of foreign
capital.
Final
Propositions
To
the basic propositions already stated in this story on the agrarian question in
Peru, I should add the following:
1.
The nature of agricultural property in Peru is one of the greatest obstacles to
the development of a national capitalism. Large or medium tenant farmers work a
very high percentage of land, which is owned by landlords who have never
managed their own estates. These landlords, completely ignorant of and remote
from agriculture and its problems, live from their property income without
contributing^ any work or intelligence to the economic activity of the country.
They belong to the category of aristocrats or rentiers who are unproductive
consumers. Through their inherited property rights they receive an income that
may be considered a feudal privilege. The tenant farmer, on the other hand, is
more like the head of a capitalist enterprise. Under a true capitalist system,
this industrialist and the capital financing him would benefit from his efforts
to increase the value of his business. Control of the land by a class of
rentiers imposes on production the heavy burden of maintaining an income that
is not subject to the vicissitudes of agriculture. The tenant farmer generally
is not encouraged by this system to improve the land and its crops and
installations. Fear of a higher rent when his contract expires keeps his
investments to a minimum. The tenant farmer’s ambition is, of course, to become
a property owner; but by his own industry he makes the property worth more to
the landlord. The lack of agricultural credit in Peru prevents a more intensive
capitalist expropriation of land for this class of industrialists. Capitalist
exploitation and industrialization of land cannot develop fully and freely
unless all feudal privileges are abolished; therefore it has made very little
progress in our country. This problem is just as apparent to a capitalist as to
a socialist critic. Edouard Herriot states a principle that is embodied in the
agrarian program of the French liberal middle class when he says that “land
requires the actual presence.”[31] In this respect, the West is certainly
less advanced than the East, since Moslem law establishes, as Charles Gide
observes, that “the land belongs to the one who makes it fertile and
productive.”
2.
The latifundium system in Peru is also the most serious barrier to white
immigration. For obvious reasons, we hope for the immigration of peasants from
Italy, Central Europe, and the Balkans. The urban population of the West
emigrates to a lesser degree and industrial workers know, moreover, that there
is little for them to do in Latin America. The European peasant does not come
to America to work as a laborer except where high wages would permit him to
save a great deal of money; and this is not the case in Peru. Not even the most
wretched farmer in Poland or Rumania would accept the living conditions of our
day laborers on the sugar-cane and cotton haciendas. His ambition is to become
a small landowner. To attract such immigrants, we must offer them land complete
with living quarters, animals, and tools and connected with railroads and
markets. A Fascist official or propagandist who visited Peru about three years
ago declared to local newspapers that our system of large properties was
incompatible with a colonization and immigration program that would attract the
Italian peasant.
3.
The subjugation of coastal agriculture to the interests of British and American
capital not only keeps it from organizing and developing according to the
specific needs of the national economy—that is, first of all to feed the
population—but also from trying out and adopting new crops. The largest
undertaking of this kind in recent years, the tobacco plantations in Tum-bes,
was made possible only by state aid. This is the best proof that the liberal
laissez-faire policy which has been so sterile in Peru should be replaced by a
social policy of nationalizing our great natural resources.
4.
Agricultural property on the coast, despite the prosperity it has enjoyed, so
far has been incapable of attending to the problems of rural health) Hacendados
still have not complied with the modest requirements of the Office of Public
Health concerning malaria. There has been no general improvement in farm
settlements. The rural population of the coast has the highest rates of
mortality and disease in the country (except, of course, for the extremely
unhealthy regions of the jungle).
Demographic
statistics for the rural district of Pativilca three years ago showed a higher
death rate than birth rate. Sutton, the engineer in charge of the Olmos
project, believes that irrigation works may offer the most radical solution to
the problem of marshes and swamps. But outside of the project in Huacho to use
the overflow of the Chancay River (it is directed by Antonio Grana, who is also
responsible for an interesting colonization scheme), the project in “Chiclin”
to use ground water, and a few other undertakings in the north, private capital
has done very little to irrigate the Peruvian coast in recent years.
5.
In the sierra, agrarian feudalism is unable to create wealth or progress. With
the exception of livestock ranches that export wool and other products, the
latifundia in the valleys and tablelands of the sierra produce almost nothing.
