Is Agrarian Populism Progressive? Russia Then, India Now

Abstract

Examined here is the claim that agrarian populism can be – and is currently – progressive, a view evaluated in relation to recent pro-peasant/farmer-first accounts of rural mobilization in Russia at the start of the 20th century and India at its end. Against this it is argued that agrarian populism cannot be regarded as progressive, for two reasons in particular. First, it overlooks or downplays the fact that capitalism requires of peasant households only their labour-power, as components of an increasingly global industrial reserve army. Opposed merely to certain forms of capitalism (foreign, large-scale) and not to accumulation per se, populists were and are unable to address this contradiction. And second, agrarian populism unleashes – or, once unleashed, endorses – discourses about the innateness of national/ethnic/religious difference associated historically and currently with the political right.