Why is the peasantry generally seen by revolutionary leftists as reactionary?

[TheWannabeAnarchist]

I don't see any difference between peasants and the working class. Both are underclasses exploited by social elites--so why did Lenin, Marx, and others see the peasantry as generally reactionary in nature? Even Mao believed that the peasants needed to be lead by the workers.

Maybe I'm just ignorant or misinformed. Could you guys help explain this to me?

[Brosa Luxemburg]

For a quick response, i'll quote Engels. It's mainly about the way that these different social classes liberate themselves.


— 5 —
Under what conditions does this sale of the
labor of the proletarians to the bourgeoisie take place?

Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor.

But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.

However, since business is sometimes better and sometimes worse, it follows that the worker sometimes gets more and sometimes gets less for his commodities. But, again, just as the industrialist, on the average of good times and bad, gets no more and no less for his commodities than what they cost, similarly on the average the worker gets no more and no less than his minimum.

This economic law of wages operates the more strictly the greater the degree to which big industry has taken possession of all branches of production.



— 6 —
What working classes were there before the industrial revolution?

The working classes have always, according to the different stages of development of society, lived in different circumstances and had different relations to the owning and ruling classes.

In antiquity, the workers were the slaves of the owners, just as they still are in many backward countries and even in the southern part of the United States.

In the Middle Ages, they were the serfs of the land-owning nobility, as they still are in Hungary, Poland, and Russia. In the Middle Ages, and indeed right up to the industrial revolution, there were also journeymen in the cities who worked in the service of petty bourgeois masters. Gradually, as manufacture developed, these journeymen became manufacturing workers who were even then employed by larger capitalists.



— 7 —
In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?

The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.

The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest. The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence. This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.

The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.

The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society. Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.

The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.



— 8 —
In what way do proletarians differ from serfs?

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.



— 9 —
In what way do proletarians differ from handicraftsmen?

In contrast to the proletarian, the so-called handicraftsman, as he still existed almost everywhere in the past (eighteenth) century and still exists here and there at present, is a proletarian at most temporarily. His goal is to acquire capital himself wherewith to exploit other workers. He can often achieve this goal where guilds still exist or where freedom from guild restrictions has not yet led to the introduction of factory-style methods into the crafts nor yet to fierce competition But as soon as the factory system has been introduced into the crafts and competition flourishes fully, this perspective dwindles away and the handicraftsman becomes more and more a proletarian. The handicraftsman therefore frees himself by becoming either bourgeois or entering the middle class in general, or becoming a proletarian because of competition (as is now more often the case). In which case he can free himself by joining the proletarian movement, i.e., the more or less communist movement. [2]



— 10 —
In what way do proletarians differ from manufacturing workers?

The manufacturing worker of the 16th to the 18th centuries still had, with but few exception, an instrument of production in his own possession – his loom, the family spinning wheel, a little plot of land which he cultivated in his spare time. The proletarian has none of these things.

The manufacturing worker almost always lives in the countryside and in a more or less patriarchal relation to his landlord or employer; the proletarian lives, for the most part, in the city and his relation to his employer is purely a cash relation.

The manufacturing worker is torn out of his patriarchal relation by big industry, loses whatever property he still has, and in this way becomes a proletarian.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

[BIXX]

For a quick response, i'll quote Engels. It's mainly about the way that these different social classes liberate themselves.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm

Um... Engels seems to have pulled that out of his ass, to be honest. That's a terrible reason to be anti-peasant. I still know no good reasons to be anti-peasant.

[Art Vandelay]

The proletariat is the revolutionary class within capitalist society. Marx & Engels weren't anti-(insert social class here) for no good reason, or because they fetishized the condition/consciousness of the proletariat, but because the historical task of surpassing the capitalist mode of production fell to the feet of the proletariat, just as it did to the bourgeoisie in feudalism. The peasantry are potential and temporary allies for the proletarian revolution, I don't think understanding that makes one 'anti-peasant.'

