The Ecology of Peasant Communism in India

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to investigate the agrarian base of Indian communism through the use of statistical data and techniques in which the Communist vote over three general elections since 1957 is correlated with 35 largely socio-economic variables taken from Indian census data. The results indicate that two of these variables—landlessness in densely populated areas—explain a significant percentage of the variance in the Indian Communist vote. It is further suggested on the basis of statistical data accumulated by other investigators for Java and the Philippines that the same two variables are highly correlated with Communist strength in other parts of Asia.

The Relative Autonomy of Party Practices: A Counterfactual Analysis of Left Party Ascendancy in Kerala, India, 1934–1940

“…Such studies commonly employ ecological or correlational methods that associate certain party types with underlying social structural variables. Lipset (1960) and Lipset and Rokkan's (1967) pioneering crossnational studies of parties showed strong correlations between conservative, democratic, or communist parties and dominant social cleavages such as income and religion (see also Dogan [1967], Linz [1966], and Zagoria [1971] for important empirical studies in this tradition). 6 The implicit neglect of the strategies and tactics of parties in a theory of party ascendancy is not simply a feature of the "pluralist" paradigm.…”

“…The hypothesis that landlessness and high population density together explain a proclivity for radicalism (Zagoria 1971) is supported by the fact that most of the rebellions took place in two districts that shared a comparatively high man-to-land ratio. Moreover, wetland cultivation was a greater part of cultivation in south, compared with north, Malabar.…”

“…This is so for several reasons. First, an earlier generation of scholarship during the 1960s and 1970s established that structural characteristics, such as tenancy relations in agriculture and high rates of proletarianization, combined with high population growth rates and intense pressure on land, were the core determinants of communist ascendancy in Kerala (and other regions where radical, revolutionary parties had been influential) (Alexander 1989;Paige 1975;Zagoria 1971). I will show, however, that these relations are only the starting point for the inquiry, because they do not hold up to comparative scrutiny and fail to explain the large time lags between structural crises and political insurgency.…”

The Green Revolution, agrarian productivity and labor

“…The asset-poor/landless people are economically poor and therefore they tend to face problems getting organized (Chambers, 1983;Zagoria, 1971) -problems that are not absolutely insuperable, however (see below). It may be counter-argued that it is the poorest and the most-asset poor who are more rebellious for, to paraphrase Marx, they have nothing to lose but their chains.…”

Agrarian Structure and Political Stability in Honduras

“…NOTES 1. Modernization theorists argue that unequal land tenure patterns are related to political instability, particularly in rural, agricultural nations such as Honduras (Huntington, 1968;Moore, 1966;Kautsky, 1972;Zagoria, 1971;Russett, 1964), According to the IDB (1980-1981: 284, 400), 64% of the Honduran population is rural and 60% of Hondurans are illiterate; the Honduran GDP per capita of $639 is the third lowest in Latin America. For some newer, more complex theoretical views on the role of peasants in revolutionary movements, see Skocpol (1979).…”