Asia: The Peasant’s Way

The publication in our last issue of “Can Asia Industrialize Democratically?”, reprinted with some small statistical deletions from Asoka Mehta’s pamphlet, SOCIALISM AND PEASANTRY, stirred broad enthusiasm and interest, notably among students of Asia. Below we present another section of Mehta’s pamphlet. As noted in our last issue, the style and language of the original have not been tampered with. We have received many requests for reprint copies of the two articles and we regret that we cannot yet supply these—The Editors.

When the relationship of socialism and peasantry is explored, it is necessary to understand the peasant’s conception of development. It is, however, not easy to trace it. The peasant is not a very articulate being. He has not gone in very much for blueprints and master plans. His philosophy, because of his “soil wisdom,” is often a curious mixture of a narrow practicality and a diffused mysticism. The social ideology of a peasant is not something that can be read on the run. Our effort to sketch the peasant’s alternative is therefore tentative.

The peasant has a different sense of “income,” and a different conception of “development.” Income is not necessarily reducible to financial calculations, as we have been doing so far. For the peasant, income depends on, in a way consists of, the “welfare” patterns which the societies, or the individuals composing them, have chosen in accordance with their environment and objectives, their inherited traditions and disposition. His roots, his milieu, are as significant to him as economic betterment—in fact they are all woven into a common fabric of his hopes. The small family holding is not a mere means of living, not even social security, but a way of life.

The peasant needs land. In Asia, where land hunger is so deep and so ancient, no social order that does not distribute land equitably can survive. Of course, if others fail, the Communists will do it. “Communism first encourages the peasants to help themselves to land so that it might have its hands free to grasp political power, and then uses the political power to deprive the peasants of land”—this indictment of Mitrany’s is true. But when the sophisticated man has gone with the Communists, despite clear warnings, the peasant cannot be expected, on his own, to assimilate the lessons of contemporary history.

The peasant wants land. Before the revolution, in Russia, Stolypin had tried to set up substantial farmers, with “sound” holdings. Lenin had denounced it as “the Prussian way,” designed to strengthen the more efficient landowners and the kulaks; he had favored what he called “the American way,” where traditional privileges would be removed and...