Rose Berry 1

FROM PEASANT STUDIES TO PROLETARIANIZATION STUDIES

WILLIAM ROSEBERRY New School for Social Research

D uring the past decade, many scholars, writing from a variety of political and theoretical perspectives, have concluded that the peas-

ant concept does not serve them well. l regard this new orthodoxy as unfortunate. The problem with "peasant studies" was less the concept than the fact that we made such studies the basis for an academic specialization and drew formal analytic boundaries around the people we called "peasants ." Some scholars could then examine peasants in isolation, while others could then regard social connections across conceptual boundaries as an academic problem. In this essay, I argue for the inclusion of "peasant studies" within a broader field of historical inquiry which I call "proletarianization studies," but I also argue that we should continue to use a peasant concept. In pursuing this argument, I examine some recent trends in the anthropological literature on peasants. I do this not as a review of the literature but as an attempt to explore the basis for proletarianization studies.

Since the incorporation of peasant studies as a named field of specialization within athropology, scholars have grappled with a re- markably persistent set of conceptual and methodological problems. Despite the proliferation of community, regional, and world-system analyses and the introduction of new intellectual fashions since the publication of Clifford Geertz' influential review article in 1961, the issues he raised continue to be relevant. Many students still struggle with the " two divergent tasks" to which Geertz referred: "(1) the de- scription and analysis of the peasantry in itself; (2) the characterization of the over-all sociocultural whole within which the peasantry exists" (Geertz, 1961: 13). The problem of " two tasks" was created by our definitions, which commonly viewed peasants as family farmers pro- ducing for their own subsistence as well as for the support of represen- tatives of superordinate groups. In one sense, peasants were seen as participating in a little economy unto themselves, oriented toward subsistence or auto-consumption. In another sense, they were seen as basic production units in a wider national or regional economy, the victims of a specifiable network of exploitative relations. However this conceptualization was stated--whether one talked of little traditions

70 Studies in Comparative International Development

versus great traditions, or of peasants as part societies and part cultures, whether one wrote of peasants controlling basic means of production and paying " ren t" to non-peasants, or of non-capitalist modes of production which articulated with dominant capitalist or feudal modes--the definitions implied a dichotomous world and necessitated "rather divergent tasks."

A second problem referred to by Geertz was also rooted in our conceptualizations. I refer to the problem of process, of peasantization and de-peasantization, or of a movement from "proto-peasant" through "peasant" to "post-peasant" social forms. The problem of process, the changing relationships of people we call peasants among themselves and with others in a changing world, is hardly the imaginary creation of an anthropological mind. Nevertheless, our ways of think- ing about process and of what has happened to peasants in the past were reflected in our definitions of peasants and other human types. Scholars contrasted peasants with primitives on the one hand and with farmers on the other (see Wolf, 1955; 1966) and speculated about the upper and lower limits of each type (Erasmus, 1967). Such typologies imply a definition of peasants in terms of perceived evolutionary progression as well as in terms of structural relations (see Leeds, 1977: 231). Whether motivated by modernization theory or a version of Marxism which emphasized differentiation among peasants (Lenin, 1964; Roseberry, 1976), it was expected that peasants would disappear into petty capitalist or proletarian classes.

Recently, scholars have been emphasizing a fact that was obvious all along but not always explicitly recognized: the problems of linkage and process are more complex than the great tradition/little tradition and proto-peasantJpost-peasant conceptualizations would lead us to be- lieve. With respect to the problem of linkage, the peasant/non-peasant relation is never isomorphic with an exploited/exploiter relation. On the one hand, peasants are not alone among the exploited, even within communities. Rather, they exist amidst a variety of other producers whose relationships with superordinate persons or institutions are complex and varied. On the other hand, even within the peasantry one can find relations of exploitation which may or may not mirror the exploitative relations which press upon a wider "peasantry."1

With respect to the problem of process, the so-called "persistence" of some peasantries is receiving increasing attention (see Stavenhagen, 1978). The projected "de-peasantization" process has not occurred in

Peasant Studies to Proletarianization Studies 71

the manner that might be expected from a mechanical, unilinear model which sees "proto-peasants" becoming "peasants" and then "post- peasants." In part, this reflects the fact that processes of capitalist development (or, from other perspectives, "modernization") have not progressed evenly or linearly. 2 This unevenness is reflected not only in the persistence of peasants as a result of market cycles (Wolf, 1955: 462-63); it is also reflected in the processes by which peasantries (and proletariats, and tenants, and a variety of types of producers) are created in the course of capitalist development.

In addition, the peasant/proletarian movement is made even more complex by the fact that particular households will include some individuals who work on the family farm and other individuals who work elsewhere for wages, just as particular individuals may alternate between peasant and proletarian "roles" during the course of a year, a month, or even a day.

