Suchergebnisse

Bernstein examines the diverse ways in which capital and the colonial state incorporated rural producers into the production and consumption of commodities as the means of securing their own subsistence. Regulations, services and the monopoly of crop producers have been used to require an often recalcitrant peasantry to organize production to meet the requirements of international capital and the local state for particular commodities, for trading profits, and for revenues and foreign exchange. The peasantry must be analysed in its relations with capital and the state, in varying concrete conditions, which means within capitalist relations of production. These are mediated not through the wage relation, but through various forms of household production by producers who are not fully expropriated, and who are engaged in a struggle with capital/state for effective possession and control of the conditions of production.

The involvement of peasants in the rebellions and revolutions of the distant past has been impressive in certain respects, but never acquired quite the importance attributed to it in our own time. In terms of the sheer weight of their numbers, the vastness of the peasants involvement in some internal wars of the past may perhaps never be duplicated. Over twenty million Chinese peasants' were killed in the terrible T'ai-p'ing (1850–1864). Nor was the significance of these colossal figures limited to sheer mass, as the Mexican Revolution illustrates. But never before has so much reliance been put on the peasants for so ambitiously revolutionary plans as in our time. Particularly since the Chinese Communist Revolution, the peasantry has displaced the industrial proletariat as the crucial revolutionary class in the dogma of the most militant Marxists. We have been told repeatedly that Mao, Guevara, Giap, and their disciples have put their hopes in the peasantry and the countryside not merely for radical upheavals through revolutionary wars in underdeveloped countries, but also for global revolution. The role the peasants actually play in such revolutionary wars is among the crucial problems of our time.