Peasant

In 2007, the absolute number of people living in urban centers had overtaken for the first time in history the number of people living in the countryside. The estimates for 2010 are that there will be around 3.3 billion people in rural areas and 3.5 billion in urban communities. These dramatic demographic changes regarding the rural-urban population distribution are quite recent. In 1970, the total world population was 3.7 billion, with 2.4 billion rural and 1.3 billion urban. During the same period, the change in the agricultural/nonagricultural population was even more dramatic. In 1970, the agricultural population stood at 2 billion people and the nonagricultural population at 1.7 billion. According to Saturnino Borras, by 2010 this will be radically reversed, with a 2.6 billion agricultural population versus 4.2 billion nonagricultural.

The World Bank states that, even as the number of urban dwellers overtakes the number of rural population, the percentage of poor people in rural areas continues to be higher than that in urban areas: Three-fourths of the world's poor today live and work in the countryside. In 2008, world poverty remained a largely rural phenomenon.

Although decreasing in relative terms, the absolute number of rural dwellers remains very significant. Many of these rural dwellers might be peasants, others not. The current usage of the term proposed by Ron Johnston et al.—“peasants work and live on family farms which function as relatively corporate units of production, consumption and reproduction”—sounds comprehensive to most of us. But additional elements will be needed for a more comprehensive understanding of the meaning of “peasant.”

Peasants have existed, and have been defined, under a variety of economic, political, and cultural circumstances, like feudalism, capitalism, and communism, spanning vast periods of history. This article outlines only a few approaches by a few authors in the vast field of peasant studies.

[Page 346]The term peasant is derived from 15th-century French païsant, meaning one from the pays, or countryside, but it ultimately originates from the Latin pagus, or outlying administrative district (when the Roman Empire became Christian, these outlying districts were “pagan;” that is, not Christian). The term peasant was in common use in 15th-century England, referring to individuals working on the land and living in the countryside, without any apparent negative connotation. It was in the 19th century that it became a term of abuse, and nowadays it is still sometimes used in a pejorative sense for impoverished farmers. One of the strongest examples of a negative connotation is Karl Marx's concept of “the idiocy of rural life.” Marx considered the peasantry to be disorganized, dispersed, and incapable of carrying out change. He expected that this class would tend to disappear, being displaced from the land and joining the proletariat. Mao Zedong, in contrast, gave the peasantry a heroic and revolutionary connotation.

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