PEASANTRY IN BANGLADESH 69
of their objective material condition.3 However by the 1890s, capitalism had matured to an extent where new conditions were developing in the countryside. These new conditions were ones in which differentiation was proceeding apace and new class relations were emerging. Here came in Kautsky and Lenin, who were equally political in their concerns.4
Both Kautsky and Lenin were addressing the agrarian question as a peasant question—how far capitalism, to the extent it was developing, had not eliminated the peasantry as a crucial political force. For Lenin, the peasantry no longer constituted an integral class', a view which also loomed large in Kautsky's analysis. This Kautsky-Lenin approach to the agrarian question is the one which is most widely taken into account today, in those poor countries where the capitalist path is being attempted.
According to Engels, it was the 'small peasant' who occupied the space at the end of the differentiation spectrum. Capitalism had not yet eliminated him. He was a "future proletarian' [Engels, 1970: 460], occasionally selling his labour under economic pressure. Lenin's poor peasant occupied the same position in the differentiation spectrum. But his poor peasant was definitely different from Engel's 'small peasant*. The pressures of competition, impoverishment and indebtedness had clearly driven him into a situation to sell his labour power, not exceptionally as implied by Engels, but regularly in order to ensure his survival. He is much closer to the status of a proletarian than is his counterpart in the Engels schema.
Lenin's middle peasant is much closer to Engel's small peasant. He earned just enough to meet the family expenditure, hiring out labour more than what he hired in. Theirs is a very precarious position—unstable and transitional between that of the peasant bourgeoisie and the proletariat [Lenin, op. cit., 79-80].
Lenin's rich peasants constitute a rural bourgeoisie, quite distinct from the middle peasantry. They are completely commercialised, producing primarily for the market. They hire in labour regularly. They are not fully-formed capitalist farmers, but are on the way to becoming so. They are more productive and hence more stable economically, enjoying a kind of economic independence.
Such, in brief, is Lenin's differentiation schema. He saw differentiation clearly in class terms (hence the name social differentiation) in direct opposition to the narodnik or populist viewpoint Th^ latter saw no class formation taking place within the peasantry, and therefore no social differentiation and no development of capitalism. They saw the continuing reproduction of an archetypal pristine peasantry. They preferred to bet on them for the successful development of Russia : not via acapitalist but through a populist path. There soon developed a new school of such scholars, led by AV Chayanov, who viewed differentiation as a demographic phenomenon without any process of cUss formation, in the Marxist sense, taking place.