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the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays' (Fanon
1967: 47, our emphasis). Again, the peasantry is seen as taking on a class
character-only-atcertain-times.-1'his-view-is held-by £hanin:-~on-the-one
hand, it is a class; on the other it is not', to which he adds that insofar as it
is a class it is one of low 'classness' (Shanin 1971: 254).
This conception of the peasantry as being 'set apart' from the rest
of the social framework is common to the substantivist approach according
to which the peasant lives in a 'different' world, the world of the small
producer, at 'a level of nearly total self-sufficiency' (Ibidem: 244).
Consequent upon this view of the peasantry as forming a society-in-itself
(in Shanin's poignant words: 'bearing the elements of a separate distinctive
and closed pattern of social relations'; Ibidem: 254), substantivist analysis
ofthe peasant economy examines social relations internal to the peasant
household and peasant farm. It is hardly surprising that this has been
severely criticized because it 'cannot formulate the social relations of
production which provide the most important element in the materialist
analysis of a mode of production'. 7
If, as in the case of a substantivist approach, the analysis is of a
special peasant mode of production and restricted to relations internal to
the peasant household, the demands of a ruling class for tribute or taxes
can only be seen as external demands which do not necessarily constitute
the small cultivator as a 'peasant'. If, on the other hand, as in materialist
analysis, cultivators are explicitly defined as peasants in terms of their
exploitation by a dominant class of non-producers, the wider social
relations within which they are incorporated become the crucial
constituting. element of their peasant-status.
Nevertheless, for us the matter does not rest there, although the
logical finality of 'by definition' . does not seem to leave room for any
afterthought. The fact is that small cultivators are defined as 'peasants' no
matter whether they are part of a pre-colonial, colonial or post-colonial
social formation. This is suggestive of a greater degree of continuity than
is specified by the definition, especially in the position of the exploiting
class, whether this is the tribute-levying state class, the colonial
administrators, the traders, or the neo-colonial state bureaucrats. The latter
classes are seen as replacing the old chiefly class and as continuing to hold
the powerless peasants at ransom. 8
It might be asked whether the continuity in the existence of peasantries
does not equally suggest a considerable degree of continuity in the
internal social relations of production. It might after all mean that chan-
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