Crop yields are negligible and farming methods are primitive. A local
publication once said that in the Peruvian sierra the gamonal appears to be
relatively as poor as the Indian. This argument—which is absolutely invalid in
terms of relativity—far from justifying the gamonal, damns him. In modern
economics, understood as an objective and concrete science, the only
justification for capitalism with its captains of industry and finance is its
function as a creator of wealth. On an economic plane, the feudal lord or
gamonal is the first one responsible for the worthlessness of his land. We have
already seen that, in spite of owning the best lands, his productivity is no
higher than the Indian’s with his primitive farming tools and arid communal
lands. The gamonal as an economic factor is, therefore, completely
disqualified.
6.
To explain this situation it is said that the agricultural economy of the
sierra depends entirely on roads and transportation. Those who believe this
undoubtedly do not understand the organic, fundamental difference existing
between a feudal or semi-feudal economy and a capitalist economy. They do not
understand that the medieval, patriarchal, feudal landowner is substantially
different from the head of a modern enterprise. Furthermore, gamonalismo and
latifundismo also appear to stand in the way of the execution of the state’s
present road program. The abuses and interests of the gamonales are altogether
opposed to a strict application of the law conscripting road workers. The
Indian instinctively regards it as a weapon of gamonalismo. Under the Inca
regime, duly established work on road construction was a compulsory public
service, entirely compatible with the principles of modern socialism; under the
colonial regime of latifundium and servitude, the same service turned into the
hated mita.
Notes
1. Luis E. Valcarcel, Del
ayllu al imperio, p. 166.
2. Cesar Antonio Ugarte,
Bosquejo de la historia economica del Peril, p. 9.
3. Javier Prado, “Estado
social del Peru durante la dominacion espanola,” in Anales universitarios del
Peru, XXII, 125-126.
4. Ugarte, Historia
economica del Peril, p. 64.
5. Jose Vasconcelos,
Indologia (Barcelona: Agencia Mundial de Libreria, 1927).
6. Prado, “Estado social
del Peni,” p. 37.
7. Georges Sorel,
Introduction a I’economie moderne (Paris: Marcel Rivi-6re, 1911), pp. 120, 130.
8. Ugarte, Historia
economica del Peru, p. 24.
9. Eugene Schkaff, La
question agraire en Russie (Paris: Rousseau, 1922), p. 118.
10. Esteban Echevarria,
Antecedentes y primeros pasos de la revolution de mayo.
11. Vasconcelos,
“Nacionalismo en la America Latina,” in Amauta, No. 4. This opinion, which is
true as regards relations between the military caudillo and agricultural
property in America, is not as valid for all periods and historical situations.
It cannot be subscribed to without making this specific qualification.
12. Ugarte, Historia
economica del Peru, p. 57.
13. Francisco Garcia
Calderon, Le Perou contemporain, pp. 98, 199.
14. Ugarte, Historia
economica del Peru, p. 58.
15. If the historical
evidence of Inca communism is not sufficiently convincing, the “community”—the
specific organ of that communism—should dispel any doubt. The “despotism” of
the Incas, however, has offended the scruples of some of our present-day liberals.
I want to restate here the defense that I made of Inca communism and refute the
most recent liberal thesis, presented by Augusto Aguirre Morales in his novel
El pueblo del sol.
Modern
communism is different from Inca communism. This is the first thing that must
be learned and understood by the scholar who delves into Tawantinsuyo. The two
communisms are products of different human experiences. They belong to
different historical epochs. They were evolved by dissimilar civilizations. The
Inca civilization was agrarian; the civilization of Marx and Sorel is
industrial. In the former, man submitted to nature; in the latter, nature
sometimes submits to man. It is therefore absurd to compare the forms and
institutions of the two communisms. All that can be compared is their essential
and material likeness, within the essential and material difference of time and
space. And this comparison requires a certain degree of historical relativism.
Otherwise, one is sure to commit the error made by Victor Andres Belaunde when
he attempted a comparison of this kind.
The
chroniclers of the conquest and of the colonial period viewed the indigenous
panorama with medieval eyes. Their testimony cannot be accepted at face value.
Their
judgments were strictly in keeping with their Spanish and Catholic points of
view. But Aguirre Morales is also the victim of fallacious reasoning. His
position in the study of the Inca empire is not a relativist one. Aguirre
considers and examines the empire with liberal and individualist prejudices.
And he believes that under the Incas, the people were enslaved and miserable
because they lacked liberty.
