A CRITICAL and dramatic goal of many radical governments has been to change traditional political values and forge a “new man.”² The most prominent leftist leaders of recent years—Cuba’s Fidel Castro, Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, China’s Mao Tse-tung, Chile’s Salvador Allende—all hoped to develop a new political consciousness in their countries. Whereas in the past citizens had been divided from one another and cowed in front of superiors, they were to begin to collaborate with their fellows as equals, trust them, and share authority with them. Together, citizens would work hard to advance their own living standards and those...

GENERAL VELASCO said that in the “new Peru” there would gradually emerge from the vulnerable and socially isolated peasant a confident individual, expressing his concerns proudly, collaborating with others to resolve those concerns, and working hard to improve Peru’s living standard. Velasco presumably hoped that the “new peasant” would also be concerned with the development of Peru as a nation and appreciative of government efforts on behalf of the peasantry. As Chapter I observed, Velasco’s government emphasized self-management at the level of the single enterprise as the critical agent of transformation. This chapter reviews key theoretical issues relevant to self-management...

BEFORE 1969, the Peruvian political system was considered an oligarchy.¹ “Forty families” were widely believed to dominate Peru’s polity and economy. Often, elite families did not formally lead the Peruvian government but backed military officers and politicians who sought the presidency. Although the families extended their influence throughout the Peruvian economy by extensive ties in banks, commerce, and industry, a significant share of their wealth was derived from their haciendas even in the 1960s (Bourricaud, 1970: 39-40; Astiz, 1969: 49-65). The families controlled the major Peruvian agricultural exports, including sugar, cotton, and wool. The dominance of Peruvian agriculture by a...

TRADITIONALLY, hacienda peasants in Peru competed with their peers to please a single man, the patron, who controlled resources and benefits important to the peasants. The world beyond the hacienda was distant to the peasant. Yet, with the transformation of the hacienda into a self-managed cooperative in the early 1970s, the clientelist orientations of peasants gave way to a new set of orientations most simply described as “group egoism.” Collaborative and participatory attitudes emerged among peasants toward their fellows in the cooperatives; but, for various reasons, a sense of solidarity did not extend to peasants beyond the cooperative, or to...

ON THE HACIENDA, peasant political participation was severely restricted by the patron. Virtually monopolizing the scarce Peruvian land resources, the hacendado held tremendous economic and political power in comparison to the peasants and was able to control their political activity. Almost all key enterprise decisions were made by the hacendado and/or his technicians. Peasant political participation was largely limited to the kind of behavior appropriate in a clientelist relationship: the placement of a request upon the patron by one peasant, always individually, as an inferior to a superior, and without assurance of any real attention to the request by the...

IN THE ARCHETYPAL MODE of clientelism on the hacienda, political leadership is reserved for the patron, and in some cases for his administrators as well. The right of the patron to exclusive decision-making powers is not to be questioned. The patron wins authority by birthright—his ownership of the hacienda and his socioeconomic position. The patron may be a “good patron,” providing material help to peasant clients in need; but if he is not a “good patron,” the peasant has no recourse. The patron is not accountable to the peasants in any way: he cannot be compelled to change his...

IN THE HACIENDA, the patron links each peasant client to himself individually and obstructs solidarity among the peasants. In part to impede ties among clients, the patron may imply that friendship, in the sense of shared personal experiences, is not important. Rather, he may insinuate, the motives of friendship are ulterior: to gain economic benefits. Friendship is a calculation of mutual advantage between a superior and subordinate, a longstanding network of obligation and dependence.¹ In the hacienda, the patron is the primary source of economic benefits, and thus peasants are persuaded to compete against each other for the friendship and...

MOST LARGE HACIENDAS were used for the private gain of the patron rather than for national development,¹ and to this end the patron sought to maximize short-run income from his estate. Whatever concerns for peasant welfare were expressed by the patron, they were generally not reflected in income distribution figures on the estates. Income inequality on the haciendas was severe; the income of the landowner was often 100 times that of the peasant, and approximately 35 percent of the income distributed in the hacienda was taken by the patron.² Rather than advance the enterprise through appropriate investment, the patron tended...

IN THE CLIENTELIST SYSTEM, the hacienda peasant was separated not only from other peasants in his own community but also from those outside it. The severe land shortages in Peru and the sharp income discrepancies among distinct peasant strata set the stage for conflict. Vitriolic battles over land and water rights occurred frequently between peasant communities and haciendas, as well as among two or three communities, and among two or three haciendas.¹ Theft was common.² Conflict between peasant community members and hacienda workers was especially intense, given the historical tensions between the two groups, and these tensions were often fanned...

THE IMAGES of the Velasco government advanced in the corporatist and “fully participatory social democracy” models were described in Chapter II. In the corporatist model, the government is perceived as controlling and monitoring citizens’ political activity and aiming to co-opt or pre-empt radical mobilization that might impede the development of a “harmonious organic social whole.” In contrast, in the “fully participatory social democracy,” the government was to support political participation and decision making, never imposing its own policy preferences (Delgado, 1973: 263-285; Velasco, 1972b: 271-289). “When the common man and the public servant meet, there is neither servant nor served,...

FROM THIS STUDY, self-management emerges as a powerful agent of change in patterns of political authority and social solidarity. In Peru, prior to 1969, hacienda peasants had long been enmeshed in a tenacious clientelist system—a system of the archetypal variety, where the patron wielded extremely great resources relative to the peasant and effectively blocked any ties among peasants. Traditionally, Peruvian hacienda peasants were cowed and atomized, fitting well into the modal image of the peasant presented by anthropologists and scholars of political culture. The Peruvian hacienda peasant did not appear to be a likely candidate for rapid dramatic development...