The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Differentiation as understood in the Chayanovian

tradition

Jan Douwe van der Ploeg

To cite this article: Jan Douwe van der Ploeg (2023): Differentiation as understood in the
Chayanovian tradition, The Journal of Peasant Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2023.2170792

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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2023.2170792

REVIEW

Differentiation as understood in the Chayanovian tradition

Jan Douwe van der Ploega,b
a
College of Humanities and Development Studies (COHD), China Agricultural University, Beijing, China;
b
Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University, Wageningen, the Netherlands

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Using a recently re-discovered text by Alexander Chayanov, this article Differentiation (social;
argues that while demographic differentiation may lead to demographic and market-
stratification, this is, for a variety of reasons, mostly temporary and induced); Chayanovian
does not generally result in the formation of antagonistic rural approach; peasantry;
frontiers; discrepancies
classes. At the same time there is also the far more deep-rooted
phenomenon of market-induced differentiation. This latter type
stems from, and reflects, capital’s ability to create and bridge price
differentials, mostly through long-distance trading and food
engineering.

In reality no theory ever gets completed, even if its believers think differently. This is a uni-
versal truth, but especially so for the work of Alexander Chayanov, an engaged Russian
scholar who was an important figure during the Russian October Revolution in 1917,
playing a dual role in this seismic event. On the one hand, he aligned the Russian peasan-
try with the revolutionary movement, simultaneously trying to assure that the revolution
also benefitted those working in the countryside. On the other hand, he elaborated a
theoretical approach that allowed for a better understanding of the organization and
development of peasant agriculture. This approach was many-sided, comparative and
comprehensive. It had multiple foci, examining the level of the single peasant farm, inter-
mediate phenomena (such as regional markets and cooperatives) and macro issues (such
as the position of the peasantry within capitalism). However, the tragic events occurring in
the aftermath of the revolution meant that Alexander Chayanov was not able to finish his
theoretical work as his life was abruptly and brutely interrupted.
The incomplete nature of his work is particularly evident when it comes to the issue of
social differentiation. The notion of differentiation figures at two levels in his theoretical
work. First, at the level of the single peasant farm and family and, second, at the level of
the agrarian sector as a whole. The two manifestations are not interlinked, although they
both contribute to the confusing, and often misunderstood, heterogeneity of agriculture.
Disentangling this heterogeneity (or at least parts of it) is precisely what unites and differ-
entiates the Leninist and Chayanovian approaches.

CONTACT Jan Douwe van der Ploeg JanDouwe.vanderPloeg@wur.nl Generaal Foulkesweg 42, 6703 BT
Wageningen, the Netherlands
© 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
2 J. D. VAN DER PLOEG

The demographic cycle

At the micro level the key phrase is demographic differentiation. This refers to, what we
now call, the economic size of the peasant farm. In Chayanov’s time this coincided with
the area (expressed in e.g. desiatinas or hectares) worked by the peasant family – at
least in Russia where land was abundantly available and regularly redistributed by
the peasant communities (mirs) themselves This set Russia apart from Western
Europe at that time where, as Chayanov noted, it was not the physical amount of
land but the intensity of land use that determined the economic size of a single
peasant farm. Be that as it may1, the economic size of Russian peasant farms
differed considerably: alongside small farms there were larger ones and, as always,
there were those in-between; the medium farms. This difference affected peasants’
wellbeing. For small farmers, poverty was never far away: they had to work hard to
maintain their families. Drudgery (a canonical concept from Chayanovian analysis)
was an everyday reality. Their opposites, the large farmers, were relatively well-off
and signs of richness (even timid ones) were often displayed. The farmers working
medium-sized surfaces were neither poor, nor rich, but somewhere in-between.
The distinctive element in Chayanov’s analysis is that he relates (and thus explains)
these differences mainly, though not exclusively, through the demographic cycle of the
peasant family. Hence demographic differentiation. When a young couple married (as
they did at that time in Russia), started working their own small farm, and got children,
they had to work hard in order to feed the family. And as the number of children increased
they necessarily had to enlarge their farm in order to make ends meet. Technically speak-
ing: the ratio of hands to do the work and the mouths to be fed was constantly changing
and this drove the peasant family. After a certain point, as the children grew up, they
added to the farm’s labor force so that a larger area could be worked, just as a modest
surplus might be transformed into some degree of well-being. However, sooner or
later, the parents necessarily had to make their final voyage and the domus (the unity
of family and land) was divided among the heirs. Thus the cycle started anew. Conse-
quently, being ‘poor’, ‘in-between’ and ‘well-off’ (just as having small, medium and
large areas of land available for working) were stages of life and the knowledge that
after each stage there is another one was an invisible glue that tied peasant communities
and families together.
In synthesis: according to Chayanov’s analysis, there is, and always will be, stratification
within peasant societies (see also Netting 1993 and van der Ploeg 2013). There are
different strata (small, medium, large; poor, middle, rich). This stratification is produced
by the demographic cycle; and the same cycle turns the different strata upside down,
over and again, intermingling them – even to the degree that you never know exactly
who is about to enter the ballroom and who is leaving. Ironically, this is reflected in