Individual
liberty is an aspect of the complex liberal philosophy. A realistic critic
would define it as the legal basis of capitalist civilization. (Without free
will, there would be no free trade, free competition, or free enterprise.) An
idealistic critic would define it as a gain made by the human spirit in modern
times. In no case did this liberty fit into Inca life. The man of Tawantinsuyo
felt absolutely no need of individual liberty—any more than he felt the need of
a free press. A free press may be important to Aguirre Morales and to me, but
the Indian could be happy without it. The Indian’s life and spirit were not
tormented by intellectual anxieties or creative pursuits. Nor were they
concerned with the need to do business, make contracts, or engage in trade.
Therefore what use would this liberty invented by our civilization be to the
Indian? If the spirit of liberty was revealed to the Quechua, it was
undoubtedly in a formula or rather in an emotion unlike the liberal, Jacobin,
and individualist formula of liberty. The revelation of liberty, like the
revelation of God, varies with age, country, and climate. To believe that the
abstract idea of liberty is of the same substance as the concrete image of a
liberty with a Phrygian cap—daughter of Protestantism and the French
Revolution—is to be trapped by an illusion that may be due to a mere, but not
disinterested, philosophical astigmatism of the bourgeoisie and of democracy.
Aguirre’s
denial of the communist nature of the Inca society rests altogether on a
mistaken belief. Aguirre assumes that autocracy and communism are
irreconcilable. The Inca system, he says, was despotic and theocratic and, therefore,
not communist. Although autocracy and communism are now incompatible, they were
not so in primitive societies. Today, a new order cannot abjure any of the
moral gains of modern society. Contemporary socialism —other historical periods
have had other kinds of socialism under different names—is the antithesis of
liberalism; but it is born from its womb and is nourished on its experiences.
It does not disdain the intellectual achievements of liberalism, only its
limitations. It appreciates and understands everything that is positive in the
liberal ideal; it condemns and attacks what is negative and selfish in it.
The
Inca regime was unquestionably theocratic and despotic. But these are traits
common to all regimes of antiquity. Every monarchy in history has been
supported by the religious faith of its people. Temporal and spiritual power
have been but recently divorced; and it is more a separation of bodies than a
divorce. Up to William of Hohenzollern, monarchs have invoked their divine
right.
It
is not possible to speak abstractly of tyranny. Tyranny is a concrete fact. It
is real to the extent that it represses the will of the people and oppresses
and stifles their life force. Often in ancient times an absolutist and
theocratic regime has embodied and represented that will and force. This
appears to have been the case in the Inca empire. I do not believe in the
supernatural powers of the Incas. But their political ability is as
self-evident as is their construction of an empire with human materials and
moral elements amassed over the centuries. The ayllu—the community—was the
nucleus of the empire. The Incas unified and created the empire, but they did
not create its nucleus. The legal state organized by the Incas undoubtedly
reproduced the natural pre-existing state. The Incas did not disrupt anything.
Their work should be praised, not scorned and disparaged, as the expression and
consequence of thousands of years and myriad elements.
The
work of the people must not be depreciated, much less denied. Agui-rre, an
individualistic writer, does not care about the history of the masses. His
romantic gaze looks only for a hero. The remains of Inca civilization
unanimously refute the charges of Aguirre Morales. The author of El pueblo del
sol cites as evidence the thousands of huacos he has seen. Those huacos testify
that Inca art was a popular art; and the best document left by the Inca
civilization is surely its art. The stylized, synthesized ceramics of the
Indians cannot have been produced by a crude or savage people.
James
George Frazer—very remote spiritually and physically from the chroniclers of
the colony—writes: “Nor, to remount the stream of history to its sources, is it
an accident that all the first great strides towards civilisation have been
made under despotic and theocratic governments, like those of Egypt, Babylon,
and Peru, where the supreme ruler claimed and received the servile allegiance
of his subjects in the double character of King and a god. It is hardly too
much to say that at this early epoch despotism is the best friend of humanity
and, paradoxical as it may sound, of liberty. For after all there is more
liberty in the best sense—liberty to think our own thoughts and to fashion our
own destinies—under the most absolute despotism, the most grinding tyranny,
than under the apparent freedom of savage life, where the individual’s lot is
cast from the cradle to the grave in the iron mould of hereditary custom.” The
Golden Bough, abridged edition (London: Macmillan & Co., 1954), p. 48.
Aguirre
Morales says that there was no theft in Inca society simply because of lack of
imagination for wrongdoing. But this clever literary comment does not destroy a
social reality that proves precisely what Aguirre insists on denying: Inca
communism. The French economist Charles Gidj states that Proudhon’s famous
phrase is less exact than the following one: “Theft is property.” In Inca
society there was no theft because there was no property or, if you like,
because there was a socialist organization of property.
