The Return of the Peasant? Prospects for an Agrarian Marxism
Jacob Seagrave
12 April 2025
12 April 2025
In 1994, looking back on an only recently ended ‘short twentieth century’, the historian Eric Hobsbawm declared the world-historical death of the peasantry. As he put it: ‘For 80 percent of humanity, the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s’. [1] Humanity then, is now forever cut off from that anachronistic world of land, subsistence, and simple reproduction. Proletarianisation as that singular historical logic of capital – of separating producers from their means of production through expropriation, commodification, and dispossession to generate radical market dependency – is, for Hobsbawm, an essentially completed process. This bidding farewell to a global class, exemplifies what Mike Davis has referred to as the ‘doomed peasant dogma’ [2], an attitude we can find reprised more recently in the Salvage Collective’s notion of the ‘Proletarocene’ as a rival to the Anthropocene or Capitalocene, [3] indexing the tragedy of a world of working-class gravediggers who have inherited only the grave of climate disaster. [4]
Yet only a year prior in 1993, La Via Campesina was formed as the new international peasant movement, a kind of rural International which today claims to represent 200 million poor peasants, small farmers, and agricultural workers in 80 countries, composed of 182 organizations across the globe. [5] Its agenda of land rights, reform, and redistribution, alongside the advocacy of agroecological farming and food sovereignty, all express a counter-hegemonic movement against the destructive and immiserating forces of agrarian capitalism: of both out-right primitive accumulation and violent land-grabbing across the Global South, as well as the mute forces of market compulsion, financialization of food commodity chains, and the commodification of agricultural inputs and outputs with its attended scourge of indebtedness, not to mention ever-exacerbating ecologies of pollution, disease, and disaster.
La Via Camepsina are responding to the long wave of re-colonization-through-neoliberalisation. Since the 1980s, the major redistributive achievements of the national liberation movements and communist revolutions – or what Eric Wolf more aptly termed ‘the peasant wars of the twentieth century’ [6] - have been overturned; systematically dissassembled through the deployment of structural adjustment policies from Mexico, to Algeria, China, Russia and Vietnam, alongside the surviving systems of peasant ownership in sub-Saharan Africa and south and south-east Asia, in an attempt to recoup the monopolistic super-profits of imperialism.
How then do we explain such a discrepancy between Hobsbawm bidding farewell to a class who are simultaneously announcing their international resistance against forces that are supposed to have already turned them into urban proletarians? Despite the fatalistic pronunciations of a world-historical terminus or beautiful elegies of a vanished peasant world, [7] might the agrarian question, or the peasant question, not have been entirely resolved in favour of a triumphant capital? Might the blocked semi-proletarianization that defines our ‘planet of slums’, [8] alongside the catastrophic ecological costs of robbery agriculture and the looming disruption to food systems, show that the classical ‘agrarian question’ – as the question of the reproduction of labour – has not disappeared, because it has not been ‘resolved’ through the supposed death of the peasantry, nor their becoming proletarian?
Here then I would like to propose a possible agrarianisation of ecology, [9] one that views reflexive political struggles over land as central to any wider communist project in the 21st century: to secure reproductive autonomy beyond the market, begin to repair the metabolic rift, and build egalitarian systems amid climate disaster and against eco-fascism. Indeed, as political ecologist Mark Tilzey argues, the question of the 21st century is essentially a reformulation of the agrarian question of land grappled with by Marx, Engels, Kautsky and Lenin. As he puts it, we need to ask ‘what kind of political organization can attend to the semi-proletariat, not to transform it into a proletariat or a class of commercial farmers but rather to re-valorize its identity as a peasantry through access to land and the fulfillment of its vocation as small-scale and ecological based providers of secure food supplies.’ [10]
Through returning to the history of this question of land and peasantry, whilst looking at the image of the peasant condition in contemporary leftist utopian and dystopian thinking, as well as examining some aspects of the current agrarian situation, I hope to explore how we might rethink an ecological politics which has lost its connection to the question of land and as such – alongside labour – the real locus of reproduction.
The major division between ‘Marxists’ and ‘populist’ over the agrarian question – a division that stretches back to Lenin’s critique of the Narodniks – is played out in Hobsbawm’s and La Via Campesina’s simultaneous assessments, which address again those three core aspects of this question identified by Henry Bernstein: [11] whether and to what extent capital is formally and really subsuming peasant production, whether and how this is significant for the wider national development of industrial capital accumulation and most crucially, what kind of political divisions and struggles are being generated by this process, that is, does it in fact provide the basis for a revolutionary transition.
