THE FARC-EP’S RELATION TO SOCIAL CHANGE
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‘modernization from below’ is evidenced by peasant/rural worker demands for technical assistance, credit, infrastructure and marketing. These demands are associated with raising production and acquiring market shares, obviously associated with modernization, albeit in capitalist form. Today the issue of agrarian reform is not a simple replay of traditional demands of ‘land for the tiller,’ counter posed to capitalist modernization associated with large-scale corporate export farming. It is an alternative modernization strategy built around modern social classes. Peasants/rural workers or at least their cadres/ leaders view land distribution as only the first step in an agrarian reform. Thus the conception of “the peasant” or “landless workers” today is vastly different from past images of atomized subsistence farmers, relying solely on traditional farming know-how and barely aware of markets, alternative cropping, non-traditional marketable crops and resistance to technological innovation. It is precisely the emergence of a different peasantry and rural workers, with modern attitudes and with positive attitudes toward the possibility of significant, even transformative, change, that accounts for the resistance to being displaced or ‘proletarianized’ (more likely joining the urban reserve army of unemployed). (Petras, 2003: 92–4, italics added) Numerous historic and contemporary examples are available to demonstrate how an “urban-centric conception of power” is a fallacy. The FARC-EP exemplifies how “rural movements can reverse urban and external flows of influence and exercise hegemony on a national basis” (Petras, 2003: 93). In regions of FARC-EP control a pre-revolutionary dynamism has introduced new forms of development outside metropolitan capital systems (see Richani, 2002a: 66, 71). Through this process, the insurgency’s political and military capacity, has, on multiple occasions and at specific times, demonstrated a domestic and international threat to national capitalist hegemony. From this it can be understood that the FARC-EP’s support and sustained position in the countryside is not a demonstration of pre-modern conditions but rather a clear presentation of the insurgency’s unique political and ideological framework within modernity itself. Again, the FARC-EP attempts to create a “war of position” not by taking centralized power but through an organized ongoing consolidation of newly revolutionized socio-geographical environments across rural Colombia. It is important to demonstrate how this has occurred, so I offer an analysis of one counter-hegemonic strategy where a once state-based mechanism, shaped to co-opt the peasantry and rural populations, was transformed into a pre-revolutionary medium of grassroots power. THE TRANSFORMATION OF JAC: FROM PACIFYING STATE MECHANISM TO REVOLUTIONARY COMMUNITY-BASED INSTITUTION The 1950s and 1960s saw a class structure in rural Colombia ripe for political organizing because of the disparities in ownership of capital and land.
