ABSTRACT
In a now famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx wrote:
The small-holding peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse … In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that separates their mode of life, their interests, their culture from those of other classes, and puts them in hostile opposition to the latter they form a class. In so far as there is merely local interconnection among those small-holding peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no community, no national bond, and no political organisation among them they do not form a class (1951: 302–3).
