Peasant Question Is a Class Question

Author(s): Gail Omvedt and Chetna Gala

Source: Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 23, No. 27 (Jul. 2, 1988), pp. 1394-1396
Published by: Economic and Political Weekly
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Economic and Political Weekly
 DISCUSSION

Peasant Question Is a Class Question 'classes' in the Marxist sense? What is the
character of 'middle peasants', aside from
Gail Omvedt being better off, that puts them on the side
of the exploiters in the class struggle? Poor
Chetna Gala
peasants may engage in some hiring out and
K BALAGOPAL (December 12, 1987) and confused the issue. The tendency has been midcile and rich peasants may hire in
Krishnendu Ray and Satish Kumar Jha to fall into one 'traditional Marxist' labourers, but is this all that identifies their
(December 19, 1987) have raised a number viewpoint-that the growth of capitalism economic
in interests? If so, then we are by
of issues in their rejoinders to our comments agriculture leads to the increased concentra- definition making the wage relation into the
(November 7, 1987) on the peasant move- tion of land in the hands of rural rich, single now defining feature of class and revolu-
ment. But where Balagopal begins with become a class of capitalist farmers (kulaks); tionary strategy.
the main question, that. of revolutionary increa&ee landlessness and proletarianisation
Ray and Jha in fact do this by treating all
strategy, Ray and Jha seem to feel that we resulting in the solidification of a growing
landholding as a source of exploitation and
are letting gender concerns override our class agricultural labourer class; the dominance
taking the peasantry as such as oppressors.
analysis. We agree that gender should not of the wage relation and the conflict between
Speaking of the middle peasantry, they write,
be considered apart from class and caste; werich farmers and agricultural labourers as the
"It is this class which has been the chief
would add that a full analysis of gender/ main rural class conflict. The 'peasantry' or
beneficiary of the Zamindari Abolition Act
patriarchy will lead us into these and pro- 'middle peasantry', now an 'independent
and the Green Revolution and which almost
vide insights on them. Further, we would commodity producer' once feudal exploita-
invariably occupied an intermediate position
argue that the question of the class character tion is removed or miminised, is thought to
in the Hindu ritual hierarchy" The 'middle
of the peasantry (including the issue of its be a gradually diminishing class, an ally of
peasantry' is identified with all 'owner-
role in the revolutionary process, the ques- the proletariat but not central to the revolu-
cultivators' and 'middle castes', and is said
tions of who are its enemies and what are tionary process. Explicitly or implicitly, it
to be so anti-revolutionary that it is impossi-
its internal differentiations) is the one that is as if the stage of socialist revolution were
ble for dalits to ally with them. This is to
is most centrally raised by the new peasant at hand and there were no peasants with any
throw the peasantry as such outside the
movement. Only, we feel that it is precisely fundamental anti-capitalist interests.
revolutionary process.
in this area that a solid Marxist analysis
DOMINANT RELATIONSHIP BalagopaI's argument is considerably
applicable to contemporary India is the most
more sophisticated and it clearly separates
lacking, and as a result tendencies abound
We believe that this kind of thinking the two questions of (1) the nature of the
among left academics and Marxist activists
dominates most discussion, and that it is rural ruling rich; and (2) contradictions bet-
of falling into 'common sense' distinctions.
erroneous. Very briefly, while there is a great ween peasants and labourers and differences
For this reason, we will concentrate on the
deal of rural wage labour (agricultural among sections of the peasantry. But he still
class issue in this reply.