1
The funny detail, of course, is that the Leninist classification scheme of small, medium and large (peasant) farmers could
only be operated in Russia because the magnitude of the land being worked could easily be assessed. If not directly,
then indirectly by the number of horses used for working the land: no horses meant a poor peasant; having one horse
translated as being a medium-sized peasant producer; and three or more horses implied being a large and rich farmer, a
kulak. If there had been structural differences in the levels of intensity this simple mathematics of the ‘revolution’ would
have failed even more than it actually did. The other side of the equation is that the same classification scheme has
never been well-understood and accepted, let alone effectively operated, by emancipatory movements in the
Western European countryside. It simply did not fit very well. It did not reveal what it was meant to unravel (i.e. to
distinguish poor rural workers from rich capitalist farmers).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 3

the literature itself. Differences in farm size and family wellbeing have been interpreted as
definitive indicators of class differentiation (Bartra and Otrero 1987), demographic differ-
entiation (White 2018) or understood as an expression of both (Deere and de Janvry
1981). In particular situations, some authors have identified a trend towards class differ-
entiation whilst others have refuted such an interpretation (see Akram-Lohdi 2005 and
Trang 2010, respectively). Anyway, to read stratification in an a priori way as an expression
of class formation is clearly wrong (see also Shanin [1977] 1990, 59; Netting 1993, 231).
Chayanov accepted that there might be such social differentiation at specific times and
in specific places. However the mere presence of socio-economic differences (i.e. the pres-
ence of different strata) can never be taken as a linear, one-way, indicator of social differ-
entiation as conceptualized in Leninist theory (Cousins 2022). Only careful empirical
research (preferably grounded on time series and applying diachronic analysis) can
reveal the different and interacting processes that contribute to, and result in, the
often impressive and, at first sight, highly confusing diversity of farms, farming and
agriculture.

Iso-prices: an almost forgotten, but still highly useful concept

Concerning the second level – agriculture as a whole – Chayanov demarcated pre-
revolutionary Russia (where peasant agriculture existed alongside landlords and capi-
talist farmers) from the post-revolutionary situation, just as he clearly distinguished
farming in the Soviet economy from farming in e.g. the USA.2 He was aware that
time and space were very important. ‘To correctly raise the question and get relevant
answers, we have to accurately and thoroughly study every single case to find out
what kind of differentiation processes we are observing [… .] and how to place
[them] in the […] national economy of the country under study’ (Chayanov 1927
in Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg 2023; italics added).3 John Harriss (1982, 180)
synthesized this far later saying that ‘purely structural conceptions of causality’ are
to be avoided.
In the USSR of 1927 ‘we have neither large, nor medium sized, capitalist farms in agri-
culture’ (Chayanov 1927 in Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg 2023). Nonetheless, there
were considerable segments of the rural population and extended areas characterized by
poverty, enslaving forms of exploitation, the abandonment of farms and migration. This
raised a question that is still very relevant today: ‘As a result of [this kind of] differentiation,
will we have the professional proletariat that completely abandoned agriculture or the
new workers who are our old friends – semi-peasants/semi-workers – who maintain
relationships with their villages?’(ibid.).4
Be that as it may, there evidently was (just as in our times there still is) a ‘complete
discrepancy’ between the social, the economic and the ecological. In Chayanov’s time
this was partly related to the shift from subsistence economies to a market economy.
2
See e.g. ‘Letter from A.V. Chayanov to V.M. Molotov on the current state of agriculture in the USSR compared with its pre-
war state and the situation in agriculture of capitalist countries (October 6; 1927)’ in Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg
2023
3
At the time of writing Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg 2023 was not yet available in printed form. Thus I am unable to
give page numbers.
4
The relevance of this early observation is revealed by the circular movement of migrant workers (from countryside to
town and then back again) in China. See Ploeg and Ye, 2010.
4 J. D. VAN DER PLOEG