This complexity of relationship and process should not have sur- prised us. Our concepts of peasants were always idealized statements that had to be mediated by an understanding of the history of particular social formations in which peasants have played a role. The best of the definitions were simply ways of talking about social relationships rather than attempts to construct elaborate typologies in which peasantries became reified as a type in an evolutionary sweep or a category in a complex whole. As attempts to examine particular peasantries in particular historical processes demonstrated the complexity of those social relations and the processes by which they were created, it could only be expected that the definitions should be enriched as well. Thus, much of the recent literature has taken the form of an attempt to rewrite definitions. If the lack of consensus on definitions has been 'frustrat- ing" (Mintz, 1973: 91), the new definitional literature can also be taken as a sign of increasing analytical sophistication and maturity.

The best of the definitional essays have moved away from general discussions of peasantries and toward an attempt to examine a complex of rural toilers as they emerge in concrete historical processes (Mintz, 1973; cf. Mintz, 1974a). The worst, however, have surrendered to the complexity and have attempted to banish peasants from their analyses. This "de-conceptualization" of peasants has taken two principal forms': (1) an ahistorical version of Marxism (Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977; Littlejohn, 1977; Friedmann, 1980), and (2) role-set analysis (Leeds, 1977).


AHISTORICAL MARXISM AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE CATEGORIES

The most influential article among the Marxist attempts to "de-con- ceptualize" peasants was written by Judith Ennew, Paul Hirst, and Keith Tribe (1977), and is firmly embedded within the version of Mar- xism outlined by Hindess and Hirst (1975). There are two key and re- lated points to their analysis. The first is that while one may talk about "peasan t s , " it is inappropriate to talk about "peasant society" or "peasant economy."3 Rather, peasants should be examined in terms of the capitalist dynamics of the societies in which they live. At this level, the analysis can be placed within the larger tradition of peasant studies and the methodological problems involved in the " t w o divergent

tasks" to which Geertz refers. Their second point is that " n o rigorous concept of 'peasant mode of

production' . . . can be constructed" (Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977: 296). I agree with the basic point and prefer to look at peasants as direct producers within a variety of modes of production (Roseberry, 1978a). One must, however, criticize their logic. First, the construction of a concept of a peasant mode of production follows the method of abstraction outlined by Hindes and Hirst (1975). It depends entirely on whether a peasant mode of production can be " t h o u g h t . " That is, can one specify in the realm of thought a unitary set of productive forces and a unique set of social relations of production to which they correspond? 4 If not, then the category does not exist. Unfortunately, the rules for argument, the rules for accepting or rejecting the articula- tion of a set of productive forces with a set of social relations, are never clearly spelled o u t ) The authors reject a peasant mode of production because the peasant farm as a "uni tary economic fo rm" cannot be conceptualized. This in turn rests on the rejection of the "family- labour f a rm" as a theoretical object. The passage is worth quoting at

length:

The category of'family' is thus central to this enterprise. The concept of PMP [peasant mode of production] depends in a large measure on being able to give a consistent eco-

nomic and social content to this category of 'family.' Clearly, the 'family-labour farm' is not an ever-always given entity. It supposes an-

terior to it (as the conditions of its reproduction) other social relations . . . . Thus the notion of the 'family-labour farm' as the basic enterprise of a mode of production raises as problems the form of the 'family' and the nature of the communal relations which sustain the operations of 'familial' production. The 'family' is not a natural in- stitution and has no essential form. Similarly, the commune has no simple existence in general but only as part of more definite social relations . . . .


The 'family-labour larm' supposes kinship relations as its conditions of existence; as a category it does not enable us to specify those kinship relations in such a way as to construct relations of production which would be specific to a 'peasant' mode of production. Just as there is no 'kinship' in general or independent of definite social relations so there can be no FLF [family-labour farm] in general (Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977: 308; emphasis added).

1 will leave aside the formalism implied by the search for "consistent economic and social content" and make one observation. 6 Every- thing that the authors say about the " fami ly" is true: families have histories. To examine the different types of family that emerge within a particular peasantry or between peasants and other classes, to examine the conflict between individual and community forms, or to examine the differential relations that exist within families is to examine the political, economic, cultural, and social formation of peasantries and other human types. The statement that "the 'family' is not a natural in- stitution and has no essential form" should not be a central argument for the rejection of a peasant (or any other) mode of production but the starting point for historical analysis.

In contrast to the vagueness of the "general and untheoretical usage" associated with the peasant concept (Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe, 1977: 295), some Marxists have attempted to construct new and more precise concepts that will allow us to examine unique and consistent sets of production relations. While the Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe article was largely negative, rejecting the peasant concept without suggesting alternative ones, a recent article by Harriet Friedmann agrees with that rejection but attempts to take the first positive steps toward the formation of a "mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of concepts" (1980: 161). While she provides a brief list of some of these concepts, most of her energy is directed to the construction of one of them in particular: "simple commodity producers." There are two levels at which she examines simple commodity production. On the one hand, she regards "peasant" as an inductive, descriptive category and is trying to produce a series of more precise, deductive categories to re- place it. Simple commodity production is seen as only one of those concepts. On the other hand, she is contrasting simple commodity production with peasant production. At this level, peasants are seen as household units of production which are only partially integrated into market relations, while simple commodity producers are household units of production which are fully integrated into market relations. "Peasants" reproduce their household units, at least in part, with the produce of their own farms. "Simple commodity producers," on the


other hand, are specialized household producers who reproduce their household units through the market.