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah I don't think they are necessarily reactionary in aims, their aims can be liberatory, but their social relations, especially where capitalism has taken a foothold prevent them from running society themselves. They are "reactionary" in a general sense because on their own, they might prefer a more gentle feudalism to the kind of worst of both worlds type situation many developing contry's peasants found themselves in (feudal laws but with capitalist economic pressures). Many of their ideals would probably be pretty inspiring and heroic and I think we see these ideals reflected in some Maoist and anarchist politics.

So in a situation where emerging capitalism wasn't to rearrange country production... Or at least squeeze more out of it to help create and sustain an urban labor force, peasants probably would have demands that would be aimed at pushing back on these demands: where the capital-influenced estate production is becoming more industrialized and centeralized for profit, peasants might want the land more evenly divided among everyone. So in response to capitalism they might look back, rather than forward and hence be considered "reactionary". But really their demands aren't reactionary in a repressive way, wanting to have access to commons, wanting to control your own labor more, I think these are the motivating things and so a communist working class movement in the past could actually offer peasants a chance for the best of both worlds... Advances in agriculture and production without the alienation and precariousness that comes with wage labor.

I'm not sure if this is at all relevant today when china and India are massively urban and most agricultural production in the world is fully capitalist in nature. Peasants are a minority and so the question of what social force in the world has the ability to reorganize things is a little more apparent.

[Venas Abiertas]

Peasants often see themselves as being tied to the land, and aspire to own some themselves. In fact, most do own at least a small parcel, although it is often of poor quality and not big enough to allow them to enter the cash economy.

The experience of peasants in wars is almost always negative. Armies march through their villages, slashing and burning and raping, and stealing their livestock. New governments usually treat them with condescension at best, or grab their lands and give them to big companies or "redistribute" them as political favors. When peasants have to leave their villages, they quickly discover that their skill sets and traditional knowledge are unneeded and even ridiculed in the big cities or foreign countries where they go to seek work.

In short, peasants are frequently conservative simply because their experience with change of any kind is normally negative. The patrón is the devil they know. Anything else seems like jumping from the frying pan into the fire.

Having said that, however, peasants have made valuable contributions to almost every Marxist revolution. They are accustomed to cooperating with others and not adverse to forming and belonging to peasant unions. They are physically fit and accustomed to hardships like marching for days over mountains and through swamps. They can find food where a city-dweller sees only trees or sand. Many have military experience or learned to shoot when they were young. When they commit to a cause, they give it their undying loyalty. Sometimes they keep fighting and resisting for years after the city-based movements have been broken up or petered out on their own.

So I think it would be a big mistake to underestimate peasants or paid agricultural workers as a revolutionary force. It's true their numbers have dwindled but there are still many hundreds of millions of them around the world.

[Devrim]

To explain it in very simple terms it is connected to the relationship to the means of production.

The worker and the capitalist have diametrically opposed immediate material interests. The worker's immediate material interest is in doing less work and in earning more money. The capitalists immediate material interest is in the worker doing more work for less money. This is the motor of class struggle.

The peasant, on the other hand, has a fundamentally different relationship to the means if production. To understand this first it is necessary to understand what a peasant is. A peasant is a small producer. They typically own their own piece of land, which they cultivate. A peasant is not an agricultural worker, who sells their labour.

The agricultural worker is a member of the working class. The peasant is as a member of the petite bourgeoisie. The peasants immediate interests are not thrown into conflict with those of the big capitalists. A peasants immediate interests are not in working less for more money. If they work less their farms will go bankrupt. A peasants immediate interests are in working harder and owning more land to make more money, and as such they are not forced into collective class struggle.

It is a bit simplistic, but that is the heart of it.

Devrim

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

What of peasant communities that have some collective ownership over their land, such as in many communities in Mexico? Marx and Engels alike did describe the peasants as generally reactionary, but they also saw hope in some cases in peasants who depended still on the commons. Their view on the Russian Mir is the example which first comes to mind.

It also highlights the problems with the term "peasant" - it includes both smallholders and members of traditional village communes.