labourer households make up about 30 p does not have a clear class analysis of the
For classical Marxism, the 'worker- cent of all rural households), family labour peasantry. What are the separate interests of
peasant alliance' was a lynchpin of the on one's own land, including the unpaid 'poor peasants' which are fundamentally op-
revolutionary process in any society of labour of women in peasant families, posed to those of 'middle peasants' and
incomplete bourgeois development. Marx remains dominant and amounts to at leastwhere do we put the dividing line? When he
saw.the peasantry as a class. Lenin, Mao and two-thirds of all rural work" In other-words,
suggests that "poor and landless peasants"
later communists sharply distinguished sec- toiling peasants, or 'middle peasants'
are 80 per cent of the revolutionary masses,
tions among the peasantry (which they defined not by a poverty criterion but as is this using 'poor' in any other sense than
sometimes saw as different 'classes'), but those making their living primarily through standard of living? Balagopal seems to feel
they had no doubt that the vast majority of family labour on their own land are the
that only the 'middle peasants' have an
peasants-as petty producers-were a largest rural group. Petty commodity pro- interest in remunerative prices; and only they
crucial part of the democratic revolution. duction, not wage labour, is the dominant are linked to the rural rich by "common caste
Lenin saw the 'worker-peasant alliance' as rural relationship. While a large amount of ties" and "feudal subordination", as a result
crucial also to the process of building rural inequality and hierarchy exists among of which they serve as the "foot soldiers"
socialism in the Soviet Union, and while them, the toiling peasantry as a whole ap- of the rural rich in attacks on dalits and the
Mao" made his landless-poor-middle-rich pears to have tenaciously hung on to the land rural poor. But, some very poor peasants
peasant distinctions, he still had no hesita- over the decades. There is inequality and also have an interest in remunerative prices
tion in describing the peasantry as the 'main heterogeneity (much of historic origins), but whenever they grow and sell cash crops; they
force' of revolution. The fact is that while these by themselves do not constitute 'class'may also have caste ties with the rural elite;
the 'landless-poor-middle-rich' distinctions in any Marxian definition. they may also be involved in forms of 'feudal
have been part of the vocabulary of all Third But a good many social scientists and evensubordination', whatever this may be.
World revolutions, it is equally true that they left activists are making the peasantry fun-Finally, not only middle peasants but also
have never been seen as a division intofun- damentally differentiated by definition. Forpoor peasants (or workers) of middle and
damental opposing classes. Tlhe worker- instance, when 'middle and rich peasants' even low castes get mobilisedt for attacks on
peasant alliance remained at the forefront are grouped together as beneficiaries of dalits, while dalits themselves in other areas
of strategy and legitimation of the, revolu- development, and 'poor peasants and theare mobilised for attacks on Muslims. There
tionary process of all revolutions up to landless' are said to be its victims, the seem-
is no clear 'poor-middle' peasant dividing
Vietnam and Nicaragua; and this was ing persuasiveness of this distinction often line that emerges from this.
precisely because-whatever the differences prevents us from asking what its class basis Further, in discussing women Balagopal
among them-peasants were seen as a fun- is. If there is hierarchy of inequality in seems to take the wage relation as central,
damentally oppressed and exploited section, landholding or income, we can draw a line when he says that women's rights to land
having basic anti-landlord and anti- (or two) anywhere and come up with two or have been taken up by the Shetkari Sari-
imperialist interests. more categories which will clearly have dif-
ghatana but not by the Rytu Coolie
We stress this, because it is precisely here ferentiated resources and some different Sangham beoause of the nature of the classes
that the growth of capitalism in India has tendencies of behaviour. But are these they organise. Does this really mean that the

1391 Economic and Political Weekly July 2, 1988

RCS is organising only wage labourers and
wants to organise on wage issues? Isn't this
staying within the framework of wage
reform? In fact it was the Sangash Vahini,
organising dalit labourers in Bodh Gaya,
which first took up in practice the issue of
women's land rights.
When only the wage relation and imr
poverishment are taken as the criteria of dif-
ferentiation, or when land ownership as such
is taken as the main basis for exploitation,
the issue most avoided is that of the class
character of the peasantry. Here we might
even say that Vanguard, the organ of the
CPI(ML), has a recent special section on
analysis in a recent special section on
agriculture when it gives the basic character
of the peasantry as that of "petty com-
modity production". Only we do not think
that petty commodity production is a semi-
feudal or pre-capitalist category. Rather, it
is precisely the nature of capitalist develop-
ment today that it renders the peasant pro-
ducer dependent on the market for sales and
increasingly expensive inputs (and this
means dependence on the MNCs and the
state) and exploits him/her via the terms of
trade. This exploitation covers a wide range
of peasant holdings, and this is why we can
find very poor peasants along with middle
and richer ones in the peasant movements.
