Why we should remember peasants

Historian Patrick Joyce explores the history of peasants, from their role in society to why their way of life offers critical lessons for our modern world

Published: November 5, 2024 at 3:52 PM

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What is a peasant? This is not an easy question to answer. Certain men have even died for trying to answer it, not least the influential Soviet economist Alexander Vasilyevich Chayanov*, a* theorist on peasants who was murdered on the orders of Joseph Stalin for his views. I will attempt some clarifications of the term ‘peasant’ in this article – albeit in less overtly murderous times.

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The peasant is usually seen as an individual primarily focused on securing the subsistence needs of the family unit. Peasants seek not to maximise income or profit. They do not produce a surplus, at least in the sense of the accumulation of capital to make more capital. They minimise risks rather than maximise gains. They are thus, and of necessity, conservative. Their aim is to ensure that all family members are adequately fed and employed. What they have to tell us concerns how the Earth and the heavens can be lived in a different way from our own.

It would be better to say quasi-subsistence than subsistence however, for few peasants led solely subsistence lives, needing access to markets of various sorts for their incomings and outgoings. Peasants are not necessarily anti-capitalist; they are more indifferent to capitalism as it is simply not part of their mental universe. The essential point is that land – whether it is self-owned, rented, and so on – is understood to be a social rather than economic entity to a peasant.

While the stereotypical view might be that peasants are generally low income, throughout history there is usually some differentiation, with some being richer, and others poorer. Overall, the communal – the village itself – is what mattered the most to peasants, and unity against ‘outsiders’ – who were always seen as a threat – in difficult times.

And then there are broader, less analytic, definitions of ‘peasant’, which concern how the word has been used over time. Under this view, peasants have been ascribed to a whole host of conditions: labourers, with or without land; sharecroppers; farm servants; rural people of low rank; even rentiers of a small sort. These people would – for the most part – call themselves peasants, and be called this in return. So, it does not seem a bad idea to refer to them as peasants today.

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Of course, peasants have varied greatly across and outside Europe, the former being the focus of my recent book: Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (2024). The large “agrivillages” of the Italian south, full of (almost) landless, waged labourers, were not the same as the scattered holdings of south Poland or west Ireland, themselves in fact pretty “micro” in size. The different patterns of European state formation created different peasantries, although until the 20th century many “national” peasantries in practice lived their lives immune – if not unaffected – by the state.

There are north-south and east-west distinctions across Europe that are of profound, long-term historical importance. The feudal system distinguished Europe north of the Mediterranean basin and the lands of the Mediterranean itself, which were governed by the latifundia system [large landed estates often overseen by servitude]. The latter, inherited from the Roman world, shaped both southern Europe and South America. These enormously large estates held in the hands of the few were accompanied by minifundismo – the tiny holdings of the many.

The decline of feudalism and of serfdom was more marked in the west than the east, and the reimposition of serfdom in eastern Europe set up distinctions every bit as enduring as that of the latifundia system. North-west Europe was in the vanguard of capitalist change, particularly the North Sea basin, especially England and the Netherlands.

The decline of the peasantry in the 20th century was phenomenal, worldwide and not just in Europe

The decline of the peasantry in the 20th century was phenomenal, worldwide and not just in Europe. Numbers tell the story in stark fashion. The urban dwelling proportion of the world’s population has increased from just over 20 per cent of the total in 1950 to approaching 60 per cent today. The pace then quickened in the latter half of the 20th century: between 1991 and 2019 the proportion of the world’s population engaged in agriculture fell from 44 per cent to 27 per cent. And yet not so long ago the world looked very different, Europe included. For instance, in France, which was once the greatest peasant country in Europe, the percentage of people in agriculture out of total employment in 1950 was still 23 per cent and only three per cent in 2019. In 1913 that figure was 41 per cent. By 2019, only six per cent of employment in once deep-peasant Russia was in agriculture.

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There has additionally been a physical falling silent of the countryside, noted everywhere in Europe, from Ireland to the Breton villages of the 1960s and 70s to Romania. In 1950s Ireland, perhaps as much as a fifth of the population left for British cities. Rural migration was apparent everywhere in Europe, even in the rapidly and brutally industrialising communist east. Italy, too, was transformed very early after the Second World War by the vast movement of people from the rural south, the Mezziogiorno, to the rapidly industrialising north.

These social changes have been accompanied by huge shifts in big agricultural business. The intensive production model has spread from the USA, and great swathes of the rural landscape have been transformed by it, particularly in the form of monoculture, one-crop production in a single expanse. In Europe, as increasingly everywhere else, the industrialisation of agriculture has transformed everything: vastly increased production is accomplished by vastly fewer workers on the basis of new technologies, mechanisation, and bioscience.

So in the increasing absence of peasants, why should we remember them?

This is why: peasants matter because of what the pattern of their lives reveals about being human. They are among the closest mankind has been to nature; they understand nature intimately and with depth, even though their idea of nature is not the same as ours today. Peasant cultures are also almost always cultures of scarcity. They understood that the fruits of the Earth are finite and should be equally shared. The idea of “the limited good” appears again and again in peasant societies, the idea that there was only a limited supply of the goods of the earth, so that if one man prospered another went without.

Theirs is the outlook of those who cannot bend the world to their will, of those who do not, unlike so many of us today, conceive of a world of unlimited resource. Although many people – particularly the young – are being more conscious about such things today, it is still the case that large numbers of people who are concerned about the destruction of the natural world have hardly any idea of what peasants are or were.

The vision of the cosmos that peasants had comprehended contained order and chaos, beauty and terror

Peasants lived within a horizon of necessity that we no longer inhabit, although the environmental crisis might mean that we reinhabit it in the future. They were survivors, as we may have to learn to be. Their vision included the recognition that the dead, and so with them the past itself, have a foundational role in human existence. The dead and the past are part of “nature”. The vision of the cosmos that peasants had comprehended contained order and chaos, beauty and terror.

Though invariably at the bottom of society it was, and in many respects still is, the peasant who is society’s essential foundation. It has been said that what the skeleton is to the body the peasant is to society, that which holds the whole thing up. For most of history people have lived their lives as peasants; empires have survived for centuries, sat upon the backs of peasants. And so “culture” is made possible.

This is the “culture” that gets put in the great museums, not the age-old culture of peasants. Their lot is usually the little-visited ‘ethnographic’ museum. While we may all in the end pay a common price for the desecration of the planet, peasants have already paid theirs. Not just with environmental destruction and agribusiness in recent decades but over centuries, for the great victims of modernity and progress have been peasants. Peasants were after all right to distrust progress.

In the 1970s the incomparable John Berger wrote this as the epigraph to his great trilogy on 20th-century peasants, Into Their Labours. It is taken from St John 4:38: “Others have laboured and ye are entered into their labour”. We are so entered.

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Patrick Joyce is a social historian and the author of Remembering Peasants: A Personal History of a Vanished World (2024). You can listen to him talk about his book on the HistoryExtra podcast here

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