ABSTRACT
During the 1970s, three currents within Mexican social anthropology, separated for decades by differences in research priorities as well as by a somewhat more fortuitous geographical dispersion of principal representatives of each group, converged around the need to understand the present and future of the peasantry. The distance between orthodoxy and revisionism had been maintained for decades within historical structuralism in Mexico not only by differences in temperament and academic formation among members of various schools, but also by material differences in access to specific documents within the body of literature produced by Marx and his scholars. The peasantry constituted a class only or precisely because it still survived outside capitalism, as part of an entirely different precapitalist mode of production. The peasantry, then, re-emerged through Bartra in Mexican Marxism as a substantial unliquidated remnant of precapitalist social organization, articulated with and dominated by a capitalist mode of production, but moved by a noncapitalist rationale.
