Forging Political Cadres for Re-Peasantization: Escuela de Acción Campesina (Spain)

Abstract

Bolstering the political formation of agrarian organizations has become a priority for La Vía Campesina and the Food Sovereignty Movement. This paper addresses the Spanish case study of the Escuela de Acción Campesina (EAC)—(Peasant Action School), which is a tool for political formation in the Global North in which the philosophical and pedagogical principles of the “peasant pedagogies” of the Training Schools proposed by La Vía Campesina are put into practice within an agrarian organization in Spain and in alliance with the rest of the Spanish Food Sovereignty Movement. The study was carried out over the course of the 10 years of activist research, spanning the entire process for the construction and development of the EAC. Employing an ethnographic methodology, information was collected through participant observation, ethnographic interviews, a participatory workshop, and reviews of internal documents. The paper presents the context in which the EAC arose, its pedagogical dynamics, the structure and the ideological contents implemented for the training of new cadres, and how there are three key areas in the training process: (1) the strengthening of collective union and peasant identity, (2) training in the “peasant” ideological proposal, and (3) the integration of students as new cadres into the organizations’ structures. It is concluded that the EAC is a useful tool in the ideological re-peasantization process of these organizations.

Strengthening Agroecology with the Political Pedagogy of Peasant Organisations: A Case Study of Baserritik Mundura in the Basque Country

“…Within this scenario, it is clear that studies that analyse and systematise the experiences of political and agroecological training in the Global North, which put LVC's educational policy into practice, are still scarce both with regard to their own training processes and collaboration with educational institutions [32,[39][40][41][42][43]. We aim to address this imbalance in a small way by presenting our use of this systematisation by adapting the elements and principles that characterise the agroecological training processes of LVC and the lessons learned to the Basque reality.…”

“Good Morning, Poet, How Are You?” Peasant Poetry and Its Vitality in Sertão do Pajeú (Brazil)

“…In the present paper, we address the vitality of peasant poetry and its derivations as a popular education tool for the "dialogue of knowledge" [16] and the strengthening of sustainable agriculture, the peasant way of life and the work of agroecological organizations [17] in Brazil's Northeast region. For this, we use the concepts of peasant poetry and popular poetry made by peasants.…”

“…Studies similar to this one have been developed in other parts of the world and Brazil, as well as in Spain, Central America and the Caribbean, giving a sense of the expansion of this agroecological practice in dialogue with the traditional knowledge of territories for the political strengthening of the peasant subject through popular education. In this sense, the expansion of peasant agroecology requires a collective political subject to be able to trigger major transformations, such as the work of Via Campesina, which combines political training with strengthening the socio-historical identities of peasants [17,27]. Education is another disputed territory [28][29][30][31][32][33][34], with the "dialogue of knowledge" and the democratic radicalization of knowledge and institutions being a fundamental step for the construction of political identity in agroecology and for the transformation of peasant and disputed territories.…”