In our times it is related to global capitalism permanently extending its many fron-
tiers (Beckert et al. 2021). Thus, discrepancies are continuously produced in more
and more areas. These generate complex inter and intra-regional forms of
differentiation.
The key concept that Chayanov proposes for the analysis of ‘this kind of differen-
tiation’5 is iso-prices.6 Iso-prices are lines that connect places with the same price for a
specific product.7 Figure 1 shows such iso-prices for rye in Russia before the First World
War (Chayanov also elaborated similar cartograms for the autumn of 1917 and the
spring of 1920).8 The figure shows that, at that time, north-western Russia (the region
around Saint Petersburg) experienced the highest price-level for rye (100 Rubbles or
more), whilst in the south and the south-east there were pockets with price levels of
60 or less.
Iso-prices are an indicator that are hardly used anymore and one might wonder how
they possibly relate to the issue of differentiation. However, a careful reading of Chaya-
nov’s exposé renders intriguing insights that offer great promise in the analysis of contem-
porary agriculture.
First, Chayanov clearly argues that ‘a subsistence economy excludes iso-prices’. If
peasant production is not market-oriented, there will be no market, nor price and,
consequently, no iso-prices. One the other hand, when markets emerge and pro-
duction becomes market-oriented, there will be prices and thus (probably) also iso-
prices.
This brings us to the second point. What is the reason for these iso-prices? They exist
because, at the local and/or regional level, prices will reflect different scarcity relations
between supply and demand – that is between the capacity and willingness of peasant
farmers to produce and deliver agricultural products and the needs and purchasing
power of non-agrarian (mostly urban) populations. The sides of this balance are rooted,
in complex ways, in population density and distribution, ecology, history, town-country-
side relations, associated power relations, and so forth. And with variations in these webs
of underlying reasons, relations and flows, scarcity relations will vary and thus, at an inter-
regional level, iso-prices will emerge.
Thirdly, it is evident that the existence of iso-prices will trigger trade. But such trade
(bringing food commodities from ‘cheap’ to ‘expensive’ areas) does not eliminate these
iso-prices. Interregional (or long-distance) trade comes with transport costs, the costs
of trading, and transaction costs (i.e. the cost of using the market). Thus a decentralized

5
There is one text (recently translated and re-published in the English language) explicitly dedicated to the discussion of
differentiation (‘On differentiation of the peasant economy’ in Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg 2023). This text, first
published in 1927, is a revised version of a report presented at the beginning of the same year in Moscow at a discus-
sion on the socio-economic differentiation of the Russian peasantry, a discussion in which both the so-called ‘Marxist
agrarians’ and the ‘agrarian neo-populists’ participated. See also Shanin ([1977] 1990, 234).
6
I am very grateful to Sasha Nikulin of RANEPA in Moscow for having explained to me the meaning and use of this
concept in the Russian academic traditions and debates of that time.
7
The concept of iso-prices and the methods for calculating them were elaborated and systematically tested for the first
time by the German agrarian economist Engelbrecht. Chayanov referred to him in his ‘Lehre van der bäuerlichen
Wirtschaft’ (1923, 126) and, later, in his ‘Essays on the theory of the labor economy’ (1924). In the latter he strongly
built on the famous Russian economist Nikolay Kondratiev who discussed iso-prices related to the market for bread
(Kondratiev [1922] 1991, 448–449). I am most grateful to the Russian economic historian Igor Kuznetsov for having
provided this information to me.
8
The three cartograms can be found in A.V. Chayanov (1989), Peasant Economy: Selected Works, Economics, Moscow, pp
110–113, which is currently only available in Russian.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 5

