Social Differentiation in Agriculture and the Ideology of Neopopulism

While the social and economic structure of societies transforms rapidly by evolutionary or revolutionary bounds, old controversies have a strong resilience and tend to reappear in their same content even if under new forms. This is the case for the debate on the nature and future of peasants and the family farm. In the late 1800s, the Russian populists argued that capitalism could not develop in their country for lack of an internal market and the impossibility of breaking into the international market against the competition of advanced capitalist economies. They defended, instead, the viability of a noncapitalist organization of agricultural production based on the economic viability of the old patriarchal…