The Demise of China's Peasantry as a Class

Abstract

Theorists of class have long predicted the end of the peasantry: Marx, Hobsbawm and Bernstein have all argued that in the transition to capitalism, peasants would be either transformed into individual specialized commodity producers (commercial farmers), or forced into wage-labour by fragmentation of their land holdings, and dispossession, debt and impoverishment. On the other hand, these theorists have been uncharacteristically ambivalent about whether or not the peasantry constitutes a class. Marx, for example, argued that although peasants' economic exploitation and political and social subordination placed them in an antagonistic relationship with other classes, they lacked any consciousness of, and capacity to articulate, their common class interests, much less organize politically. Pointing to the uneven, contradictory impacts of globalized agriculture and consequent differentiation among agriculturalists, Bernstein, too, cautions that ‘“the peasantry” is hardly a uniform or analytically helpful social category in contemporary capitalism… The same stricture necessarily applies to any views of peasants as a (single) “class” (“exploited” or otherwise)‘.