>There are two ways to erode the material base of rural patriarchy &
>usher in modern sexism & with it a new terrain of women's struggles:
>let capital erode it by destroying rural agriculture altogether or
>else the revolutionaries get rid of it on their own. Either way, it
>will take primitive accumulation, capitalist or socialist; in the
>capitalist case, you'll get a huge stream of landless migrants, who
>will move to cities in Mexico or further to the North (which has
>already been happening to some extent); in the socialist case, you'll
>probably get the kind of problem that all socialist primitive
>accumulations experienced. Peasants get beaten in both cases.
>Perhaps there is a third way that doesn't involve coercion, but no
>one in world history has even tried it, even if there is one.
I sez:
There are more and less patriarchal pre-capitalist rural cultures, yes ? I'm certainly not much of an expert on this, but one of the more classic contrasts is between the very patriarchal cultures of NE Asia and the more egalitarian cultures of SE Asia (which is one reason why First World liberal eco-tourists prefer Bali). One can use materialist analysis to explain these variations, but a cookie-cutter mode of production model won't do it. My guess is that more and more First World solidarity movement types will pick and choose which indigenist struggles they want to support on the basis of (real or projected) differences in gender (in)equality.
The same NACLA types who adore the Zapatistas also argue that during the Cardenas and immediate post-Cardenas years Mexico had a chance to "modernize" its agricultural sector without indulging in the kind of ruthless super- exploitation of the peasantry that you mention (and without wiping out the rural patriarchal culture of which you speak, presumably) -- give the ejidos the most fertile land, the necessary technical assistance, access to decent irrigation and roads, and so on, and the ejidos could produce a tidy surplus for domestic urban consumption and national food self-sufficiency (assuming that urban proletarians and middle classes would be content eating low value- added staple foods). Tom Barry wrote a pretty good book on this, _Zapata's Revenge_. Problem is, seems like a mildly left green fantasy about the path not taken, since it doesn't really deal with the class power of the neo-hacienderos (who were resisting land reform like hell and were plotting some kind of coup until Cardenas decided not to succeed himself) and the need for Mexico to export tropical exotics in order to import U.S. capital goods. (Plus subsidies to Mexican kulak collectives probably would have required that the state tax the national bourgeosie it was incubating into existence at higher levels than was politically and economically feasible). As a red-green I've very sympathetic to peasant anarchism and Narodnikism, but I think you are very correct to point out that a lot of First World "small is beautiful"/"appropriate technology" adorers of peasants haven't thought very clearly about the complex issues of gender, development, and imperialism that you raise.
John G.