ABSTRACT
This chapter, by way of conclusion, draws out key lessons from the case studies in terms of the status of the peasantry and peasant resistance, both in the current conjuncture and looking to the future. It examines the peasantry’s role as agent, not only of resistance and rebellion, but also of revolution and transformation, and its potential as the leading advocate for, and practitioner of, social and ecological sustainability. This is because the bulk of subaltern classes in the global South are semi-proletarian, retaining links to land, however tenuous; the links to land, ideologically, culturally, and materially, are of disproportionate significance to subalterns relative to off-farm employment, constituting a very strong normative image of how current the current politico-economic system might be changed to the benefit of the majority rather than the few. This relates to the book’s political ecological perspective, and the climate crisis induced by capitalist imperialism. This problematizes any notion of universal transition to urban, industrial, productivist capitalism, or even to a ‘green’ capitalism no longer premised on fossil carbon, since even this would retain a strongly imperial relation between North and South. This position validates a ‘pro-peasant’ view of a post-capitalist, agroecologically based social system.
