CLaSP END OF YEAR PANEL II: CLASSES OF LABOUR- ‘The Basic Model’

Co-hosted with the Journal of Agrarian Change.

Speakers: Jairus Banaji (SOAS) will deliver the main lecture, followed by responses from Henry Bernstein (Emeritus Professor, SOAS) and Jens Lerche (Emeritus Professor, SOAS).

Chair: Elena Baglioni, QMUL.

NOTE: Event will be hybrid- Graduate Centre, Room 101 (in-person) and MS Teams (online). Access the online meeting here. The event will be followed by a reception from 6-7 PM.

Event blurb:

The question of how we think about the relationship to capitalism of people living and working in the countryside has long been a vexed one. Even if over 40 percent of the global population still lives in rural areas – many self-identifying as peasants – the political implications of categories of analysis run into well-worn traps. Perhaps the most troubling binary is the one between an evident sympathy for peasants and accusations of reactionary populism; between peasants as revolutionaries, the natural base for movements of liberation from colonialism (Wolf, MacMaster), and peasants as a ‘conservative, apathetic mass’, the bastions of conservatism that Marxists see them as.  Starting with Algeria as perhaps the best example of a terrain that has thrown up sharply polarized images of the peasantry (Bourdieu’s attacks on Fanon and the later critiques of Bourdieu himself), I go on to sketch an alternative framework for the writing of agrarian history, one that moves beyond the myopic focus on peasants and their vertical division into rich, middle and poor to an expanded and arguably stronger version of ‘classes of labour’. In the literature, the term ‘classes of labour’ is meant as a description of agrarian situations, such as that in India, where there is widespread wage-dependency among the smaller cultivators. My own work on the book I’m writing has convinced me that the term should be used in a much wider sense to span the division between peasants and a wide assortment of rural labourers and agricultural workers drawn from the peasantry, many of whom still saw themselves as ‘peasants’ while enmeshed in forms of exploitation typical of capitalism. The paper tries to show this by looking at each of the classes of labour in more detail and discussing the commonalities and differences between them.          

Speaker bios:

Jairus Banaji is a research associate with the Department of Development Studes, SOAS, University of London, and is currently working on a book titled The Peasantry and the Landless: A Historical Study of Classes of Labour. His most recent publications include A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Haymarket, 2020); Wanting Something Completely Different: 111 Vignettes of Left-Wing Figures, Themes, Films and Writers (Rab-Rab, 2023); A Marxist Mosaic: Selected Writings 1968-2022 (Brill, 2024); and ‘Marxism and Late Antiquity’, in J. Salyga and K. Valadbaygi, eds., Mode of Production and the Historiography of Capitalism: Gender, Race and Eurocentrism (Bristol University Press, 2026). 

Henry Bernstein is Emeritus Professor of Development Studies at SOAS. Jens Lerche is Emeritus Professor in Agrarian and Labour Studies at SOAS.