For Lenin in his monumental Development of Capitalism in Russia – written in Siberian exile in 1899, and laden with statistics in a spirit outstripping even Marx’s mining of the Victorian Blue Books in Capital (1876) – the class differentiation of an already divided peasantry doomed the Narodnik peasant essentialism to revolutionary irrelevance, and with it, any hopes similar to ones expressed by Marx 25 years earlier in his suggestive letters to Vera Sasulich, that the Russian mir or commune might provide a direct pre-capitalist base for socialism. Conscious of what he termed ‘the dual position and dual role of the peasantry’, [12] Lenin’s project was to enlist poor peasants under what Lars Lih has termed the ‘heroic scenario’ [13] of working-class leadership, pushing for a bottom-up democratic ‘American path’ of agrarian capitalism in Russia, against a potential top-down Prussian ‘Junker’ path. The New Economic Policy reiterated this ambition and involved inviting populists into government, like A.V. Chayanov, [14] whose consumption-production theory of peasant household economy remains a rival to Marxism’s recurring emphasis on how the processes of agrarian class differentiation inhibit any preservation of the peasantry and thus potential for agrarian socialism.
In opposition to this emphasis on the economic fragmentation of any singular class interest, populism constructs an emancipatory peasant horizon that strategically essentializes the peasant against the backdrop of complex rural class divisions, as the utopian figure of subsistence, rooted in land as the means of autonomy from the market. What Philip McMichael calls ‘peasant modernism’, [15] re-valorises the peasant as an imaginary subject of plenty in opposition to the feudal linguistic baggage of lack, backwardness, survival and the bare life of subjection.
Land reform and redistribution as a necessary condition for securing access to reproduction, or agroecological farming as an alternative socio-ecological metabolism, and food sovereignty as a new moral economy beyond market laws, express a dual project for both the defense of diverse rural producers and proletarians and a re-peasantization and re- population of the countryside.
Whilst such a project shares deep affinities with the degrowth position, in its image of an ecologically harmonious, energy light, labour-intensive form of production, crucially, many of La Via Camepsina’s demands do not reflect a utopian plan, but an ecological accurate reading of the global food system. For instance, the very smallest of producers on plots of 5 acres or less already produce 1/3 of the world’s food supply using only 25% of its agricultural land. [16] When this is compared to conventional overproduction and how a 1/3 of food – enough to feed 2 billion people [17] - is simply wasted, small-scale and agroecological farming would seem to realistically be able to ‘feed the world’ under the right conditions.
As activists point out, there is nothing technologically necessary about conventional fossil fuel intensive agriculture, which after energy production is the second largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. [18] Indeed as many have pointed out, [19] the toxic energy-intensive tools of the post-war Green Revolution, like pesticides, fertilizers, mechanization and hybrid cropping was simply not about ‘feeding the world’, but rather an imperialistic cheapening of labour-power, the commodification of food systems, and anti-communist containment of rural uprisings in a decolonializing south. In the ongoing aftermath of such metabolic derangement, the peasant then ‘returns’ from our political repression, as both a contemporary class position, and a politically unifying horizon beyond the messy complications of divergent rural interests between small, medium and large producers.
Yet what if this image of the peasant prefigures instead a new dystopian post-capitalist world of neo-feudalism? This recent thesis suggested by Jodi Dean, Cedric Durand and Yanis Varoufakis amongst others, [20] argues that digitally and financially driven neoliberal over-accumulation is laden with feudal tendencies, such as rent and debt extraction, extra-economic force, and monopoly markets.
In doing so, such thinkers bring back the Dobb/Sweezy and Brenner/Wallerstein debates of the 50s, 60s, and 70s on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. From these debates emerged Political Marxism, which against the world-systems theory of Immanuel Wallerstein and his emphasis on the expansion of external colonial markets for the development of merchant capital, stressed instead (and in accordance with Marx’s own emphasis in Capital Vol 1.) the dynamism of class struggles over changing property relations in late feudalism: how tenant farming in England first provided the conditions of compelled innovation and productivity. For Political Marxists, capitalist social relations entail a movement towards a condition of mute compulsion or radical market dependency whereby the entanglement of the political and economic that characterized feudal tributary systems gives way to impersonal pure economic market mediation. [21]
Jodi Dean’s sophisticated account of neo-feudalism picks up on this theme of the separation of the economic and political, arguing that neo-feudalism is a continuation and reflexivisation of imperialism under the conditions of communicative capitalism characterized by four features: a monopolistic over-accumulation and concentration of capital, a parcellization of sovereignty and increased use of political authority to wield economic power, the proliferation of hinterlands which cleaves an increasingly exclusive urbanism from zones of abandonment, and finally, the revival of apocalyptic and reactionary ideology.
