How Does Industrialization Affect The Life Of Peasants?

For centuries, peasants have constituted the great majority of all agricultural labour. Peasants can be described as groups of people that practice self-sufficient agricultural activities, although peasant farming is not just an enterprise but also a unit of domestic economy (Gałęski, 1972: 41).

Industrialisation and the changes it has brought forth in the economy and society have modified the way in which peasants live and are perceived in modern times, especially in Western countries. Throughout industrialisation and the rise of capitalism, peasantry as a social group has been expected to disappear in numerous occasions as a result of these processes. However, it would be incorrect to assume that peasants and their way of living have ceased

Here, peasants, or “campesinos”, no longer depend exclusively on agriculture for their subsistence, as they also rely on a number of other activities for part of their income. Moreover, the widespread phenomenon of migration away from rural areas (and often, migration away from their countries) has created new, multifaceted identities, which challenge, and often supersede, the peasant idea of people rooted to a particular place or area. Finally, nowadays, even peasants partake in cultural practices (such as clothing, music, and technology) that render them a participant part of the modern world, of a reality bigger than the social context of the villages in which they were “confined” in the past. Nevertheless, even though the way in which rural labourers live and relate with others may have changed, being a “peasant” is still a very important element of self-identification for many people in rural communities (Edelman, 2000: 15).

In conclusion, peasantry has been able to survive in an increasingly expanding industrialised and capitalist society mainly by adapting, by letting the protagonists of this reality think about and redefine what it means to be a peasant in today’s world, by deciding which aspects of tradition maintain and which discard in order to be able to keep up with the times. Each of these situations varies depending on the community, and we must assume there are as many ways in which to be a peasant as there are peasant