This also ties together the interests of
agricultural labourers and peasants-
because they find common enemies in
capital and the state, and because the wages
of labour do depend, among other factors,
on what small-scale peasant-owners can af-
ford to pay. There are inequalities and con-
tradictions, of caste/gender/economic
character, among the rural toiling majority.
but they are"contradictions among the peo-
ple' and not among fundamentally opposed
class enemies; the object of revolutionary
strategy should be not to sharpen them but
to overcome them in the direction of bring-
ing forward the interests of the most op-
pressed sections in the process of common
struggle against the main exploiting forces.
RURAL SECTION OF RULING CLASS
There is a rural section of the ruling class,
and defining its class character is another
neglected task of analysis today. We agree
by and large with Balagopal: "We should
first stop thinking of rural India in terms
of peasant and labourer. It is not enough to
modify this by identifying an 'upper section'
of the rich peasantry, or granting magna-
nimously that there do exist landlords in
benighted places like Bihar. We have to look
at what is a very real class, which can-
not be called 'peasant' rich or super-rich-
by any stretch of 'one's imagination.gle
class cannot be specified in terms of
landlords, though it has emerged through a
further development of the landlord class.
To this day a major part of its interests are with the state, and we really have to ask
in landholding, but it straddles the rural and whether the strategy he suggests has been
non-monopoly urban economy"'
Shetkari Sanghatana refers to this section Sanghatana direction is the opposite: focus
as the "urban goondas", while Balagopal
Economic and Political Weekly July. 2, 1988 1395
describes them as the "rural rich" or "pro- ment which controls and administers prices)
vincial propertied class". Neither term con- through the price issue; let the local
stitutes a really adequate economic class exploiters-the 'India in the villages',
*characterisation. But there is some reason the local power-holders and dalal inter-
for this vagueness. Though there is histori- mediaries-be dealt later in the process.
cally based inequality in the villages, and Along with this its strategy deals with the
though landholding defines one type of in- question of how to effectively, build up
equality, it does not appear that the rural organisational strength in order to be able
ruling section his its power based only (or to deal with exploiters and power-holders at
primarily) on land-and for this reason it any level.
is inaccurate to describe it as a 'rich peasant' For instance, the campaign issues in
or 'capitalist farmer' or 'landlord' class; Maharashtra from 1980 to the present went
though such categories/classes do indeed froin onions to tobacco to milk-sugar and
exist in the rural areas they do not constitute to cotton prices. At the beginning many
the rural ruling class. It appears that this sec- raised the criti'cism.that onion and tobacco
tion today gets its major income and power prices were the issues of rich peasants who
not from land but rather from political grow cash crops; why not take up such issues
powerholding and corruption, control over as jawar, grown and also sold by a wider
sugar factories and co-operatives and the number of peasants in the dry areas? But
institutions of panchayat raj, smuggling, the movement was not in a position to do
contracting, highlevel employment, etc. If, so. Issues such as jawar or other food crops
for instance, one looks at the history of the required effectively organising the peasan-
co-operative sugar factories in western try over a very wide geographical area; issues
Maharashtra, one can see clearly that those such as sugar involved a confrontation with
who get wealth and power from the sugar Maharashtra's most powerful rural elite-
co-operatives are not peasants who own big the sugar barons-in the centre of their
land but people who are politically strong power. In fact the milk-sugar campaign was
and have ruling party connections, and who a failure and the Shetkari Sanghatana could
use these institutions to exploit both not get a real base in western Maharashtra
peasants and agricultural labourers/sugar (which it should have done if it really was
cane cutters. a 'rich peasant' organisation). But, with the
During the debate on the 'mode of pro- cotton issue, the main cash crop of almost
duction in agriculture' some Marxist- all peasants of eastern and part of northern
Leninists made the point that the rural rul- Maharashtra, a militant and very widespread
ing class based its power on political and not struggle erupted from the end of 1986 and
economic factors. But we don't agree that with it the organisation's roots have gone
for this reason it can be called a 'semi-feudal' deep in the Vidarbha area. It is now in a
or landlord class instead of a 'capitalist position to start taking up issues such as
farmer' class. Instead, to fully analyse its jawar and sugar, and to confront the power
character, we need a concrete analysis of the of the sugar factories-which was seen in the
processes of surplus labour exploitation and Sangli conferences in January 1987.
