Why the distinction between workers and peasants?

[Eagle_Syr]

From a Marxian point of view, I'd like to know why there is a distinction between workers and peasants. Is it their relation to the means of production? I know the peasant class is the result of feudal serf class, without the binding heredity.

Is a farm laborer in modern America a worker, or a peasant, or what? I mean, one who labors on a farm (not the landowner). If a farm laborer is selling his labor to the landowner because the landowner owns the land and the farm laborer has no land of his own, doesn't that make him proleterian? Isn't he alienated from the product of his labor and the means of producing product?

And whether peasants are proletariats or not, are they not nonetheless oppressed under the capitalist or feudal mode of production? And since they are, why should they not revolt? Why couldn't peasants gear the land toward communal use (Emiliano Zapata proposed this in Mexico, for example).

Should the serfs of 13th century France have revolted? If so, why? Why not? I'm trying to understand the dynamic between the underclass and ruling class pre and post-industrial revolution.


I'm just confused about the exact difference between workers, peasants, what "proletariat" exactly means.

Sorry for all the questions

[Tim Finnegan]

"Peasant" is unfortunately one of the most poorly-defined terms in social history, and when used outside of a specific context doesn't amount to much more than "lives in the countryside". Unfortunately, many Marxists of the Orthodox tradition insist in describing class as a series of grand monoliths related only externally, shedding all of the nuance that an authentic social historian (and in this I include Marx) would bring to the table. So, generalising somewhat, there are a number of specifications that we need to make when talking about peasants.

First, you have pre-capitalist peasants. These represents numerous distinct historical classes, each specific to their own social context, so what the term amounts to is the vague idea of people who are neither aristocrats nor town-dwellers. In a specifically European context, it refers to a class of agrarian producers, organised as households and brought together around the feudal manor. It is from this class that the mercantile and artisanal classes would emerge.

Second, you have agricultural petty-proprietors. These are agricultural small businessmen, specialising in the production of a specific commodity or commodities, such as grain, potatoes, eggs, or what have you, much as an independent tailor might produce clothes. Historically speaking, this is a class which tends to emerge through a political revolution that produces a bourgeois (i.e. individualistic) program of land redistribution, the classic example being of course the French Revolution.

Thirdly, you have agrarian wage-slaves. This is share-croppers such as post-bellum American blacks, debt peons such as the Mexican peasantry at the time of the Revolution, and other formally independent but de facto employed . They are the rural analogue of groups such as the weavers of early 19th century Yorkshire or Lyons, who were formally independent but were in practice wholly dependent on merchants, creditors, and other primitive capitalists. Historically speaking, this emerges when an agrarian region becomes enmeshed in capitalist social relations without a program of bourgeois land-redistribution.

Farm-labourers are simply rural proletarians, and are not generally described as peasants.

[Book O'Dead]

[..]

Is a farm laborer in modern America a worker, or a peasant, or what? I mean, one who labors on a farm (not the landowner). If a farm laborer is selling his labor to the landowner because the landowner owns the land and the farm laborer has no land of his own, doesn't that make him proleterian? Isn't he alienated from the product of his labor and the means of producing product?

Sometimes even the "landowner" isn't directly involved in the transaction between the farm worker and the company that is exploiting them and the land. But that already existed in Marx's time. The were called, "factors", hence the word factory.

A farm is now a factory. And what do we call those who labor in a factory? The coolest aspect of this realization is that Marx and others of his time were not only there on the scene as all this shit was happening, but some of them--at very least Karl Marx--predicted it's unavoidable development into what we have now.

[Ostrinski]

There does exist an agricultural as well as industrial proletariat. The reason the industrial proletariat is often placed on a higher pedestal is that they are considered more dexterous and productive as a result of their interaction with that kind of productive environment and the specific labor division that it begets.

[Book O'Dead]

There does exist an agricultural as well as industrial proletariat. The reason the industrial proletariat is often placed on a higher pedestal is that they are considered more dexterous and productive as a result of their interaction with that kind of productive environment and the specific labor division that it begets.

Maybe capitalism has blurred the distinction out of recognition or existence?

[Eagle_Syr]

Thanks for the clarification.

