Not all peasant households are integrated into the wider economy in the same way. For many there are only the most menial forms of wage labour. But a minority may establish links with those in privileged positions-delivering support for politicians, doing favours for big landowners or moneylenders, manipulating supposedly traditional family, clan or tribal networks. A differentiation arises between peasant households as struggles over land are tied into the conflicts in the wider economy, at a local, a national or even a global level. 66
Such differentiation means that what are conventionally described as "peasant movements" do not have a single automatic trajectory of opposition to capitalism and the ruling classes. The leadership in peasant movements often comes from those who have been most successful in enlarging their holdings and accumulating enough capital to employ labour power rather than sell i�. They have sufficient freedom from daily toil and sufficient connections to wider society to take the initiative when it comes to mobilising others. Hamza Alavi noted long ago that peasant revolts tend to be led by middle peasants, not poor peasants or landless labourers.67 The penetration by capitalism of the countryside means that it can, in fact, be the petty agricultural capitalists who head peasant movements, putting forward demands like lower prices for fertilisers that benefit themselves disproportionately.
That is not the only direction in which revolts from the countryside can go. The differentiation of the peasantry often means that the middle and poor peasants are under pressure from those who will use political connections to drive them from the landcaste Hindu landowners in India, local party cadres in China, chiefs connected to state apparatuses in Africa, soya barons in Brazil. The result can be uprisings directed against the petty agrarian capitalists and not led by them. But such uprisings then have to confront the forces of the state, which try to isolate them in particular localities, relying upon the very way in which the peasant household gets a livelihood-by labouring to produce a harvest from its own plot of land-to disperse the protests. So the Zapatista insurgency rocked the Mexican state, but that did not prevent the state effectively sealing the movement off in the Lacandon jungle where it remains isolated a decade and half later. The various Maoist movements of dalits (the former "untouchables" ), tribal peoples, the landless labourers and poor peasants in
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The Runaway System