[Comrade #138672]

I don't see any difference between peasants and the working class. Both are underclasses exploited by social elites--so why did Lenin, Marx, and others see the peasantry as generally reactionary in nature? Even Mao believed that the peasants needed to be lead by the workers.

Maybe I'm just ignorant or misinformed. Could you guys help explain this to me?Well, this is ignoring the fact that the peasantry and the proletariat are different "underclasses", originating from different modes of production, namely feudalism and capitalism. As we know, capitalism is more progressive than feudalism. This means that the proletariat is the more progressive class, as opposed to the peasantry, which would be, by comparison, more reactionary.

[Devrim]

It also highlights the problems with the term "peasant" - it includes both smallholders and members of traditional village communes.

Compared to that in many languages the English term is quite exact. It does define people by an economic relationship. The term used in many other languages is much more vague, often just meaning villager. Of course it is also problematic in that it lumps together the poorest self sufficient small holders along with those on the brink of modern capitalist agriculture.


What of peasant communities that have some collective ownership over their land, such as in many communities in Mexico? Marx and Engels alike did describe the peasants as generally reactionary, but they also saw hope in some cases in peasants who depended still on the commons. Their view on the Russian Mir is the example which first comes to mind.

Marx talked in his later work about the possibility of a giant leap allowing the peasant communes in Russia to become directly socialised and manage to avoid capitalism. It didn't happen. However, Marx didn't see the hope of revolution in lying in these forms, but saw that a workers' revolution might allow them to avoid the barbarism of capitalism.

Devrim

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Marx talked in his later work about the possibility of a giant leap allowing the peasant communes in Russia to become directly socialised and manage to avoid capitalism. It didn't happen. However, Marx didn't see the hope of revolution in lying in these forms, but saw that a workers' revolution might allow them to avoid the barbarism of capitalism.
It didn't happen in part because the Russian Mir was dismantled before the Russian Revolution. That's not the case elsewhere in the world however - many Latin American countries still have communal agrarian relations

Marx didn't see the revolutionary hope lying in those forms, but there have been peasant-based revolutions that didn't ask for the direct redistribution of property but the protection of agricultural commons (the uprising in Chiapas in 1994 being a recent example). It was also a compelling motive for peasants to join revolutionary guerrilla movements in Latin America during the Cold War.

My own thought on the subject is that it's one of those areas that Marx and Engels may have had right in their time, but that by the modern era, the relation that communal peasant villages have to modern capitalism is such that they can play an active leading role alongside the working class.

[G4b3n]

The classical anarchists refereed to sections of the peasantry as the rural proletariat. One can not put a single label on the entire peasantry because they constitute various relationships to the means of production. In simple terms, those who own nothing or next to nothing and labor on land that is not their own have very similar interests to that of the working class as they simply desire a reliable means of existence. The peasants that exist within the small bourgeoisie own the means with which they labor, employ others to labor for them, or enjoy some other form of privileged relationship to production. These are the peasants that are expected to be reactionary, however, in various past revolutions they have been sympathetic to worker's movements and it is not out of the realistic scope of things for them to support a worker's revolution.

[Comrade Jacob]

The peasantry are petty-bourgeois but they have their revolutionary elements.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Schofield (2003) identified the peasantry as a term that is as all-encompassing as the term 'Christian'. It hides a multiplicity of experience, social status, wealth and, in feudal times, levels of freedom; peasants could range from serfs with nothing more than a tiny property and small garden, to members of the minor gentry so wealthy that they could employ numerous serfs themselves.

So to say the peasantry is generally viewed as reactionary is not quite correct. Rather, in society today, given the global nature of capitalism, you will rarely come across many serfs. Rather, the sorts of peasants you will come across will be land-owning peasants, whose wealth came about as a result of feudal relations. In other words, the wealthier sections of the peasantry (as well as, arguably, sections of the middle peasantry) did well out of feudalism. They had no inclination to see feudalism replaced by capitalism, let alone by socialism or any similar system that involves the collectivisation of property and the destruction of oppressive social relations.

[blake 3:17]

It was a big mistake on the part of socialists to dismiss the peasantry so quickly. Marx's quips on 'rural idiocy' I wish were actually funny.

