PEASANTS AND POWER IN MEXICO 13 the cornerstone of any understanding of Mexican and Latin American reality. A reading of the last (and unfinished) chapter of Capital must have left interpreters of the agrarian structure of a country such as Mexico in a quandary: "The owners of labour-power, owners of capital, and landowners, whose respective sources of income are wages, profit, and ground rent, in other words, wag® labourers, capitalists and landowners, constitute then three big classes of modern society based upon the capitalist mode of production"8 Where do we place the most numerous class in our rural zones, the peasants? Answers to this problem have been of two sorts: (1) in the Mexican countryside, either there are precapitalist remnants in the countryside which require the model of the feudal mode of production to explain; or (2) the capitalist mode of production is the dominant one, and therefore, the peasants are nothing but rural proletarians. Both of these positions have abandoned the fundamental concepts of class structure: wage-labour^ profit, and ground rent. We will try to show that, given that Mexico is a capitalist country, it is not possible to understand its agrarian structure except on the basis of these concepts. It does not follow from this dominance that the peasants are rural proletarians. This is so because Mexico is not simply a capitalist country, but it is also an "undeveloped country," dependent upon imperialism. Paths to Capitalist Agriculture If there is anything clear in the Leninist interpretation of agrarian evolution, it is that such evolution cannot be understood in strictly economic terms: the political dimension plays a role so important that without it one cannot begin to perceive the heart of the problem. This is especially evident in Mexico where the modalities adopted in agriculture cannot be understood without a previous study of the roots of the agrarian reform generated in the heat of the 1910—1917 Revolution. For Lenin, there are two roads of capitalist development in agriculture: 1) The old land-holding economy, bound to serfdom, which slowly transforms into an entrepreneurial capitalist economy ("Junker" type) by means of the internal evolution of the latifundia. 2) A revolutionary process which destroys the old land-holding economy, the large holding and the systems of serfdom; giving rise to petty peasant economy while itself decomposing before the onslaught of capitalism,4 Whichever of the two paths to capitalist agriculture is followed, each consists in a process of depeasanting and the substitution of the system of wage labour for the system of corvee. Depeasanting is, in reality, the birth of an agrarian proletariat wrenched, with greater or lesser violence, from the soil; this can only occur parallel to an accumulation of capital and a concentration of production which has, as its base, non-salaried labour. This process follows along the lines of what Marx terms