The peasantry
The development of the capitalist form of production has cut the life-strings of small production in agriculture; small production is irretrievably going to rack and ruin . . . We foresee the inevitable doom of the small peasant . . . 58
So wrote Engels in the mid-1 890s. The massive growth of the world's cities over the last half century has vindicated much of the reasoning behind Engel's statement. The peasantry is as absent today from North West continental Europe as it was from England in Engels' day. But the shrinkage globally has been much slower than Marx and Engels expected. Peasants still amount to about a third of the world's population. The reality, across much of Latin America, as in nearly all of Africa and South and East Asia, is that hundreds of millions of individual small farmers are clinging on to the land which they own or rent. They find themselves caught again and again in a vice, as rising prices for energy and fertiliser inputs squeeze them from one side and competition from capitalist farms with modern equipment presses them on the other. And the discontent bred by this can still make the peasantry an important political fact in major countries in the Global South. Even in Latin America, where the peasantry shrank by half between the 1960s and the 1980s,59 it has been peasant-based rebellions against capitalism that have caught the imaginations of people around the world, with the Zapatistas in southern Mexico, the MST landless workers' movement in Brazil and a big section of the movement which swept Evo Morales to the presidency of Bolivia in 2006.
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The Runaway System