ABSTRACT
Marxian political economists have grappled with the "agrarian question" since the late nineteenth century, when European Marxists confronted the vitally important question of making sense of the agrarian peasantry's role in the rapidly emerging European capitalist economies. By the late nineteenth century, it was evident that Marxist theorists needed to come to terms with the continued political and economic importance of the peasantry across Europe. Capitalist industrial development in European societies had failed to displace what Marxists commonly viewed as a backward, anachronistic vestige of a pre-capitalist society. Engels' analysis of the "peasant question" was driven by practical political concerns and lacked a systematic theoretical analysis. The results of the project, based on Karl Kautsky empirical study of German agriculture, were published in his 1899 work, The Agrarian Question. Agrarian questions, however, remain just as pertinent in industrialized countries such as the United States, where capitalist development has gone farthest in transforming the food and agriculture system.