accumulation that define this class, and of Now for the question of agricultural
the nature of state-based political power labourers, The position is often put forward
within a predominantly capitalist society. that revolutionaries should start with the
poorest and most proletarianised sections,
QUESTION OF STRATEGY i e, agricultural labourers, and only then
think of alliances with the 'middle' peasan-
Balagopal centres his critique on the ques- try. But we feel this is unrealistic. By and
tion of strategy and states his framework as large, agricultural labourer wages have risen
"the traditional framework of capture of not through wide-scale organised struggle
state power by the working people in order but in relation to the general prosperity of
to build socialism and transform society agriculture in their area; agricultural
towards the stage of communism". Here labourers themselves locally and spon-
one could legitimately criticise Shetkari taneously have struggled within this context
Sanghatana for not having such a clearly to raise tieiir wages.. But, large-scale
formulated goal in terms of which strategy agricultural labourer-based organisations
is defined. Nevertheless it has a clearly for-
have become strong only where the rural
mulated strategy of building the movement movement has first taken root among the
and organisational power which we feel peasantry and in the context of broader
should be taken seriously. issues, whether those have been those of
Balagopal's position seems to be that tenancy or caste/tribal issues. Even in the
while ultimately the struggle is against the case of Bihar, because of the extreme nature
state, the initial and main issues of the strug-of violence, an agricultural labourer-based
This
should be focused on opposing the local movement has found itself confronting the
exploiters, the rural rich. It is unclear from state. But in regard to local struggle we still
this how the movement will go forward from have to ask whether effective agricultural
fighting the local power-holders to dealing labourer wage struggles have been organised.
The Jower and middle peasants have not
been ready to make an alliance; factors like
able to attack the main enemy. The Shetkari caste have been suggested as the main reason
for this but we have to ask if the movement
the attack on the state (the national govern-- has really taken up the economic issues of
 peasants.
The strategic approach of the Shetkari
Sanghatana has been that agricultural
labourer wage issues should be taken up
within the context of and in relation to the
wider economic issues of the peasantry. This
is attacked as deception, but if we look at
Maharashtra it seems that efforts to organise
a broad movement of agricultural labourers
around the wage issue have not succeeded.
It is not that these efforts have not been
made; there is a Co-ordination Committee
of Agricultural Labourers and EGS Workers
with the participation of many party-linked
and non-party agricultural labourer organi-
sations which has existed for several years.
When Shetkari Sanghatana organised its
first conference in 1980 it put forward a
demand of Rs 20 for agricultural labourers,
linking it with the price issue. (At this time,
it may be remembered, other independent
peasant organisations were not even ready
to talk of agricultural labourer wages.) This
was attacked by the Co-ordinating Commit-
tees convenor, Santaram Patil, who described
the call for unity of peasants and
agricultural labourers as the "unity of the
lamb in th;e stomach of the tiger". At the
time this was appealing to many (including
ourselves) concerned about the rural poor grow together, it is a question of mutual sup-
and organising agricultural labourer move-
ments. But time has shown a different reality. is raising questions of strategy for the
The Co-ordinating Committee's struggle has
not grown, in spite of access to party and
union funding and support; the Shetkari
Sanghatana's struggle has. Today the
Shetkari Sanghatana (and the Inter-State
Co-ordinating Committee of peasant organi-
sations) calls for Rs 25 as minimum wages.
The Co-ordinating Committee and other
party-linked organisations don't even dare
make such a demand, much less organise
struggles around it. There was a recent farce
of the Maharashtra government's Minimum
Wage Committee, which was dubbed a
"bagaitdar committee" and boycotted by the
Co-ordinating Committee because it had
none of its representatives. The CC called
for a doubling of the present legal wage rates 'middle peasants' have shown themselves
of Rs 6, 7, 8 and 10 in dry, semi-irrigated,
irrigated and urban zones. The Shetkari
Sanghatana's representative on the com-
mittee called for Rs 25 and eventually resign- interests as petty producers, including both
ed charging that the committee had no scien-
tific basis for its recommendations-which
were to accept the doubled rates called for
by the CC! In fact at this time male agri-
cultural labouters already earn Rs 15-16 even
in dry areas in much of Mahar4shtra, and speific interests, then a nistorical materialist
Rs 25 is not at all unrealistic. By making the
demand and speaking of it constantly in
public meetings, Shetkari Sanghatana is at
least preparing the atmosphere for agri-
cultural labourers to struggle on it and
peasants to accept the demand in order to
get agricultural labourer support on the price
issue. Further, an agricultural labourer con-
ference of the Shetkari Sanghatana and
some allied organisations in the sugarcane
area is already being planned.