We
dispute and, if necessary, reject the testimony of colonial chroniclers. But
Aguirre seeks support for his theory precisely in their medieval interpretation
of the form and distribution of the land and its products.
The
fruits of the earth cannot be hoarded. It is not credible, therefore, that
two-thirds of the crops were taken over for the consumption of the officials
and priests of the empire. It is much more likely that the crops supposedly
reserved for the nobility were actually put into a state storehouse for social
welfare, a typically and singularly socialist provision.
16. Hildebrando Castro
Pozo, Nuestra comunidad indigena.
17. Ibid., pp. 16-17.
18. After writing this
essay, I find ideas in Haya de la Torre’s book Por la emancipation de la
America Latina that fully coincide with mine on the agrarian question in
general and the Indian community in particular. Since we share the same points
of view, we necessarily reach the same conclusions. 19 Castro Pozo, Nuestra
comunidad indigena, pp. 66-67.
19. [Note unavailable]
.
20. Ibid., p. 434.
21. Schkaff, La question
agraire en Russie, p. 188.
22. Castro Pozo, Nuestra
comunidad indigena, p. 47. The author has some very interesting comments to
make about the spiritual elements of the community economy. “The vigor,
industry and enthusiasm with which the communal farmer reaps and sheaves wheat
or rye, quipicha (quipichar: to carry on one’s shoulders. A widespread
indigenous custom. The porters and stevedores of the coast shoulder their
loads), and rapidly proceeds to the threshing floor, joking with his companion
or with the man tugging on his shirt from behind, present a profound and
decisive contrast to the indolence, indifference, apathy, and apparent fatigue
with which the yanacones do the same or similar work. The former mental and
physical state is so evidently more desirable than the latter that it raises
the question of how the work process is affected by its results and concrete
purpose.”
23. Sorel, who has examined
carefully the ideas of Proudhon and Le Play on the role of the family in the
structure and spirit of society, has made a penetrating study of “the spiritual
part of the economic environment.” If anything has been missing in Marx it has
been an adequate legal spirit, although this aspect of production did not
escape the dialectician of Treves. “It is known,” he writes in his Introduction
a Veconomie moderns, “that the family customs of the Saxon plain made a deep
impression on Le Play when he started his travels and that they decisively
influenced his thought. I have wondered if Marx was not thinking of these
ancient customs when he accused capitalism of turning the proletarian into a
man without a family.” Returning to the comments of Castro Pozo, I want to
recall another of Sorel’s ideas. “Work depends to a very large measure on the
feelings that the workers have about their task.”
24. Schkaff, La question
agraire en Russie, p. 135.
25. It must not be
forgotten that the laborers of the sierra suffer in the hot and unhealthy
coastal climate; they soon contract malaria, which weakens them and predisposes
them to tuberculosis. Nor should it be forgotten that the Indian is deeply
attached to his home and his mountains. On the coast he feels an exile, a mitimae.
26. This topic makes clear
how closely our agrarian problem is related to our demographic problem. The
concentration of land in the hands of the gamonales is a cancer in national
demography. Only when it has been extirpated can Peru progress and really adopt
the South American principle: “To govern is to populate.”
27. The government’s
project to create small agricultural property is based on liberal economic and
capitalist theory. Its application on the coast, subject to the expropriation
of estates and the irrigation of uncultivated land, can offer fairly broad
possibilities of settlement. In the sierra, its effects would be much more
limited and doubtful. Like all attempts to distribute land in the history of
our republic, it disregards the social value of the “community” and is overly
solicitous of the latifundista, who jealously protects his own interests. In
regions where there is still no monetary economy, lots should not have to be
paid for in cash or in twenty annual installments. In these cases, payment
should be specified in kind instead of money. The state’s system of acquiring
estates to be distributed among the Indians shows its extreme concern for the
latifundista, who is given the opportunity to sell unproductive or rundown
estates for a profit.
28. Schkaff, La question
agrcdre en Russie, pp. 133, 134, 133.
29. Francisco Ponce de Leon,
Sistema de wrendamiento de terrenos de cul-tivo en el departamento del Cuzco y
el problema de la tierra.
30. The Commission for the
Promotion of Wheat Farming has announced the success of its experiments in
different parts of the coast. It has obtained substantial yields from the
rust-immune “Kappli Emmer” variety, even in semi-arid areas.
31. Edouard Herriot, Creer
(Paris: Payot, 1919).
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