Friedmann has concentrated on an important distinction. Yet, the

peasant concept, for all its vagueness and descriptiveness, may still be relevant for both types. While Friedmann's exercise in conceptual rigor illuminates the structural variation obscured by an uncritical use of the word " p e a s a n t , " it also ignores the forms and relations through which a variety of "mutua l ly exclus ive" types of producers might coalesce. If there is no such thing as a peasant economy or a peasant mode of production, it does not follow that there is no such thing as a peasant class. Peasants, or people who define themselves as peasants, may be important political actors at given moments in particular social

formations. Yet the authors of the new Marxist literature on peasants do not provide any mechanism for moving from their rigorous categories to class analysis.

Here we must refer to a conflict within the Marxist tradition regard-

ing the relationship between "class si tuation" and "class consciousness . " The dominant tradition, by no means limited to the ahistorical versions of Marxism which I am criticizing, sees class primarily as a structural position based upon the relationship of people to the production process, or upon their position within a mode of production. An outside investigator may define the relevant social classes and then determine the extent to which people within those classes are conscious of or act in terms of their class position. An opposing position has been taken by E.P. Thompson as part of a criticism of Althusser. He writes:

Class formations.., arise at the intersection of determination and self-activity: the working class 'made itself as much as it was made.' We cannot put 'class' here and 'class consciousness' there, as two separate entities, the one sequential upon the other, since both must be taken together--the experience of determination, and the 'handling' of this in conscious ways. Nor can we deduce class from a static 'section' (since it is a becoming over time), nor as a function of a mode of production, since class formation and class consciousness (while subject to determinate pressures) eventuate in an open- ended process of relationship--of struggle with other classes--over time (Thompson, t978: 106).

Of course, the problem of class and group formation is commonly associated with Weber rather than Marx, but while Marx clearly defined class in terms of structural relationship to a production process, I think it can be shown that Marx did not see class in the mechanical way that

many Marxists do. For example, in the oft-cited and misunderstood passage on the French peasantry in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis


Bonaparte, Marx first describes the economic situation of the peasan-

try, and then notes:

In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separate their mode of life, their interests and their cultural formation from those of the other classes, they form a class. In so far as these small peasant proprietors are merely connected on a local basis, and the indentity of their interests fails to produce a feeling of community, national links, or a political organization, they do not form a class (Marx, 1973: 239).

I contend that the second question, the formation of a " fee l ing of c omm un i ty , " was basic to Marx ' s definition of a class. 7 To address the

question implies an attempt to understand the historical formation of a

particular peasant ry-- the economic, political, social, and cultural forces that divide it and that may unite it, much as Marx ' s analysis in

The Eighteenth Brumaire referred to a specific peasantry and, as it happens, found no links that united the peasantry as a class. Unfortu- nately, the authors of the new ahistorical Marxism have not considered this set of questions. Indeed, the nature of the conceptual exercise pre- cludes an understanding of the formation of political communities which do not correspond to the mutually exclusive categories. We are left, then, with an analysis of structural heterogeneity and no under-

standing of class-based political action.

ROLE SET ANALYSIS AND THE CATALOGING OF HETEROGENEITY

To further explicate the relationship I am trying to draw between structural heterogeneity and class formation, I must first examine another literature which has tried to make peasants disappear. I refer to role set analysis and take Anthony Leeds as a major figure in that trad-

ition. Leeds argues that the peasant concept:

represents a total muddle and a permeating lack of theoretically useful distinctions. It is essentially a folk term adopted into social science usage without the necessary scientific refinement for appropriate scientific use. Indeed, the term basically has no scientific validity at all (Leeds, 1977: 228). s

In place of a concept of peasants or peasantries, he erects interlocking role sets, pointing to such advantages as the necessary implication of relationship and the recognition that roles are not mutually exclusive, i .e. , that individuals may play several roles at once. He then constructs


a typology of peasant, proletarian, farmer, tenant, slave, etc. " ro les ," examines the relationships with complementary role sets which each role implies, and analyzes the manner in which individuals may com- bine roles.

At a certain level, Leed's discussion is useful. Like the new Marxist literature, it draws our attention to the complexity of relationships among various producers as well as between producers as superordinate persons or institutions. It forces us to look at particular constellations of roles (relationships) rather than to construct abstract definitions of peasant essences. And, if we take the relational aspect of role seriously, we must follow Leeds in his rejection of the concept of peasant society. One is struck, however, by the fact that others have made quite similar points without resorting to the elaborate theoretical superstructure Leeds creates. The classic definitions of peasants mili- tated against the notion of peasant society and forced us to look at the more complex societies in which peasants lived. That this was recognized as an important problem by anthropologists is manifest in the "area studies" literature that emerged in the 1950s. 9 It is true, of course, that as definitions and typologies were reified by a generation of empiricist pedants, the relational aspect of our definitions was ig- nored. But such pedants can appropriate roles without relationships just as easily as they turned "part societies" into "societ ies ." And scholars like Sidney Mintz have been able to talk about individual and social complexity among producers by analyzing them in history.