Further, while Ray and Jha may charge
us with making gender issues primary, it
1396 Economic and Political Weekly July 2, 1988
should be noted that the CC and most other
sections of the agricultural labourer move-
ment have hardly thought about the specific
work pattern and needs of women agri-
cultural labourers, aside from a fairly empty
demand of 'equal wages. They have not, for
instance, included women's rights to land or
houses when demanding 'land for the
landless' or 'houses for the homeless'. The
women's conference organised by Shetkari
Sanghatana at Chandwad, however, did
make a demand for women's property rights
and, noting that much of women's
'household' work involves agricultural pro-
* The invisibility of women's labour in the field
cessing and other related work, argued that
and in the home led to the vast under coun-
womeaagricultural labourers should get
ting of women cultivators in the census,
paid for a full 8-hour day if they worked for
5 hours and for 11/2 day if they worked a full
8-hour day. The Shetkari Sanghatana ap-
pears to be thinking more seriously of these
issues than the 'agricultural labourer'
organisations. The gender issue in fact is one
of those 'broad' issues which can be linked
to broad rural (peasants' and agricultural
labourers') struggles to help both grow.
Ironically, many urban feminists see this as
'using' women's issues to build the peasant
movement! Instead, when all liberation
movements against an exploitative system
port, not of 'use'. The Shetkari Sanghatana
women's movement as well as for the ques-
tion of agricultural labourers.
Is THERE A 'PEASANT POLITICS'?
Finally, Balagopal says that there is no
'middle peasant' politics but rather the
choice is between the rural rich and the rural
poor. This again leaves the class character
of the 'rural poor' undefined, unless
Balagopal wants to reiterate the familiar
thesis that peasant commodity producers or
any 'middle' sections must ultimately side
with the bourgeoisie or the proletariat.
But we think this is inadequate. First,
ready to align with the rural poor (or with
workers) when their specific economic issues
are taken up-and these are primarily their
the price issue and in some cases localised
issues focusing around drought, dam and
project eviction or threat of it and other
forms of state exploitation. And, if peasants
as petty (commodity) producers have
framework would tell us that they have a
specific politics What is this politics, and is
it anti-capitalist? It appears to be true that
from the beginning of capitalism to the pre-
sent, the accumulation of capital is based
not only on waged factory labour but also
on non-waged labour, including the looting
of third world wealth, the domestic work of
women in the home, and the ongoing pro-
cesses of exploiting the third world peasan-
try. In other words, the 'primitive accumula-
tion of capital' is an ongoing and a very cen-
tral process. Then, such non-waged labourers
have equally an anti-capitalist interest, an
interest in smashing the system and the states
that back it up. Defining the interests of
peasantry, and defining the processes of
exploitation and the production process, tells
us about what their specific 'politics' can be.
Marx was doing something like this when.
he wrote of the French peasantry as being
anti-capitalist, and it is very important that
it be done for the differing conditions of
Indian peasants today.
Note
which means in turn that peasant cultivators
as a group are undercounted. We believe that
this vitiates the use of census statistics regar-
ding -the proportion of agricultural labourers.
While the census shows a major growth in
their proportion between 1951 and 1971 (but
not 1971-81), the Agricultural Labour/Rural
Labour Enquiries show only a modest
growth of 20 per cent to 30 per cent of all
rural households between 1956-57 and
1977-78, hardly enough to talk of rapidly
growing proletarianisation. About half of
these agricultural labourer households have
small amounts of land. 30 per cent therefore
seems a fairer figure for the all-India pro-
portion of agricultural labourers (and if we
take only male workers, the census figures
for 1981 would show 31 per cent as the pro-
portion of male agricultural labourers to all
male workers in agriculture-a better esti-
mate for households). The remaining rural
households are predominantly dependent on
family labour on their own land. Of course
there is a great deal of inter-state variation,
but the dominance of peasant petty
production-and its sizeable amount even in
areas where agricultural labour families are
unusually large-remains undeniable.
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