I'd recommend Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis and The Food Wars by Walden Bello as important correctives to the imperialist Euro-technophilia of a lot of Leftist thought.

From an article by Mara Baviera and Walden Bello in Monthly Review in 2009:


These developments constitute not simply the erosion of national food self-sufficiency or food security but what some students of agricultural trends call “de-peasantization”—the phasing out of a mode of production to make the countryside a more congenial site for intensive capital accumulation.25 This transformation has been a traumatic one for hundreds of millions of people, since peasant production is not simply an economic activity. It is an ancient way of life, a culture, which is one reason displaced or marginalized peasants in India have taken to committing suicide. In the state of Andhra Pradesh, farmer suicides rose from 233 in 1998 to 2,600 in 2002; in Maharashtra, suicides more than tripled, from 1,083 in 1995 to 3,926 in 2005.26 One estimate is that some 150,000 Indian farmers have taken their lives over the last few years,27 and global justice activist Vandana Shiva explains why: “Under globalization, the farmer is losing her/his social, cultural, economic identity as a producer. A farmer is now a ‘consumer’ of costly seeds and costly chemicals sold by powerful global corporations through powerful landlords and money lenders locally.”28

Resistance

Yet peasants have refused to go gently into that good night to which Collier and Hobsbawm—not to say Marx—would consign them. Indeed, one year before Hobsbawm’s book was published, in 1993, La Vía Campesina was founded, and over the next decade this federation of peasants and small farmers would become an influential actor on the agriculture and trade scene globally. The spirit of internationalism and active identification of one’s class interests with the universal interest of society that was once a prominent feature of workers’ movements is now on display in the international peasant movement.

Vía Campesina and its allies hotly dispute the inevitability of the hegemony of capitalist industrial agriculture, asserting that peasants and small farmers continue to be the backbone of global food production, constituting over a third of the world’s population and two-thirds of the world’s food producers.29 Smallholders with farms of under two hectares make up the bulk of the rice produced by Asian small farmers.30

The food price crisis, according to proponents of peasant and smallholder agriculture, is not due to the failure of peasant agriculture but to that of corporate agriculture. They say that, despite the claims of its representatives that corporate agriculture is best at feeding the world, the creation of global production chains and global supermarkets, driven by the search for monopoly profits, has been accompanied by greater hunger, worse food, and greater agriculture-related environmental destabilization all around than at any other time in history.

Moreover, they assert that the superiority in terms of production of industrial capitalist agriculture is not sustained empirically. Miguel Altieri and Clara Nicholls, for instance, point out, that although the conventional wisdom is that small farms are backward and unproductive, in fact, “research shows that small farms are much more productive than large farms if total output is considered rather than yield from a single crop. Small integrated farming systems that produce grains, fruits, vegetables, fodder, and animal products outproduce yield per unit of single crops such as corn (monocultures) on large-scale farms.”31

When one factors in the ecological destabilization that has accompanied the generalization of capitalist industrial agriculture, the balance of costs and benefits lurches sharply towards the negative. For instance, in the United States, notes Daniel Imhoff,

the average food item journeys some 1300 miles before becoming part of a meal. Fruits and vegetables are refrigerated, waxed, colored, irradiated, fumigated, packaged, and shipped. None of these processes enhances food quality but merely enables distribution over great distances and helps increase shelf life.32

Industrial agriculture has created the absurd situation whereby “between production, processing, distribution, and preparation, 10 calories of energy are required to create just one calorie of food energy.”33 Conversely, it is the ability to combine productivity and ecological sustainability that constitutes a key dimension of superiority of peasant or small-scale agriculture over industrial agriculture.

http://monthlyreview.org/2009/07/01/food-wars

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Of course Blake, regardless of the efficiency of output of peasant production vs capitalist production in agriculture, the key determinant of our support should be the social relations of the peasantry vis a vis the exploiting and exploited classes.

