the peasantry

[Tjis]

If I understand correctly, Marx saw the peasantry as a seperate class, who are inherently reactionary. I have a few questions about this.

Who are the peasantry exactly? I'm afraid I don't know the exact definition as used by marxists. Is it all the people who do agricultural work? Or is it just those that also own land? Is there a limit to the amount of land they can own and still be called a peasant, instead of a capitalist?

Also, why are they considered reactionary by many marxists? For example here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1552743&postcount=65), Bobkindles seems to have the view that it's fine for the working class to rule over the peasantry, even if the working class is a minority.


Fair enough. In this context, the most accurate definition of "heirarchy" is "a a body of persons in authority" or "any system of persons or things ranked one above another". If you accept this definition, do you then believe that the working class should not be placed in a position of authority over the remnants of the ruling class, and other persons and classes who are liable to oppose revolutionary change, such as the peasantry? Do you reject the idea that the working class may be faced with a need to impose its interests on other persons and classes, with violence, possibly acting as a minority of the population, if workers take power in an under-developed country?

How is such a position justified?

[redasheville]

If I understand correctly, Marx saw the peasantry as a seperate class, who are inherently reactionary. I have a few questions about this.

Who are the peasantry exactly? I'm afraid I don't know the exact definition as used by marxists. Is it all the people who do agricultural work? Or is it just those that also own land? Is there a limit to the amount of land they can own and still be called a peasant, instead of a capitalist?

Also, why are they considered reactionary by many marxists? For example here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1552743&postcount=65), Bobkindles seems to have the view that it's fine for the working class to rule over the peasantry, even if the working class is a minority.

How is such a position justified?

If you accept the Marxist definition of class, the peasantry is in a separate class from workers. No two ways about it.

Peasants have different objective class interests than workers. Peasants want to be able to till their own land and benefit from their own productive capacity, without being oppressed by greedy tax collectors or landlords or what have you.

Workers on the other hand, have an objective interest in collectivizing the means of production i.e. taking socialized production (which already exists under capitalism) and combining it with socialized appropriation.

Now, these two classes are not necessarily in conflict with each other. Indeed, in 1917 the revolutionary government won the peasantry to the revolutionary camp by ending the war (most soldiers were peasants) and redistributing the land. However, peasants' class interests may eventually conflict with those of the working class. This happened during the Russian civil war, when industry collapsed, and the revolutionary government could no longer give the peasants manufactured goods in exchange for grain. The revolutionary government had to simply take the grain in order to feed the starving cities. This obviously pissed off some peasants, and eroded the support for the workers' state.

So the answer to your question is that it depends. The peasantry are not reliably revolutionary (simply because peasant production isn't socialized like industrial production is), and when they are they follow the lead of another class: workers, intellectuals etc.

[redasheville]

Oh, to address one more point in your post: peasants are not the same as agricultural workers. Peasants are a hangover from feudal economic relations, and it is understood that peasants own their own land (or at least aspire to own their own land), own their own tools etc. In other words, they are not simply selling their labor power.

[BobKKKindle$]

Marx saw the peasantry as a seperate class, who are inherently reactionaryArguably it's not correct to see the peasants as constituting a stable class because Marx's conception of class is based on the relationship that someone has with the means of production, and, as a social group, the peasantry exhibits multiple relationships - there are some peasants who own land and also hire people to work on their hand, there are other peasants who also own land but only draw on their own labour and the labour of their dependents without hiring anyone else, there are some peasants who work as labourers in addition to working on their own land, and finally there are peasants who rent their land from a landlord and pay them by handing over a share of their produce. All of the groups I described above may also derive some of their income from side ventures like domestic textile production and even low-level industrial goods like porcelain, with these tasks historically being allocated to the female members of the household. In general, however, the peasantry is regarded as part of the petty-bourgeoisie, due to the fact that all of the groups described above own their own property, especially when Marxists are concerned with the middle strata. It's significant that farm-labourers are not part of the peasantry because they do not own any land, and are basically rural proletarians. The fact that the peasantry is such a heterogeneous group (with "deep internal stratification" as Trotsky puts it) is one of the factors that led Marx and Trotsky to believe that the peasantry is not reactionary as such but is incapable of acting independently of other classes. The other factors include the geographical dispersal of the peasants, which stands in contrast to the spatial concentration of the proletariat in the cities and industrial enterprises, as well as the close link between the peasants and the land, which, in the case of all but the richest section of the peasantry, means that peasants are liable to support petty-bourgeois property, i.e. the division of property into many small units, and not the socialization of the means of production. This means that the peasantry has, at times, taken the side of the bourgeoisie, which is what Marx argues in The 18th Brumaire, contenting that the peasantry functioned as the main basis of support for Louis Napoleon's authoritarian regime. However, the peasantry can also be won over to the side of the proletariat when land reform is accepted as a political goal by the revolutionary party, which is what the Bolsheviks did, allowing them to maintain the support of the poor peasants throughout the Civil War, despite the authoritarian measures that were used to extract food supplies. This is expressed by Trotsky thus:

"....no matter how great the revolutionary role of the peasantry may be, it nevertheless cannot be an independent role and even less a leading one. The peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois. This means that the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ is only conceivable as a dictatorship of the proletariat that leads the peasant masses behind it"

The Permanent Revolution, Basic Postulates (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/tpr/pr10.htm)


How is such a position justified? By asking whether this is justified you're raising all sorts of tricky questions about whether Marxism involves a conception of morality and justice. But the issue to keep in mind when talking about the peasantry is that Marxists do not see an amorphous group like "the masses" or "the people" as the origin of socialist revolution - rather, we argue that only the working class can serve as the basis for the overthrow of capitalism, and the construction of a socialist society. The class interests of the peasantry and the working class are not the same, and so, if you're interested in socialism, and you accept that socialism can't come from the peasantry, you should accept that the working class may be forced to oppress the peasantry (violent expropriation of food, collectivization, etc.) to carry the revolution forward.

To add to the above, I don't understand why you think it's especially "bad" that the working class might have to rule over the peasantry when the working class is a minority. When the working class comes to power in an underdeveloped country, i.e. where the working class is a minority of the population, it's more likely that the working class will have to adopt measures against the class interests of the peasantry in order to maintain its class rule until it receives support from the workers of other countries, whilst also trying to ensure that the peasantry does not move into the hands of the bourgeoisie. Whether the working class is the majority or not does not affect whether decisions that serve the class interests of the working class are morally acceptable, because a decision does not become morally invalid as soon as it fails to receive the support of the majority of the population. What matters is that policy reflects the class interests of the working class, which often involves going against the class interests of the peasantry.