So would a revolution of some kind have been possible 800 years ago?
Is it the presense of productive resources such as factories, a result of capitalism, that is necessary for a socialist revolution to be successful? Why couldn't a feudal society experience an agrarian revolution, establish communalism, and then develop industry?

Thanks again

[Ostrinski]

Maybe capitalism has blurred the distinction out of recognition or existence?Rather, that since measurement of wealth under capitalism is through the medium of industry as opposed to land under feudalism, agriculture itself has become and industry.

[Geiseric]

Peasantry can own land, whereas proletarians own nothing. Peasantry can also employ laborers to work on their farm that they own. The key is ownership and whoever gets the profits from the productive forces.

[Book O'Dead]

Peasantry can own land, whereas proletarians own nothing. Peasantry can also employ laborers to work on their farm that they own. The key is ownership and whoever gets the profits from the productive forces.

And how many 'peasants do you know in San Francisco, Leon? Not many, I'll bet.

Listen: the peasantry, however you define it, no longer exists as a class. The world is pretty much divided neatly into two classes, workers and capitalists. And it doesn't require a degree in statistic to learn what the proportion of workers to capitalist is right now.

[Eagle_Syr]

And how many 'peasants do you know in San Francisco, Leon? Not many, I'll bet.

Listen: the peasantry, however you define it, no longer exists as a class. The world is pretty much divided neatly into two classes, workers and capitalists. And it doesn't require a degree in statistic to learn what the proportion of workers to capitalist is right now.

Thanks for the clarification. So would a revolution of some kind have been possible 800 years ago?
Is it the presense of productive resources such as factories, a result of capitalism, that is necessary for a socialist revolution to be successful? Why couldn't a feudal society experience an agrarian revolution, establish communalism, and then develop industry?

[Book O'Dead]

Thanks for the clarification. So would a revolution of some kind have been possible 800 years ago?
Is it the presense of productive resources such as factories, a result of capitalism, that is necessary for a socialist revolution to be successful? Why couldn't a feudal society experience an agrarian revolution, establish communalism, and then develop industry?

There were agrarian and peasant revolutions before. Their outcome is pretty much what we have today.

[Karabin]

the peasantry, however you define it, no longer exists as a class. The world is pretty much divided neatly into two classes, workers and capitalists.

I will disagree on that. Maybe what you say is true for developed western nations, but definitely not true in other parts of the world (In this instance I'm specifically thinking of Eastern Europe). I lived in Eastern Europe for 2 years, and I would definitely say that there is still a peasant class there; many villagers need to sell the goods that they farmed at a market to survive.

[islandmilitia]

The classical Marxist argument behind the working class being the primary site of political agency is that the working class, through the processes of modern industrial development, is engaged in a collective labour process, which means that the factory space places workers in close proximity with each other and that production itself depends on a complex division of labour in which all the particular components are necessary for the final outcome. This is what Marx means in the Manifesto when he says that "with the development of industry, the proletariat not only increases in number; it becomes concentrated in greater masses, its strength grows, and it feels that strength more". Later on in the Manifesto, he implicitly contrasts this view with that of the utopian socialists, who are said to regard the working class only "the most suffering class" rather than recognizing the crucial strategic role of the working class in capitalist production.

The peasantry, in contrast to all these features, was seen by Marx (and more specifically by Trotsky) to be spatially dispersed and to be engaged in forms of production which do not embody an advanced division of labour, the result being that the peasantry lacks collective political agency, and is, in moments of crisis, orientated towards the equalization of land holdings on the basis of private property, precisely because land be divided up, whereas a factory cannot.

This is the classical argument, because it's worth considering whether these perspectives are true in all times and places. There are examples which show that the peasantry is capable of collective political agency - for example, the contemporary MST (Landless Workers' Movement) in Brazil which has involved agricultural labourers and poor peasants engaging in mass land occupation under the leadership of peasant activists. Similarly, it's worth considering whether the categories of proletarian and peasant are necessarily exclusive, as in China you see that most of the workers employed in export production retain rural household registration and are still very much tied to their families in the countryside, which opens up the possibility of a progressive dialectic of struggle between rural and urban zones.