Social differentiation of the peasantry (Marxist)

ABSTRACT

Marxist understandings of the peasantry focus largely on class relations and seek to locate rural households within wider sets of class structures and dynamics. This article reviews debates and controversies amongst Marxists on the classic agrarian question, class differentiation within processes of transition from pre-capitalist to fully capitalist societies, land reform and class relations, whether or not to characterize peasants as petty commodity producers, the relationship between class and other forms of social differentiation such as gender, race, ethnicity and caste, and the role of class differentiation in peasant politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Social differentiation
• peasantry
• class dynamics
• accumulation
• transition
• land reform
• peasant politics

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Jens Lerche and Jun Borras for their valuable suggestions which have helped to strengthen this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Other key aspects of ‘the dawn of the era of capitalist production’ include national debt, the tax system and trade protection, which, like colonies and slavery, depend on the organized force of the state to hasten transformation (Marx 1976, 915).

2 Bernstein (2012, 252) distils these questions from a systematic assessment of Byres’ research. He labels these as Agrarian Questions (AQs) 1, 2 and 3, and characterizes them as centred on the problematics of (agricultural) production, (contemporary) politics and (industrial) accumulation.

3 Similarly, Shivji (2017) argues that the term ‘working people’ is more appropriate today than drawing clear distinctions between ‘peasants’ and ‘workers’.

4 See Bernstein (2016) for his response to Byres (2016) and to Oya (2013, 1554), who also questions Bernstein’s ‘overly pessimistic’ views on the agrarian question of capital.

5 ‘Tendency’ is a term used advisedly by Bernstein, distinguishing it from an empirical ‘trend’ towards greater differentiation. This is because ‘many determinations’ mediate between a general tendency and the highly variable circumstances and dynamics seen in practice (Bernstein 2010, 109).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben Cousins

Ben Cousins is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) at the University of the Western Cape. He undertakes research on agrarian change, land reform., property rights and smallholder agriculture in Southern Africa.