It is for the purposes of historical analysis that Leed's theoretical system is most enfeebled. It is interesting to note that when he discus- ses the evolution of cacao production in Brazil, the role set analysis plays no significant part. Reference to roles becomes an ex post facto attempt to talk about the relationships that emerged from history or that characterize a particular situation. They do not lead to an analysis of the historical process itself. The use of role sets is a way of talking about individual interactions within a given social order. The social relations implied are those between an actor and his or her role alter (e.g., peasant roles vis-/~-vis non-peasant roles). What is a good bit more problematic is a discussion of institutions or social groupings composed of individuals who may or may not share role sets, groupings which are not mere aggregations of roles (just as they are not mere aggregations of individuals), and which may in turn affect or determine a specific constellation of roles. Given the relationships embodied in such groupings, one may talk about them by reference to role sets, but one cannot build up to them through role analysis.


Let us take as an example the peasant family, which we encountered in our discussion of Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe. In classic definitions of peasants, the family was the key to the contradictory position of peasants as controllers of a process of production and subjects of exploita- tire relations. The family controlled land and basic resources and was able to make basic production decisions. In making those decisions, it had to balance the consumption needs of the family with the demands placed upon it by superordinates. In meeting consumption needs, it would be guided by a logic of reproduction rather than expansion. The peasant farm was seen, then, as both an enterprise and a home (see Galeski, 1972), a unique combination of unit of production and unit of consumption. When that conceptualization was placed in history, it was seen to be an idealization. The family as a unit of production was never isomorphic with the family as unit of consumption. Some family members would occasionally work elswhere (e.g., exchanging labor with other family farmers, working on large estates in return for wages or the right of access to land, working for the state on large scale public works, working for merchants or processors, etc.). In part this reflected the various exploitative relations in which peasant farmers could be enmeshed; in part it reflected the consumption requirements of the family itself. Even before the rise of capitalism, peasants, in a wide variety of settings, would send family members to work off the farm to supplement family incomes in those years or seasons in which the farm did not provide all of the family's needs. This was even noted by Chayanov (1966), the theoretician extraordinaire of "peasant economy." It has been noted more recently by Wolf (1966: 46) and was central to an analysis of the composition of working classes in industri- alizing Europe by Joan Scott and Louise Tilly (1975). Thus, individuals within the household played a variety of roles, working in a variety of production units, only some of which could be considered "peasant ." Following role analysis, we might reject the peasant concept for concealing this complex role structure. As I read Leeds, this is precisely what he has done. Another approach would see the peasant family as attempting to reproduce itself as a farming family and adopt- ing several strategies to do so. As the family made production decisions, and as some of its members worked off the farm, it was guided by the logic of auto-consumption, or the subsistence requirements of the family. The attempt to reproduce itself could push the family and the individuals that comprised it in contradictory directions that would ultimately dissolve the family, as Scott and Tilly have shown in West- ern Europe (1975; Roseberry 1981a; 1983). But work off the farm, or


the adoption of complex roles, could also be an essential means for survival of the family as a "peasant" family. Rather than ending our analysis with the recognition that individuals within families played multiple roles in a wider society, then, a recognition of role complexity would be the first step toward a deeper understanding of how peasants--as families and as individuals--attempt to live in worlds they do not create. A peasant concept, rather than being superflous, would be essential for such an understanding. 1~

What is true for families is even more true for classes. If we can dis- cern several "categories" or " ro les" and see people moving back and forth among them, we must also recognize that the discrete categories in terms of.which people act may be more simple. A variety of tenant, sub-tenant, squatter, and peasant roles or categories may coalesce into a peasant "c lass ." Similar processes can happen as various sorts of people become or come to define themselves as "proletarian." And then again, they may not. The point is that there are forces tending toward greater heterogeneity or fractionalization at the same time as there are forces tending toward greater homogeneity. A basic aspect of a capitalist social formation is that it is characterized by uneven development. One characteristic of that unevenness is that economic and political forces, in part working "behind the backs" of the people who are most affected and in part working through the conscious activity of those same people, tend to simplify at one level relationships which at another level are quite heterogeneous. Role analysis and the new Marx- ism allow us to talk with some precision about the heterogeneity; they allow us to say much less about the forces promoting a feeling of homogeneity or community.

TOWARD AN HISTORICAL MATERIALIST UNDERSTANDING OF PEASANTS AND PROLETARIANS

In order to resolve this problem, it is not sufficient to supplement "mode of production" analysis with analyses of the "ideological instance" or to supplement discussion of individual roles with examina- tions of class roles. Each of the social scientific styles I have criticized takes a social totality and breaks it up into mutually exclusive categories or roles. We need an analysis which will reconstruct that totality, which will allow us to examine the forces that simultaneously create heterogeneity and homogeneity.

