Why are the Peasants considered a separate class to the Proletariat and the Bourgious

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Title speaks for itself. Why are the peasants considered a class of their own? I don't know whether this was cleared up in Marx's works or not as I am still reading some of his more crucial writings, but aren't the peasantry nothing more than agrarian proletarians and petit-bourgiousie (Farmhands and land-owners)?.

[Art Vandelay]

What defines a particular class, is its relationship to the means of production; therefor the short answer is that the peasant class and the proletarian class, have different relationships to the means of production.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

What defines a particular class, is its relationship to the means of production; therefor the short answer is that the peasant class and the proletarian class, have different relationships to the means of production.

How so? Do the proletariat and farmhands not both produce through manual labour their commodities? Do the bourgiousie and farm-owners not exploit their respective workers' labour to create surplus, currency or otherwise?

[MustCrushCapitalism]

Peasants aren't a class, and don't have unified class interests.

Landowning peasants (bourgeois) may hire nonlandowning peasants (proletarian) to work the fields and whatnot, but there are also peasants who work their own land without hiring anyone (petty bourgeois).

[Flying Purple People Eater]

Peasants aren't a class, and don't have unified class interests.

Landowning peasants (bourgeois) may hire nonlandowning peasants (proletarian) to work the fields and whatnot, but there are also peasants who work their own land without hiring anyone (petty bourgeois).

Why then, are proletarian peasantry separated from the proletariat in most socialist theories?

(If I'm ignoring something significant here, please point it out. I'm still learning)

[Aussie Trotskyist]

The serf possesses and uses an instrument of production, a piece of land, in exchange for which he gives up a part of his product or part of the services of his labor.
The proletarian works with the instruments of production of another, for the account of this other, in exchange for a part of the product.
The serf gives up, the proletarian receives. The serf has an assured existence, the proletarian has not. The serf is outside competition, the proletarian is in it.
The serf liberates himself in one of three ways: either he runs away to the city and there becomes a handicraftsman; or, instead of products and services, he gives money to his lord and thereby becomes a free tenant; or he overthrows his feudal lord and himself becomes a property owner. In short, by one route or another, he gets into the owning class and enters into competition. The proletarian liberates himself by abolishing competition, private property, and all class differences.


-Engels, The Principles of Communism, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

[Hit The North]

Under Feudalism the peasantry is an aggregated layer of various status groups who's relation to the means of production is determined by a set of traditional obligations and rights. Under this system peasants have access to land (primary means of production) that is farmed to provide the means of subsistence for the family but also a proportion of which belongs to the landlord who "owns" and administers the territory in which the land belongs. It's more complicated than this, but this is essentially the peasant's relationship to the means of production.

Marx writes about how the development of capitalism depend upon its ability to uproot peasant populations and transform them into proletarians. Proletarians are characterised by having no access to means of production except by selling their labour power to the bourgeoisie who monopolise the means of production. Unlike the peasant who produces his own subsistence, the proletariat produces commodities that belong to the capitalist and in return receive a wage via which they can purchase the commodities they produce from the capitalist who owns them. The wage relation transforms the worker himself into a commodity.

People who work the land as labourers, and are paid a wage, are not peasants but workers.