Peasanty and Rural Petty Bourgeoisie

[Tim Finnegan]

This is probably an easy one, but I haven't quite been able to get my head round it, so: what, in terms of economic class, is the distinction between a peasantry and a rural petty bourgeoisie?
The obvious answer seemed to be that the former are tenants and the latter independent land-owners, but then I recalled that, firstly, independent land-owners such as the Russian kulaks were considered to be peasants of a sort, which would seem to complicate things. Is this application of the term "peasant" perhaps sociological, rather than economic?

[Jose Gracchus]

Peasant does seem to be highly sociological in context. I mean for some reason black sharecroppers in the post-bellum South are not considered peasants, though I doubt there were not Eurasian peasants who did not have similar economic relations to large landowners.

I too would like clarification. What is a "peasant"? What is a "tenant farmer"? What is a "sharecropper"? What is a "smallholder" or "freeholder"? A "small farmer" or "family farmer"? Can these overlap?

I would say you are petty bourgeois if you own their own MOP, and labor it: their plot. However, if they have no real land ownership, and rent their plot in exchange for produce or labor, that complicates things. Similarly truly landless farm labor is obviously proletarian in character, especially as the wage-labor relations intensify. The U.S. agricultural economy being the logical point of conclusion.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Much (perhaps not necessarily all, though) of the gray area between the farm worker and the small farmer who actually owns the land (as opposed to the gray area of lifelong leases) could be addressed by programmatic orientation. Who among the sharecroppers, small tenant farmers, etc. would gravitate towards land redistributions (hence the undeniable appeal of peasant patrimonialism for large peasant populations)? Who would gravitate instead towards the stability of proletarian farm work, even if under the thumbs of managers like a one-time Gorodets state farm "red director"?

[graymouser]

The term "peasant" is used in Marxist discourse for a variety of small farmers who have differing relationships to agricultural production. In general, it means the small farmer who owns or is a tenant of a small holding; a small farmer, either bound in feudal, semi-feudal or capitalist relations of production. The peasantry are stratified depending on how much land and other resources they control. Strictly speaking the peasantry is a petty bourgeois class, since its members possess the means of production themselves, and is distinct from the rural proletariat who work the land but own or rent none.

As with all petty bourgeois classes, the immediate goal of the peasant is to secure their own claims on their land - and in every revolution in the 20th century, land reform was a burning question. But the peasantry can be won to the proletarian revolution through this very question - as occurred in the Russian Revolution with the slogan of land redistribution, which became fact.

Politically the peasantry has never been able to consistently be a revolutionary class; despite feeling quite a strong fervor when they are poor and hungry, they are physically separated in a way that makes effective coordination virtually impossible. They can be dragged in on one side or another, as history has shown, but if they're not getting something out of it they can sit on their hands. A good example of this happened after the pro-government forces prevailed during the Spanish civil war.

Physically the peasantry is a demographic minority in the world, and is no longer the decisive factor it once was. The truth is that the peasantry has been shedding members, who come to the massive cities of the third world and sit at the lowest levels of society, eking out a slum existence because small farming is not competitive with globalized agribusiness. In many countries with large farming populations, the peasantry has been overtaken by the agricultural proletariat, who have a much different class trajectory than traditional peasants. But understanding peasant questions is very crucial when trying to study 20th century revolutions.

[Jose Gracchus]

What of the contention that the Bolshevik concession to the SR land reform was ultimately an error - that productivity in the agricultural economy collapsed and the Bolsheviks ended up sending armed workers to rob the peasants of their grain at gunpoint? Small individual plots will not have the output of large, intensively worked ones. Especially including the angle of capital in the form of farm mechanization...

Of course, it is much more academic today. I don't know of a country today where the peasantry or other individual producers would be any very substantial political factor, in its own right, nation-wide.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The Bolshevik concession was Lenin's personal concession as early as 1905, not 1917. I raised this issue a couple of years ago. Economically it was flawed, but someone else said that there was politically no other choice, citing the Hungarian example of no land redistributions. Also, it isn't academic when one considers the countryside of many developing nations and the proportion of agriculture to GDP.

[Rowan Duffy]

Of course, it is much more academic today. I don't know of a country today where the peasantry or other individual producers would be any very substantial political factor, in its own right, nation-wide.

Zimbabwe?