Figure 1. Iso-prices for rye in Russia in the pre-World War One period (1909–1913).

pattern of semi-independent, but interlinked, regional markets emerges within which the
production and consumption of food are largely (though not exclusively) regional and
mutually interdependent. This is reflected in Figure 2 (derived from the work of Chayanov
[1923] 1986, 259).
It is important to take into account here that regional markets and the phenomenon of
iso-prices do not belong to a remote past. Of the total amount of food produced and con-
sumed in the world today 84% never crosses national boundaries. It is produced and con-
sumed within one and the same country – and most production and consumption are
proximate in terms of distance (less than 20 kilometers apart). This does not exclude,
however, the parameters set by the world market having a strong impact upon regional
markets.
Take for example the EU, within which there is, formally speaking, one milk market.
Nonetheless, there are considerable and significant iso-prices. In the year 2002 these
ranged from 0.26–0.36 Euro/kg. of milk (farm gate price), with consumer-prices (for 1 L
of UHT milk, excluding VAT) ranging from 0.51–1.12 Euro (in the same year). The farm
gate price as a percentage of the consumer-price varied between 23 and 61% (Unalat
2002, 25). These regionalized processes of price-formation were explicitly institutionalized
in some parts of the world. In this vein Italy had, up to the end of the 1960s, zone bianche:
‘white zones’ that combined a gravitational center (an urban conglomeration) with its sur-
rounding agrarian hinterland (as in Figure 2). In the framework of these zone bianche the
farmers and labour unions (the latter representing consumers) met yearly to negotiate
and agree upon the milk price. Consequently, the milk price paid in Milan differed from
the one paid in Reggio Emilia, whilst the one in Bologna was at yet another level.9

9
In the framework of the then just-created EEC (European Economic Community) this practice became forbidden as it was
seen as a ‘distortion’ of the free market.
6 J. D. VAN DER PLOEG

Figure 2. A set of decentralized but interlinked markets.

Without going into detail, I observe here that several social movements are currently
trying, once again, to actively restore and manage specific price levels (that differ mark-
edly from prices paid elsewhere).10
Iso-prices can be made to disappear, just as they can re-emerge. Current food regimes
actively construct and exploit places of poverty that they then link to places of richness
through long-distance trade.11 Food engineering, which allows for bridging huge dis-
tances in time and space,12 and control over infrastructure (ports, processing plants,

10
Theoretically important is that the movements bring about intra-regional price differences (as much as they contribute
to the reproduction of inter-regional differences).
11
Long-distance trade has been, through the ages, an important prerogative of capital (Braudel 1992)
12
Such as making latte fresco blue, see van der Ploeg 2008, chapter 4.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 7

etc.) are strategic here. Thus, food empires are constantly expanding the frontier that is
used to feed capital accumulation.

The non-emergence of capitalist farmers

Capital makes food products flow from one side of the iso-curve to the other (preferably
bridging gaps that are as wide as possible), with the effect of lowering farm gate prices
in relatively well-off regions. This flow both induces and explains an important politico-
economic process: the impoverishment of the peasantry without any simultaneous
‘accumulation from below’. Impoverishment induces a many-facetted stratification: pea-
sants losing their land, some of them migrating to the cities (mostly to live the life of
human garbage as the Brazilian expression goes), yet others try to defend themselves
through all kinds of handicrafts, etc. But there is no simultaneous emergence of capital-
ist farmers (i.e. rich peasants becoming capitalist farmers employing wage workers) – at
least, not in a generalized way. This is because the induced price reductions virtually
exclude profit-making at the level of single farms.13 If anything, the international food
trade (as organized by the current food empires) generates a very specific kind of
class-dynamics. On the ‘poor side’ of the international trade chains we witness the mar-
ginalization of peasantries and the emergence of large-scale capitalist farm enterprises
controlled by large non-agrarian capital groups. However, these new enterprises are
definitely not the result of any ‘accumulation from below’, as Leninist approaches
would have it. In this vein, Ben White noted, in a study in Indonesia, that ‘rural differen-
tiation and concentration are established facts; however this has not produced a capital-
ist large-scale farmer class’ (2018:1108; italics added). Instead, land-grabbing is the key
phrase to understanding their spread throughout the Global South. On the ‘rich side’
a similar crippled type of differentiation can be seen: ‘one side is operational, the other
not’. Poor and middle peasants are outcompeted but, some exceptions apart, there is
no coherent and generalized transition of ‘rich peasants’ into ‘capitalist farmers’. To
give just a few references: At the beginning of this twenty-first Century, Europe as a
whole (EU28) had a total of 12,248,000 farms. Of these, 11,885,000 (i.e. 97%) were
classified as family farms (FAO 2014). Equally, in France only 3% were classified as capi-
talist farms (Laurent and Remy, 1998), whilst in Italy it also oscillates around 3% (ISTAT
2010 and 2022), a sharp decrease compared to the first decades of the previous century
(Sereni 1979).