Those forces are historical or, more properly, world-historical. As


North American anthropologists have become more interested in theory and have turned their backs on their relativistic past, they have adopted rather ambivalent attitudes toward history. Just as "empiri- cal" analysis has been confused with "empiricism," "historical" analysis has been confused with "historicism." That is, a call for historical definitions seems to be a call for particularistic studies, particularistic definitions and categories, a return to our Boasian past. Certainly, a call for historical studies is a call for sensitivity to the particular. For example, Sidney Mintz, who has been among the most eloquent in calling for historically grounded definitions of peasants, has generally limited himself to the Caribbean region, to an analysis of the manner in which slaves, peasants, proletarians, and other toilers have been formed in particular configurations on particular islands and to a comparison of island histories within a general Caribbeanist perspective (see, in addition to work already cited, Mintz, 1974b; 1977; 1978a; 1978b; 1979; Mintz and Price, 1976). But these local histories, and the processes by which those groups were formed, are always seen in terms of global processes of capitalist development; local facts are seen as world-historical facts. The writing of history, then, is not seen as a particularistic exercise but as a way of deepening our understanding of a capitalist mode of production in which:

� 9 separate individuals have, with the broadening of their activity into world-historical activity, become more and more enslaved under a power alien to them . . . . a power which has become more and more enormous and, in the last instance, turns out to be

the worm market (Marx and Engels, 1970: 55).

These distinct ways of looking at history can be seen as well in The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al., 5956). It can be argued that a disagreement regarding theory and method is embedded within this de- served classic. All participants share an attempt to understand Puerto Rican society in its unity and diversity, to undertake particular community studies that would be united in a larger comparative analysis. While Steward attempted to use cultural ecology as an integrating focus in the book's introduction, a second introductory note, written by "the staff," pointed to the importance of "culture history." Each introduction briefly mentioned the importance of the other's approach but quite clearly dismissed it (see Wolf and Mintz, 1957: 410; Rose- berry, 1978b; Silverman, 1980). Of course, given the use to which "culture history" had been put in North America and the position of Steward within the development of anthropological theory, he could


not be expected to look on historical approaches with sympathy. He dismissed them as particularistic, associated with an emphasis on dif- fusion (Steward et al., 1956: 15). But his students made it clear that their interest in history was neither diffusionist nor particularist (505-06). Rather, they had reference to a process which linked their

separate communities within a single whole. That process was the development of a world-embracing capitalism, the effects of which they

described in these terms:

During four and a half centuries of colonialism many world areas have come under European political and economic domination. Despite differences in imperial tech- niques and in local cultural traditions, many peoples who formerly had subsistence economies have been drawn into a larger system of commerce and have begun to produce cash commodities. In each instance, the social and ceremonial life based on the aboriginal subsistence pattern was destroyed, economic activity became individ- ualized, native handicrafts were lost, and the basic population tended to become pro- letarianized and hence to assume a lower-class position in the national or imperial society. Despite differences in the total acculturation of the societies involved in the process of expanding empires, the albrementioned similarities are very real and very significant. Where heavy capial investment in production machinery, processing equipment, and other means of exploiting resources has occurred, portions of the local population have formed a wage-earning proletariat, even though many features of their earlier cultures survive (Steward et al., 1956:505).

By calling attention to the " fundamenta l similarities in the processes of proletarianization as these have developed throughout the wor ld" (505), the authors of The People of Puerto Rico laid the foundation for an approach to anthropological subjects as a comparative analysis of proletarianization. That foundation was all the more important because, while calling attention to the similarities involved in the process of proletarianization, their studies of particular sub-cultures also indi-

cated essential differences. Reference to proletarianization was not confined to a new type - - the rural proletar iat--but to a process which

had created a family farmer growing tobacco, an hacienda tenant and

family farmer growing coffee, as well as a wage earning worker in the cane. This work, as a whole, allows us to see how a variety of peoples are united by a process of capitalist development and, simultaneously, how the unevenness of that process creates and maintains variety.

My reference to history, then, has this dual objective: (1) the attempt to analyze anthropological subjects as world-historical facts, and (2) the attempt to see the effects of the world-historical process (or, more

properly, of world-historical processes) as uneven. We must recognize


the unity and diversity of the people we study and the processes through which their social forms are created. This attempt to look at history as both a continuous and a discontinuous process is embedded in a call for a move from peasant studies to proletarianization studies. The attempt to see peasant studies in such terms is not limited to the analysis of "de-peasantization" or the creation of "rural proletariats." Rather, I am suggesting that we need to look at the formation of peasants, tenants, proletarians, and other types in terms of the uneven processes of capitalist development, that we need to view all of them in terms of the processes of proletarianization. Various types become, in part, precipitates of uneven development, the human results of uneven proletarianization.