The problem being, as I said above, is that it is un-satisfactory to simply generalise the 'peasantry'. Some are poor, some can be quite wealthy. Some will have very primitive social relations - they produce enough for themselves and their families, i.e they subsist. Others will be able to sell a small surplus at local markets. Other still will be able to rely on a constant surplus to provide a higher standard of living for their families, and will be able to employ other 'peasants' to take up part or all of their agricultural labour.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

Schofield (2003) identified the peasantry as a term that is as all-encompassing as the term 'Christian'. It hides a multiplicity of experience, social status, wealth and, in feudal times, levels of freedom; peasants could range from serfs with nothing more than a tiny property and small garden, to members of the minor gentry so wealthy that they could employ numerous serfs themselves.

So to say the peasantry is generally viewed as reactionary is not quite correct. Rather, in society today, given the global nature of capitalism, you will rarely come across many serfs. Rather, the sorts of peasants you will come across will be land-owning peasants, whose wealth came about as a result of feudal relations. In other words, the wealthier sections of the peasantry (as well as, arguably, sections of the middle peasantry) did well out of feudalism. They had no inclination to see feudalism replaced by capitalism, let alone by socialism or any similar system that involves the collectivisation of property and the destruction of oppressive social relations.

As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there continue to exist peasants who live and farm on land either owned by their community or by their state. They do not make some insignificantly small portion of that population. There are also those who are still basically serfs who work the land of another, though it's less extreme in form than you would have seen at the turn of the 19th century in Russia or Mexico or any other feudal country.

[Devrim]

It didn't happen in part because the Russian Mir was dismantled before the Russian Revolution. That's not the case elsewhere in the world however - many Latin American countries still have communal agrarian relations.

I have very little idea about the details about these village communes, or indeed much about Latin America in general. Could you provide a basic reference for mr to catch up, please.


Marx didn't see the revolutionary hope lying in those forms, but there have been peasant-based revolutions that didn't ask for the direct redistribution of property but the protection of agricultural commons (the uprising in Chiapas in 1994 being a recent example). It was also a compelling motive for peasants to join revolutionary guerrilla movements in Latin America during the Cold War.

I suppose it all depends how you vies these sort of events, and I would view them very differently to you. I don't think that there is much that is revolutionary at all about these sort of guerrilla movements. Even from your own explanation what they ask for is 'reactionary' in that their aim is to preserve old property forms.



My own thought on the subject is that it's one of those areas that Marx and Engels may have had right in their time, but that by the modern era, the relation that communal peasant villages have to modern capitalism is such that they can play an active leading role alongside the working class.

I think that you are completely wrong here. The peasantry as a class is in historic decline. It has much less weight today than it did in the 19th century. As a section of this class those who are involved in communal type property relations must be a tiny groups size wise. I think to expect economically insignificant sectors of the population residing in backwaters to play a 'leading role' is delusional. They don't matter.

Devrim

[Devrim]

The classical anarchists refereed to sections of the peasantry as the rural proletariat.

It depends how you define peasantry. I think traditionally the peasantry was considered to be small producers and that the rural proletariat to be part of a separate class. Of course there is a large cross over too and things aren’t that simple with for example many peasants being semi-proletarianised, e.g. providing paid labour for richer peasants as well as having their own small piece of land.

Devrim

[Devrim]

So to say the peasantry is generally viewed as reactionary is not quite correct. Rather, in society today, given the global nature of capitalism, you will rarely come across many serfs. Rather, the sorts of peasants you will come across will be land-owning peasants, whose wealth came about as a result of feudal relations. In other words, the wealthier sections of the peasantry (as well as, arguably, sections of the middle peasantry) did well out of feudalism. They had no inclination to see feudalism replaced by capitalism, let alone by socialism or any similar system that involves the collectivisation of property and the destruction of oppressive social relations.

This seems a bit confused. The wealth section of the peasantry today do well out of capitalism as you note that feudalism has been replaced by capitalism. Its interests are in protecting it property, and its goals are in expanding this property. This makes it a reactionary class. It doesn't really matter how it is viewed. It is its historical role.

Devrim

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

I have very little idea about the details about these village communes, or indeed much about Latin America in general. Could you provide a basic reference for mr to catch up, please.