Iso-costs
Alongside iso-prices one can also discern iso-costs. These refer to (and summarize) the
variable and fixed costs that occur in agricultural production. Peasant production is
grounded on a relatively autonomous resource-base. Most inputs and factors of pro-
duction are produced and reproduced within the farm (or region). Through many
different processes, though, this resource-base is being eroded and thus ‘world’s agricul-
ture is being [… ] drawn into the general circulation of the world economy, and the
13
This is reflected, among others, in the fact that, in macro-terms, over the years Dutch agriculture shows no (calculated)
profits at all. There are just (calculated) losses. This does not exclude families generating attractive incomes from
farming. The same is true for other European countries (and to family farming generally).
8 J. D. VAN DER PLOEG

centers of capitalism are […] subordinating it to their leadership’ (Chayanov [1923] 1986,
257). Alongside its presence on the downstream side of the peasant farm, the ‘trading
machinery’ (ibid:258) also appeared on the upstream side. And again the effects were,
and are, two-tiered. First it is most likely that the quantitative relations between means
of production within the peasant farm do not correspond with the prices of capital and
labour in the reigning markets.14 Thus, problems of relative overpopulation suddenly
come to the fore (see e.g. Chayanov in Nikulin, Trotsuk, and van der Ploeg 2023).
Second, new forms of stratification emerge as a result of the commoditization of the
resource-base being an unequal and non-linear process (Nemchinov [1926] 1967;
Shanin [1977] 1990, 234–242; van der Ploeg 2010) that translates into important differ-
ences in the intensity and scale of farming. Thus, the stratification brought about by,
and through, differential commoditization, extends to differences in farming styles (as
Salamon 1985; Goldschmidt [1947] 1978; and Strange 1988 have shown to be the case
in the USA).

The rule: stratification but no class differentiation

All this can be synthesized in the thesis that mostly peasant societies are characterized by
a many-sided stratification but lack a generalized and consistent trend towards class
differentiation. There is a possible theoretical line of reasoning that helps to sustain
such a thesis. Alongside this there is an important, empirically induced, argument that,
I think, further supports this thesis (or ‘rule’).
Bernstein (2020, 36) is right when he argues that the discussion of peasant class for-
mation (and, consequently, the exploration of differentiation) requires ‘a theoretical
framing’. Such framing has been convincingly developed by Thiemann (2022) who
characterizes, after a careful re-reading of Marx, the peasantry as (part of) ‘the third
class’. Instead of being made up by the combination of contradictory class segments
(capital and wage labour) – a combination that is inherently unstable and necessarily
deemed to dissolve into separate elements – the ‘artisan’ is ‘a general class of labour
[that represents] an antonym to the proletarian condition and [which operates] the
means of production as patrimony rather than capital’ (2022: ix). The labour process
here is grounded on, as much as it provides, relative autonomy, self-direction and pos-
sibilities for emancipation (op. cit., 6). ‘Artisans [peasants included] have control over or
effective access to the means of production and are thus in a position to self-direct their
labour. [Consequently], the artisan is the class which innately opposes ‘the process which
divorces the producer from the ownership of the conditions of his own labour’’(Thie-
mann 2022, 13; italics added). Such opposition is possibly further strengthened by the
nature of agricultural production, as suggested by Mann and Dickinson (1978) (but cri-
ticized by Mooney 1982 and later on by Toledo 1990) who argue that the labour
process in agriculture is an encounter with living nature, which makes the systematic
separation of manual and mental labour and the inevitable recourse to wage labour
relations highly improbable.
14
Chayanov was well aware of the theory of relative prices of production factors – a theory that was well explained in late
19th Century Russian textbooks – but he did not elaborate this aspect any further. I am grateful to Sasha Nikulin for
explaining this issue to me.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 9