The reconstitution of peasant studies as proletarianization studies has numerous advantages. First of all, it takes us beyond the typological exercise by which 15easants are reified as a category among various other categories. Instead, we look at the formation and transformation of peasantries in terms of an historical dynamic. Moreover, we are thus constrained to examine the connections among various peoples within that dynamic, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of part-society/part-culture definitions. This is in part due to the fact that reference to history, as proletarianization, involves at attempt to grasp a totality. We are therefore able to incorporate the relational insights of, e.g., Leeds' role models or Friedmann's mutually exclusive concepts without falling into the same traps. That is, rather than leaving our analysis at the level of a cataloging of complexity, we examine complex relations in terms of a totalizing process. But the most curious advantage of this perspective is that, in contrast with role analysis or ahistorical Marxism, it does not make peasants disappear.

Discussion of this last point requires that we deepen our understanding of "proletarianization studies." On the surface, emphasis on proletarianization places us within two traditions which can have more in common than is normally recognized--modernization theories and Marxism-Leninism. Of course, emphasis on proletarianization fits more obviously within a Marxist problematic. The particular version of that problematic which I have in mind, however, and the one that has some relationship to modernization theory, is that which takes as its point of departure Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964). In its crude form, it involves an analysis of "the transition" from a non-capitalist mode of production to a capitalist mode. Implicit or explicit in such an analysis is the expectation that peasants will dis-


appear into proletarian or petty capitalist classes through a process of differentiation and exploitation among the peasantry. Of course, this is a caricature, and Lenin's analysis of the Russian countryside is a good bit more subtle than summaries--and the uses to which some Marxists have put that study--would indicate. 11 It is the expectation that peasants will disappear into capitalist and proletarian classes that ties this version of Marxism most clearly to a modernization perspective that sees peasants becoming post-peasants. Both are based on a West Euro- pean model that is itself imperfectly understood, and both impose a linear dynamic upon history. 12

The attempt to go beyond a unilinear understanding generally leads one into a version of dependency theory. Without addressing the in- tricacies of dependency debates, I simply refer to the increased emphasis on the persistence of peasantries, and/or the "maintenance" of non-capitalist modes of production, as a processual result of the form and dynamic of capitalist development within underdeveloped regions. While the dependency literature has enhanced our understanding of the complexity of historical processes, an additional element--found in some versions of the dependency theorists' analysis of the persistence or non-disappearance of the peasantry--requires comment: that is, the contention that capitalism (or a particular underdeveloped capitalist formation) needs a peasant or non-capitalist sector. In an article which emphasizes the persistence of the peasantry in Mexico, Rodolfo Stavenhagen (1978) adds:

We will even go a step further and put forth the hypothesis that the current dynamics of dependent capitalism in Mexico requires the constant re-creation of the peasant economy . . . . what we hypothesize here is that capitalism in its present stage in Mexico is incapable of absorbing the peasant economy en t i r e ly . . , and that, on the contrary, the

maintenance and even the constant re-creation of the peasant economy is functional for the capitalist system . . . . (34-35).

He then goes on to list four capitalist needs fulfilled by the peasantry in Mexico. The list is of less interest than the style of argument, a style that anyone who has spent much time with the dependency literature will recognize. This profoundly functionalist orientation seems to be based on the assumption that capitalism is a well integrated and coherent system, that it can satisfy its needs. In this sense it demonstrates a remarkable innocence with regard to contradiction. More important, it is based on a poor understanding of the forces which create particular social and economic conditions.


Those forces can be understood, in part, with reference to capitalist development. Here we may show how peasantries can persist because of the position of underdeveloped formations in the world system, and we may, with the functionalists, show that they resolve certain needs (e.g., providing a reserve army of labor, reproducing a cheap labor force, etc.). But our analysis will always be misplaced as long as we maintain a purely systemic understanding of capitalism. We must also see that capital accumulates through the action of particular capitalists or corporations who invest in particular regions or commodities. Their concern is not with the interests of the system but with the interests of the firm. In pursuing those interests, they may go off in contradictory directions and create a variety of other forms. 13 Such differential activity may mean that particular forms will "persist"; it may also mean that those forms will be created through the action of capital in particular regions. For example, a peasantry may emerge in the interstices of a plantation system [see Mintz's (1974b) analysis of Caribbean peasantries]. Also, people who appear to be peasants may emerge in a direct relationship with capital. Leeds (1977) provides an analysis of how peasant-like folk, as pioneer squatters, served as the principal points of expansion for cacao production in parts of Brazil. It has also been shown that the nineteenth century investment of capital in coffee production in some parts of Venezuela tied producers more closely to the land, creating a free-holding peasantry in a direct relationship with merchant capital (Roseberry, 1978c; 1981b; 1983).