From this, Dean reserves sharp criticism for what might be recognized as Degrowth ambitions: dreams of localized sustainable agroecological food systems, re-commoning and small-holder farming, which for her in their emphasis on survival, ironically reproduce the feudal ideology of disasterist localism, and mean little in America and Europe where between 70-80 percent live in cities. Perhaps Dean means serfdom instead, with its unrecoverable sense of subjection and immobility, since she seems to find no political potential in the condition of the peasant. Overall, whilst becoming-peasant remains a provocative, even controversial, image for expressing this ‘neoliberal reflexivization of extra-economic forces’, it does sit at odds with the discursive re-valorization of that image of rural subsistence emanating from the south and championed by La Via Campesina.
But before turning to this global southern majority, what then for any agrarian question in the imperial core, where in the case of Europe only 4% of workers work in agriculture – of which 1/3 alone are in Romania. [22] In Europe the recent highly successful farmers’ protests express the entrenched interests of squeezed small and medium farmers against the piecemeal ecological provisions of the reconfigured Common Agricultural Policy subsidy. Similar to the French gilet jaunes, such protestors refuse capital’s externalization of the ecological costs it generates. Changes to subsidies do affect a substantial minority [23] of smaller farmers who simply could not turn a profit without this now 60-year-old program of continental agricultural welfare, which strives to cheapen food and in turn cheapen labour, in skewed competition with the south, whilst generating mountains of overproduction, pollution, and waste. This has also meant that since the 1970s and onwards agricultural labour in Europe has been a largely migrant affair, a system increasingly characterized, as Kai Heron have noted, as one of eco-apartheid [24]: of militarized borders against war and climate refugees and seasonal super-exploitation in greenhouses, plantations and fields.
The recent farmers’ protests again demonstrate the complexity and shifting nature of state, market and rural class dynamics in the imperial core. They do importantly raise the hardly asked question of how and why food is produced. Yet we might question in turn how their fetishization of land and valorization of ‘the farmer’ is regressive and chauvinistic, unmoored from the human and ecological brutalization that characterizes contemporary agriculture. How can we shift their thought-ending slogan No Farmers, No Food, No Future to the questions of What Farmers? What Food? What Future? This might be a question of transforming a regressive even potentially fascistic counter-movement against the market by squeezed small producers, into a progressive one focused on land re-distribution, ecological reparation, and workers’ rights. How might movements in the imperial core begin to organize rural-urban and north-south alliances around such questions across diverging interests and in an atmosphere of increasing reaction?
In the global south, home to 85% of humanity, neoliberalism has produced a condition of semi-proletarianization. With 1 billion people living in slums [25] and only 43% of the world’s population left as rural dwellers, [26] there has arisen an increasing mass of humanity literally surplus to capital’s requirements. But how can we begin to understand this through the lens of Political Marxism as a situation of changing class dynamics over property relations, rather than a world-historical terminus?
Following the work of scholars in Critical Agrarian Studies like Leandro Vergara-Camus, Paris Yeros and Sam Moyo we can view semi-proletarianization as really an ongoing migratory process of de-peasantization and re-peasantization as people seek to use whatever eroded access to land they have in the face of diminishing urban opportunities. As Vergara-Camus emphasizes, in the context of a squeeze on land and employment, ‘access to land becomes a refuge from neoliberal restructuring...Rural-urban exodus is no longer an option’. [27] It is doubtful then, what the teleological and defeatist Marxism from either Hobsbawm or the Salvage Collective can provide for understanding this complex and diverse process. Emblematic struggles like the MST in Brazil, the Zapatistas in Mexico or the indigenous movement in Bolivia, exist alongside a whole spectrum of rural movements from Zimbabwe, [28] and India, [29] to the Philippines [30] and Colombia, [31] composed of a range of class alliances and organizational forms, and which use diverse strategies and tactics in response to national histories, state responses and ecological changes.
Such struggles are not free from contradictions: small-holding is often a deeply patriarchal system based on the free labour of women and children. We should critical of simplistic advocacy for a future of ‘family farming’. [32] Land too, comes laden with a host of progressive and deeply regressive identifications. Land redistribution can also be co-opted by capital as a neat way to externalize the true costs of labour-power: as in China where the most impressive land reform of the 20th century, in a dialectical twist, provided the ’comparative advantage‘ for capitalist takeoff. [33]
Yet in agrarianizing ecological thinking and in developing an agrarian Marxism, we can at least begin to grapple with these questions, reimbuing our politics with a sense of the urgent, complex and contested class dynamics of land struggles across the globe, which offer a necessary but dialectical trajectory beyond disaster and indeed beyond our own pessimistic analytical and organizational tendencies.