I know of them mostly through Mexico, but I think many other countries have an analogous experience. Basically, when the Europeans came to Mexico, the native farmers had different notions of land rights. The Mesoamericans distributed land to communities who then gave families the right to work it. Of course, this model wasn't exactly "Democratic" but there you go.

During the conquest the best native lands were distributed to wealthy Spaniard landlords and the rest of the land was left aside for communities to farm. The agrarian communities continued to exist, especially in the more remote areas, but the Spanish centralized land ownership under the most powerful families later on in their rule. That is how the infamous Hacienda came to Mexico

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calpulli
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ejido

During the Mexican revolution, the peasants demanded the right to the land and ejidos were set up by force when Zapata's army rose up in Morelos (Ejido being a rural farming commune which "owned" the land and gave individual farming families the right to use it). After the revolution, the ejidos were enshrined into the constitution and became the basis for peasant life. People did not own the land as smallholders but actually as communities. The problem is that this was a very localized form of economic power and it did not translate to serious political sovereignty. As such they did not receive serious investments in their communities to bolster production and the communities often became split between those who supported the state and those who didn't as political agency became divided. Of course, they exist outside of Capitalist logic and so are fundamentally unable to compete or produce food at "efficient" and "profitable" levels, focusing on producing enough (with limited technology too) for supporting their towns.

The political descendants of the social democrats who instituted it in the 1930s to win elections reformed the law in the 1990s to prepare for NAFTA. That is what sparked the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, where farmers forcefully occupied the land of wealthy Mexicans and distributed it among the peasant communities. They also demanded that their own ejidos be protected against possible dismantlement. The EZLN continues to control a good portion of Chiapas with tens of thousands of inhabitants, and they do not use the land as private economic property. They have also inspired indigenous peasants elsewhere in Mexico, and have been an important part of the Left in that country since their emergence on the scene. Of course they trade with outsiders so there is a sense in which they are dependent on Capitalism but they have been the most progressive and radical movement to actually seize and hold the means of production for an extended period of time in the past couple decades.

Incidentally, despite being "backwards" peasant revolutionaries, their policies on gender have been remarkably progressive too, catapulting women into leadership positions in their militias and creating space for them in local direct democratic institutions. Their communiques have also traditionally been more radical on lgbt rights issues than other revolutionary movements historically have been. Perhaps that is due to the fact that some indigenous groups in Mexico look upon the gay community with tolerance.

There are movements elsewhere, especially in indigenous communities whose agriculture is under threat by some kind of policy imposed by neoliberal governments. Of course, these movements have problems, not the least of which is a difficulty in organizing with the urban working class due to the physical alienation. The upshot is that unlike the urban working class they don't risk losing their jobs, homes, or ability to feed their family if they participate in a movement that fails. Ultimately, as a class, they are often at minimum no more socially backwards than their working class compañeros and they remain a serious force in many areas. Traditionally they have been heavily influenced by many Marxist and Anarchist strains of thought, as well as their own indigenous ideas of communal property ownership/resistance etc



I suppose it all depends how you vies these sort of events, and I would view them very differently to you. I don't think that there is much that is revolutionary at all about these sort of guerrilla movements. Even from your own explanation what they ask for is 'reactionary' in that their aim is to preserve old property forms.
A lot of progressive movements have started historically by trying to preserve some limited assets that the poorest classes retain.

Many of those guerrilla groups were problematic, particularly the Marxist Leninist and Maoist groups, though they were also groups responsible for organizing the urban working class, not just the peasants. I don't think they were reactionary because of their involvement with the peasants but from the kind of political model the majority of radicals took on during the Cold War.