Central to our understanding of capitalist dynamics, then, should be the recognition that a variety of forms of labor relations may be a direct result of processes of uneven development. Far from causing peasantries simply to disappear (though that is certainly one result), processes of capital accumulation may maintain or even create peasantries. 14 Our understanding of the emergence, growth, persistence, and im- poverishment of particular types of rural producers will be incomplete, however, if we undertake our analyses solely at the level of capitalist accumulation. Such an approach would see peasants merely as a precipitate of uneven development. They are a percipitate, in a sense; but they are more. If capitalists "call up" peasantries, they do not do it at their will. The "precipitate" perspective would fall in line with another aspect of the functionalist approach to persistence: the (generally implicit) view that capitalists (or capitalism) can create those forms of surplus labor extraction that best suit their (its) needs. A recent example of such functionalism is Wallerstein's identification of


three forms of labor extraction with three sectors of the world system: free labor at the core, sharecropping in the semi-periphery, and coerced cash-crop labor in the periphery (Wallerstein, 1974; 1979). In an important review, Brenner has noted that the exploiter is seldom able to impose exactly what he wishes. Rather, the forms of exploitation emerge, in part, as a result of prior constellations of class relations and the attempt to re-form them through struggle (Brenner, 1977). The investor is not interested in imposing "capitalism." He is simply trying to extract as much profit as possible under given circumstances. He may, in addition, attempt to transform radically those circumstances, and the history of colonialism and imperialism is full of successful attempts to do so. But the outcome depends very much upon the power the potential exploiter and/or the agents of the state can muster; and aside from recognizing the differential and competing interests among exploiters, one should not assume that all power rests with those who rule.

Just as the investor attempts to extract profit, the producer attempts to extract a living. Peasantries may result as a form of accommodation to competing interests, a temporary resolution to two sets of problems which in turn sets in motion new contradictions (Mintz, 1978b; 1979). That is, they may resolve a merchant' s need for a stable supply of goods at low cost and high profitability at the same time that they resolve a farmer's need for land and a living. Thus we can look at Caribbean peasantries as a "mode of resistance" (Mintz, 1974b: 131-34), and we can look at the cacao expansion in Brazil or the coffee expansion in Ven- ezuela in a new light. A peasantry was "called up" in nineteenth century Venezuela, in part because merchants invested in coffee production and in part because small scale agriculturalists in particular regions--along with large number of migrants from other parts of Venezuela--saw in coffee a chance to improve their life chances (see Roseberry, 1981b; 1983).

Of course, the peasantry which was created in nineteenth century Venezuela was hardly the type found in textbooks, and there is some question as to how they should be conceived (see Roseberry, t978c). Indeed, the very process which constituted them as a "peasantry" also made possible a more familiar process of outright proletarianization in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, I do not think such peasants are all that unique. Most of the peasantries anthropologists study, even in Europe, are not the classic European sort. They are "precipitates" of the uneven development of capitalism and forms of accommodation to particular directions that development may take, emerging within a


variety of social situations in response to various demands that can only be understood in terms of world-historical processes. This is true even in those regions where something like a "peasantry" existed before contact, as Wolf's comparison between Mesoamerica and central Java clearly showed (Wolf, 1957). If peasants appear and disappear (or appear and "persist") as part of a capitalist dynamic, the lesson to be drawn from that is not that "the concept of peasantry seems to me one of the less useful categories for understanding the history of Latin American (or, say, African) societal structure and process" (Leeds, 1977: 252). Rather, the concept of peasantry becomes crucial for an understanding of Latin American history and for an understanding of "the processes of proletarianization as these have developed throughout the world" (Steward et al., 1956: 505).

In a recent book, Raymond Williams (1977) has referred to basic concepts not as "concepts but problems, not analytic problems either but historical movements that are still unresolved" (11). Role set analysis and ahistorical Marxism have attempted to resolve at an analytical level problems that have not yet been resolved historically. The peasant concept should not be discarded, for the historical movement of which peasants have been a part is still unresolved. The reconstruction of that concept cannot be accomplished without a critical examination, however. Too often, the peasant concept has been used to obscure history. Instead, we need to see peasants, at least in some situations, as the contradictory product of a specific historical movement: the creation of the modern world.

NOTES

This is a slightly revised version of the final chapter of Coffee and Capitalism in the Venezuelan Andes (University of Texas Press, 1983). I have benefited from the comments and suggestions of numerous people, among them Scott Cook, Sidney Mintz, and Gerald Sider. Each would have written a somewhat different essay.

1. Sidney Mintz (1973) expressed this most clearly: But it is nonetheless insufficient to characterize the peasantry as a 'part society' and to describe it in terms of its asymmetrical relationships to external power. The fact is that peasantries nowhere form a homogeneous mass or agglomerate, but are always and everywhere typified themselves by internal differentiation along many lines . . . . .

No serious attempt to describe or define a peasantry anywhere is likely to be ideally ef- fective without recognition that the very devices that may ensure the viability of the peasant sector as a totality also reveal its limitations in terms of the trajectories of particular groups within that sector. Thus, unless "the peasants" can be understood in terms of their internal differentiation along economic and other lines, it may appear that they consist entirely of the prey; in fact, some are commonly among the predators (93, 94).