The innate opposition to differentiation, as hypothesized by Thiemann, is supported

by, and reflected in the institutional patterns (Ostrom 1990; Diez Hurtado 1998; Lucas,
Gasselin, and van der Ploeg 2019), infrastructures (Boelens 2008), historically created land-
scapes (van der Ploeg 2022) and cultural repertoires (Hofstee 1946) that one finds in
peasant societies. Such repertories, for instance, explicitly discourage, disapprove and,
even, actively hinder growth at the farm level that goes beyond the potential of farm
and family – and this is especially the case when such growth starts to threaten the con-
tinuity of other peasant farms and families (for ‘traditional’ cultures see e.g. Foster 1965
and Berger [1979] 2014 and for ‘modern’ repertoires e.g. Ortiz 1971 and Rooij, Brouwer,
and van Broekhuizen 1995). Cultural repertoires thus inhibit the materialization of differ-
entiation as a social reality. In this respect cultural repertoires come to the fore as crucial
elements of ‘superstructure’ – reflecting and reaffirming the structure, consistency and
endurance of the ‘third class’.
The theoretical framing of the peasantry as part of the third class does not, of course,
exclude the possibility of stratification. There always are some peasant families getting far
richer than others whilst running far larger farms, just as there are others becoming impo-
verished. Equally, there is bound to be a division of labour and dependency relations
between the different strata as well. But such differences and dependencies are contained
through cultural repertoires. This explains why the differences that show up at one
moment in time, do not result in perpetual linear processes that result in ever-widening
gaps (as shown for e.g. yields by Zachariasse 1979). Within peasant agriculture being or
becoming ‘rich’ is a biography with a clear beginning as well as a clear end. The same
applies for being poor. Both emerge and then dissolve. Upward mobility (which clearly
contributes to stratification) is followed by downward mobility (Shanin [1977] 1990,
216–218). In peasant agriculture, mobility is cyclical, with some families moving
upwards and others downwards (Edelman and Seligson 1994; IFAD 2010). In the next gen-
eration’s time these processes will probably be reversed. This occurs in countries as
diverse as China and the Netherlands: some small peasant-like farmers disappear, while
others grow. At the same time, some large entrepreneurial farms are eliminated and
their resources become available and may be partly used by local peasants who want
to enlarge their farm and/or by new entrants seeking to establish themselves as new,
small and peasant-like farmers (Huang 1985, 169; Ploeg, 2018, 501).

Exceptions to the rule

Although there is no general tendency of rich peasants converting themselves (through a
process of accumulation ‘from below’) into capitalist farmers, there are specific pockets
where such a transition is occurring. These need to be explained by looking at the specifi-
cities of time and place. There still is much research to be done, but some ingredients of
such an explanation can be suggested here. Typically, such transitions frequently occur
by crossing the iso-curves Chayanov was referring to. That is the story of relatively rich
Western European farmers moving into the USA where they can obtain cheap land and con-
tract cheap Mexican workers for their enlarged farm enterprises. The same applies to large
growers of fruits and vegetables in the southern part of Europe who can contract poor and
often illegal labour migrants from Sub Saharan Africa (and to large horticultural producers
in the Netherlands and elsewhere in NW Europe employing cheap migrant workers from
10 J. D. VAN DER PLOEG

Eastern Europe). Crossing the iso-curves and moving to cheap land15 and/or cheap labour is
generally the key to these processes. Yet another case occurs when peasant farmers change
into agricultural entrepreneurs (through increased degrees of commoditization, especially
when supported by the state through modernization16 and Green Revolution programs)
who, under special circumstances (e.g. long-run security regarding farm-gate prices and
the availability of cheap credit) are spurred to make the step towards capitalist farm enter-
prises build on the expanded use of wage workers. However, cases like these are the excep-
tion rather than the rule (which does not imply that they are without political relevance).
Wherever the role of living nature in agricultural production can be strongly reduced
(through an artificialization of nature, such as e.g. genetic modification), the probability
of agricultural production being organized as capitalist enterprise increases.

