Land reform, socialism, and
the Mexican countryside

. Note from from Communist Voice #5, Nov. 1995:

. The following three articles debate the Marxist agrarian program for the Mexican countryside. They center on whether land reform is socialist; whether recognizing the limitations of land reform means denying peasant demands for land; and whether an agrarian program must take account of the fact that land reform has not stopped the driving of the majority of the Mexican peasants off the land and the turning of a large number of the remaining ones into wage-workers and semi-proletarians. The Chicago Workers' Voice agrarian program centers on more financial aid to the agricultural co-ops (ejidos) as a solution to peasant poverty and as supposedly a quasi-socialist or somewhat socialist measure; in fact, their program is an idealized form of the program begun by the late Lazaro Cardenas, Mexico's president from 1934 - 1940 and founder of the present Mexican political system. We begin with Oleg's defense of the CWV program and then proceed to two replies.