I think that you are completely wrong here. The peasantry as a class is in historic decline. It has much less weight today than it did in the 19th century. As a section of this class those who are involved in communal type property relations must be a tiny groups size wise. I think to expect economically insignificant sectors of the population residing in backwaters to play a 'leading role' is delusional. They don't matter.
I don't think they could play a leading role alone but could do so alongside the working class where they are still relevant. I think that they will likely be an active participant in any revolution in many parts of Latin America, for instance. Groups and movements like the EZLN have left their mark on the millions of Mexicans, especially in the South, who still have these kinds of property relations (though just like the proletariat, their class is a divided one even where it is most radical)

There is also substantial movement back and forth in between the peasant classes in these communities and urban and rural proletariat in their home countries and in places like the US. For instance many American farmworkers are peasants whose land was privatized, or who weren't able to compete with American farms, and needed to head to the US to help support their family members who remain in the communities. To say that they are "backwater" misses the fact that the people from these towns are feeding the tech workers at Google. It also misses the point that these peasants are workers, and many workers are also peasants, at different points in their lives. Like peasants historically, there is a constant push for them to seek the higher living standards that being an urban worker has to offer, but unlike peasants historically, there is always a community for them to return to if they grow tired of the long hours in a factory.

These communities also often have other kinds of production that they have developed. One ejido in Mexico (not EZLN affiliated as far as I know) has fish farms, gravel factories and lumber production in addition to food production which they themselves have built up. Of course we should have no illusions - as far as the community relates to the outside world, this functions as capital - but these "peasants" are not "petit bourgeois smallholders" so much as relatively self-conscious peasants doing the best they can to organize their communities.

Lastly, what tends to excite these communities revolting in the first place is going from being a "backwater" to being forcefully incorporated into global capitalism, as evidenced by the EZLN uprising in the face of NAFTA and possible land privatization. These people largely live on the last corners of the world which are economic "commons", but the whole point is that there are no real "backwaters" left in the modern global economy outside of the primitive communists in the deepest jungles of the Amazon, Africa, New Guinea and India..


anyways I'm tired and rambling I'll try to finish this conversation later - I don't want to argue that the peasants will be the next revolutionary class, just that peasants can, when class conscious, and in the right conditions, have the agency and capability to participate actively in a revolution.

[Djoko]

Because peasants are mostly mini-capitalists

[blake 3:17]

Because peasants are mostly mini-capitalists

The only reasons their bodies would be smaller would be due to nutritional deficiencies & hard work.

Working the land & surviving parasitically off of waged labour are qualitatively different.

[Venas Abiertas]

I propose that we move away from any previously conceived distinctions about the revolutionary potential of proletariats, lumpenproletariats, peasants, agricultural workers, industrial workers, service workers, etc.

Today, the widespread deindustrialization of formerly industrial countries has led to the disappearance of the huge factories and mills of the past two centuries that each employed thousands of workers. The giant industrial complexes of yore have not been rebuilt in the Global South, either. These days, service jobs predominate over manufacturing ones. The prevailing phenomenon now is the alienation of workers from each other, leading many to identify more with their bosses and the rich than with their fellow laborers. In both North and South the "lumpenproletariat" has now swollen to include hundreds of millions, perhaps even more than a billion human beings. Land distribution is worse than ever, with the best parcels almost completely in the hands of transnational agro-giants.

The time has come to expand our definition of the proletariat, or maybe replace it altogether. After all, there are really only two social and economic classes: the exploiters and the exploited.

Both classes share the same physical space: a rapidly deteriorating environment whose growing levels of contamination or air, water, and soil threaten the entire human race and most other species as well.

Some leftist thinkers have suggested that we should instead group people by "chains of production." A chain of production would include all those who participate in the collecting of raw materials, manufacturing, packaging, transportation, and selling of a certain product. It would also include all other exploited who occupy the same territory, such as subsistence farmers, street vendors, domestic help and restaurant workers, and it would include the animals, plants, soil, water, and air found in that territory.

This could be a way of linking together people and groups of people who have dissimilar occupations, educational levels, living situations, cultures, and histories but who share a common concern: their condition as exploited beings inhabiting an increasingly threatened (and threatening) environment.

[laoch na phoblacht]

the "peasantry" or rural people are part of the working class their is no ideological reason to ignore rural people. It is probably a result of most leftists being urban based not a result of ideology. leftists can't ignore rural people if they truly hope to ever achieve a revolution.