These movements have led many activists to adopt what are sometimes called "neo-populist" views.60 These see the peasants as the agent of social change, or at least a component in the agency of the "multitude". And sometimes the future of world food production is also seen as lying with them, since food production per hectare is often greater on small peasant plots than on larger holdings.61
But missing from this recognition of the persistence of the peasantry as a force, even if a declining one, is the way in which it has been changed profoundly by capitalism, although not necessarily in the way which Marx and Engels expected. Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin pointed out in the late 1980s that "two alternative forms of agricultural production" had developed within capitalism-on the one hand "farming based on wage labour", and on the other "a form of organisation of production based on the family farm which is incorporated into the capitalist mode of production". In this second form, "The peasant economy is structurally integrated within the capitalist mode of production" and "surplus value is extracted from the peasant through the agency of commercial capital and credit institutions" and "contributes to capital accumulation-but outside the peasant economy from which it is drawn" .62
The peasantry that has been drawn into the circuits of capitalism in this way is not a homogenous group, but differentiated internally on the basis of size of landholding, ownership of equipment and levels of debt. At one extreme are those who have managed, by one means or another, to transform themselves into petty agricultural capitalists, at the other the landless labourers. Between them lies a bigger or smaller layer of those who rely on family labour, perhaps employing wage labour occasionally, perhaps supplementing their household incomes by agricultural labour for others.
Labour outside agriculture can be important for the poor and middle peasants. Figures from 1 5 developing countries in the 1980s showed non-agricultural income amounted 30 to 40 percent of total rural household income; in China it increased from 10 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 199563 and "acquiring nonagricultural jobs has become crucial to avoiding the fate of peasant life and escaping rural poverty";64 in Egypt 25 percent of rural household income came from "wages outside the village" in the 1 980s.65
Who Can Overcome?
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