1. Hobsbawm, E. (1994) The Age of Extremes, London: Abacus, p. 288
2. Davis, M. (2018) Old Gods, New Engnimas: Marx’s Lost Theory, London: Verso, p.131
3. Moore, W. M. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, London: Verso
4. Salvage Collective (2022) The Tragedy of the Worker: Towards the Proletarocene, London: Verso
5. Borras, J. (2023) La Via Campesina – transforming agrarian and knowledge politics, and co-constructing a field: a laudatio , Journal of Peasant Studies, 50 (1) 691-724
6. Wolf, E. (1999 [1969]) Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press
7. For an example of this style see Joyce, P. (2024) Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World, London: Allen Lane
8. Davis, M. (2005) Planet of Slums, London: Verso
9. This builds on Zehra Taşdemir Yaşın’s presentation of ‘the agroecology movement as a socio-historical outcome of the agrarian question of nature and as a constituent of a broader anti-systemic strategy to resolve the socio-ecological question’, p. 1381, Zehra Taşdemir Yaşın (2022) The environmentalization of the agrarian question and theagrarianization of the climate justice movement, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 49(7) 1355-1386
10. Tilzey, M. (2017) Political Ecology, Food Regimes and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, Resilience, London: Springer p. 254
11. See Akram-Lodi, H. & Kay, C. (2010) Surveying the Agrarian Question (Part2): current debates and beyond, Journal of Peasant Studies, 37(2) p. 255-256
12. Lenin, V. I. (2019 [1899]) ‘The Development of Capitalism in Russia‘ in Collected Works Vol 3, London, Verso, p.31
13. Lih, L. (2011) Lenin, London: Reaktion Books
14. Le Blanc, P. (2023) Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, London: Pluto Books
15. Phillip McMichael, (2006) Peasants prospects in the neoliberal age, New Political Economy, 11(3)
16. Ricciardi, V. et al (2018) How much of the world’s food do smallholders produce?, Global Food Security, 17, 64-72
17. https://www.wfp.org/stories/5-facts-about-food-waste-and-hunger
18. https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector
19. See Glenn Davis, J. (2022) The Agricultural Dilemma: How Not to Feed the World, London: Routledge
20. Dean, J. (2020) Communism or Neo-Feudalism?, New Political Science 1, 1-17; Durand, C. (2024) How Silicon Valley Unleashed Techno-feudalism: The Making of the Digital Economy, London, Verso; Varoufakis, Y. (2023) Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, London: Bodley Head
21. Meiksins Wood, E. (1981) The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism, New Left Review, 1/127
22. https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/02/13/all-you-need-to-know-about-the-eu-agriculture-sector#:~:text=An%20estimated%208.6%20million%20people,4.2%25%20of%20the%20EU's%20employm ent.
23. https://adamcalo.substack.com/p/landscapes-podcast-episode-9-farm
24. Heron, K. (2024) Climate Catastrophism and Eco-Apartheid, Geo-Forum, 153
25. https://www.statista.com/statistics/267714/urban-population-in-slums/
26. https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization
27. Vergara-Camus, L. (2014) Land and Freedom: The MST, the Zapatistas and Peasant Alternatives to Neoliberalism, London: Zed Books, p. 28-29
28. Moyo, S. (2011) Changing agrarian relations after redistributive land reform in Zimbabwe, Journal of Peasant Studies
29. Baviskar, A. & Levien, M. (2021) Farmers’ protests in India: introduction to the JPS Forum, Journal of Peasant Studies.
30. https://viacampesina.org/en/land-grabbing-in-philippine/, https://panap.net/2022/06/stay-to-resist-land- grabs-and-rights-abuses-in-philippines-bicol-region/
31. https://www.tni.org/en/article/tackling-inequality-through-land-redistribution-lessons-from- colombia#:~:text=Land%20concentration%20in%20Colombia%20is,the%20agrarian%20roots%20of%20co nflict
32. Heron K. & Hefron, A. (2022) Let a Thousand Fiefdoms Bloom, Spectre
33. Tilzey, M. (2017), Political Ecology, Food Regimes and Food Sovereignty: Crisis, Resistance, Resilience, London: Springer, p. 301-312