The Coalition of the Working Class and the Peasantry under Capitalism

Abstract

Both by origin and by position in capitalist society, worker and peasant are blood brothers. (403) If Communists stand for an alliance of the working class and the peasantry, this is not wishful thinking. They are operating on the objective laws of social development and know that the interests of capital and the interests of the vast majority of the peasants must necessarily come into conflict. The effect of the general laws of capitalist accumulation in agriculture is the dislocation and dispersal of the peasantry…. The vast majority of the peasants become bondsmen of capital — some go to the city and swell the ranks of the proletariat; those who stay in the village gradually become semi-proletarians. (404)