| | Peasants, in a broad and ill-defined sense, continue to make up the majority of the population in most under-developed countries. Hitherto, there has been little theoretical concern with the peasant question, and this has been a major reason for the incoherence of so-called rural development policies, as well as of much of the analysis and criticism of such policies. We need to clarify the location of peasantries within under-developed societies, their role in the process of development (or under-development), and their internal dynamics. This is not just for the sake of theory itself, but to improve concrete analyses, and to lay bare the strategic political implications of different theoretical tendencies, as well as of having no explicit theory at all. |