2. Aside from classic Marxist statements which emphasize the unevenness of development, this point was made in the mid-1950s in a classic article by Eric Wolf (1955):

It would be a mistake, moreover, to visualize the development of the world market in terms of continuous and even expansion, and to suppose therefore that the line of development of particular peasant communities always leads from lesser involvement in the market to more involvement . . . . Two things seem clear . . . . First, in dealing with present day Latin America it would seem advisable to beware of treating production for subsistence and production for the market as two progressive stages of development. Rather, we must allow for the cyclical alternation of the two kinds of production within the same community and realize that from the point of view of the community both kinds may be alternative responses to changes in conditions of the outside market. This means that a synchronic study of such a community is insufficient, because it cannot reveal how the community can adapt to such seemingly radical changes. Second, we must look for the mechanisms which make such changes possible (462-63).

3. They make this point with an examination of Lenin's Development of Capitalism in Russia (1964) and Kautsky'sDie Agrarfage (1974), showing that while both authors are examining social situations which include peasants, neither author feels compelled to analyze a peasant economy or peasant society.

4. Specifically, Ennew, Hirst, and Tribe (1977) see two questions as "central to the notion of a concept [sic] of 'peasant mode of production: '"

(i) the first is concerned with the unity of this object "peasantry": with the question of whether the "peasant" enterprise is a unitary form; (ii) second, if it is so conceivable, whether this type of enterprise is connected with a single set of social relations of production such that it might be argued to be part of a specific mode of production (307)?

5. Indeed, Hindess and Hirst (1977) indicate that they changed their rules as they wrote Pre- Capitalist Modes of Production (1975) but never bothered to revise their draft (32-33).

6. It would surely be difficult to find a "unitary economic form" with "consistent economic and social content" for a capitalist mode of production.

7. Marx examined the potential for community in terms of structural relations and historical formation. Also on this point, see Marx and Engels' remarkable discussion of "individuals, class, and community" in The German Ideology (1970: 82-86).

8. The muddles he refers to are similar to those pointed out earlier: the abstract definition of "peasant" becomes a search for "essences" embodied in a reified category or social group; it directs our attention to persons (or types of persons) rather than social orders; it is a mid-point in a teleological evolutionary scheme, etc.

9. See Steward (1950) or Manners (1957). I also have in mind the typological essays of Wolf and Mintz (e.g., Wolf, 1955; 1957; Wolf and Mintz, 1957). These essays can be seen as efforts to understand the formation of anthroplogical subjects in terms of the uneven dynamics of local and world history. The types later became rigidified when they were used as classificatory labels by a generation of empiricist investigators.

10. To avoid misinterpretation, 1 note that I am not trying to return to an older literature in which the "family--peasant, proletarian, or bourgeois--was reified. When 1 say that "the family was attempting to reproduce itself" or that "the family was making basic reproduction decisions," I am fully aware that those decisions were made by particular individuals and that they did not necessarily serve the interests of other individuals within those families. In an impressive analysis that uses a version of role analysis to great effect, Herrnann Rebel (1978) has concentrated on the conflicting interests between household heads and other household members, between heirs and the disinherited, and between heirs and retired tenants on peasant farms in early modern Austria. He has therefore penetrated the family ideology and has shown the conflicting roles which it en- compasses and obscures. Having shown the heterogeneous reality behind the homogeneous fam-


ily ideology, however, he does not conclude his analysis at that level. Rather, he goes on to question the origins of that ideology, showing how the peasant household in early modern Austria emerged as a central bureaucratic unit with the rise of the absolutist state (Rebel, 1983). Thus we have an analysis which is at once sensitive to the heterogeneous social reality of a peasantry and the cultural and political forms that promote an illusion of homogeneity. Each aspect of the analysis is essential to the elucidation of the other.

11. For one thing, the book is an argument against populist prescriptions which created obstacles to this process. In no sense did Lenin see differentiation and class formation as automatic.

12. It is no wonder that Stavenhagen (1972) complained of two trends which had hindered the development of Latin American sociology--the importation of bourgeois sociology with its modernization theory a n d the importation of orthodox Marxism (12).

13. Mintz (1976) has made this point quite well: The perpetuation of "traditional" technology, of archaic forms of labor exchange, or "money-barter" and other features of a former way of life may result, at times, not so much from the calculated paternalism of an undifferentiated "capitalism" as from the internecine, long-term struggles among different capitalist groups, with varying but equally intense claims upon the same market or resource. The A 's want cocoa; the B's labor; the C's rent; together (or rather, no t together), they may manage to keep the D 's startlingly "traditional." Capitalism, in short, is not an entelechy; its social expression implicates particular groups with differing stakes, within the same community, region, or nation. Thus the survival of older economic forms, in some cases, may turn out upon examination to be more the precipitate of conflicting external interests than the intended consequence of the actions of some particular interest group (xiv-xv).

14. It is interesting to note that Marx recognized this sort of process occuring in the core of the. capitalist system (1967, I: 748).

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Rose Berry 1