The intertwinement of different forms of differentiation

Market-induced differentiation does not come ‘alone’, just as Ben Cousins observes for class
differentiation (2022:1394). It is intertwined, in many different and complex ways, with other
forms of differentiation (e.g. gender, generation, race, religion, class and caste) that,
together, result in constellations in which one form of differentiation feeds into (or pre-
vents) another. Thus, religious differentiation, for instance, might support or even induce
new patterns of class differentiation (as documented by Moerman 1968 and Long 1977),
whilst small farmers working for large farmers may help to avoid the ‘disappearance’ of
the former (as occurred in large parts of north-western Europe in the post-WW2 period).
Slotting market-induced differentiation into the analysis of such complex, heteroge-
nous and constantly moving constellations has at least three benefits. Firstly, it inevitably
extends the analysis (including class analysis) to the global level. Secondly, it explains why
the expected effects often do not materialize in the spaces where we might expect them,
but crystallize in other, far-away, spaces. Thirdly, it helps to us understand how capital
evolves by, and through, a range of essentially non-capitalist forms of differentiation –
sometimes even actively enlarging them.
Market-induced differentiation has, as already noted, differential effects. When different
agricultural constellations (each with its own particular levels of scale, intensity, income-gen-
erating capacity17, accessibility, etc.) are systematically interlinked through one single
market – if, in other words, iso-prices are eliminated and simultaneously reproduced –
the effects will be highly diversified (see also Mazoyer and Roudart 2006). This is accentuated
when the development of agricultural technologies is biased, in the sense that their design
is more suited to some constellations and represents a significant rupture with others.

Market-induced differentiation and peasant politics

Peasant struggles contain a range of potential responses that may allow the peasantry to
avoid the devastating effects that can result from intertwined processes of differentiation.
15
The notion of cheap land includes the absence of environmental and/or spatial regulation (or enforcement).
16
Tellingly, modernization in West-European agriculture contained a large element of a cultural offensive, meant to era-
dicate the then reigning cultural repertoires.
17
Reflected in the VA/GVP ratio, i.e. the relation of Value Added (or ‘labour income’ as Chayanov called it) and the Gross
Value of Production.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 11

Food sovereignty is a prime example as it aims to re-regionalize both the production and
the consumption of food and rejects free trade as an ordering principle. Food sovereignty
uses local and regional marketplaces to tie production and consumption together, and
represents an institutionalized alliance between rural and urban people. This leads to
food markets becoming nested in a mutual understanding between peasant producers
and urban consumers (Ploeg, Ye, and Schneider 2012). Food sovereignty does not
exclude inter-regional marketing – it grounds it upon ecological principles: only
produce that is lacking may come from elsewhere whilst surpluses are only traded into
other marketplaces that are experiencing shortages (this is the principle underlying e.g.
the Brazilian Ecovida network). A second response is peasant-managed cooperatives,
which govern both the operation of local and regional markets and interregional trade.
They also play an important role in enlarging and sustaining the autonomous resource
base that upholds peasant production. Agroecology is a third pillar: which both further
strengthens the resource-base and promotes the rich diversity of food (and other pro-
ducts and services) needed in local and regional markets. A fourth response is a
change in technological development. Instead of centering on off-the-shelf magic
bullet solutions such as genetic modification and automation, it puts ‘man and living
nature’ center stage again and contributes to their co-evolution –as advocated in the
agroecological agenda. And last, but far from least, farming, small-scale processing and
local marketing are (once again) to be made as attractive as possible, especially for
women and young people.

Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Sasha Nikulin and Igor Kuznetsov for providing me with crucial insights and rich
background information.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor
Jan Douwe van der Ploeg is Professor Emeritus of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and
Adjunct Professor in Rural Sociology at the College of Humanities and Development Studies of
China Agricultural University in Beijing. He is the author, most recently, of The Sociology of
Farming: Concepts and Methods. Previously he wrote, among others, Peasants and the Art of
Farming: A Chayanovian Manifesto.

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