ABSTRACT
This chapter is an overview of peasant and indigenous resistance dynamics in Latin America as a whole, from the colonial to the neoliberal and ‘post-neoliberal’ capitalist eras. The case studies, in subsequent chapters, while exhibiting certain commonalities, demonstrate the importance of spatialized specificities of class relations in determining the particular character of the agrarian question and forms of resistance in each social formation. Across all cases, however, peasant unrest has arisen typically from the inability to meet adequate subsistence needs due primarily to inequitable land distribution, and from the lack of adequate ‘exit options’. This unrest has, in all cases and at different times, been co-opted by the state ‘from above’ into ‘sub-hegemonic’ reformism, whereby peasant demands are mollified by some land distribution and agricultural support, supplemented by state welfarism. These state interventions have failed to resolve ‘peasant problem’, however, since land ownership remains highly concentrated and the dominant classes in the state remain committed to capitalist ‘development’ on the basis of extractivism.
