Landless agricultural labourers are peasants without land rather than industrialized farm workers

Evidence

It must be recognised that the problem of the agricultural labourers is an extremely difficult one, and even today very hard to solve. In general, the following criteria must be borne in mind: the agricultural labourers to this day are for the most part simply peasants without land—(hence were all the more so in the Risorgimento period)—and not the workers of an agricultural industry developed through concentration of capital and the division of labour. Moreover, in the period of the Risorgimento, tied labour [obbligato ] was considerably more widespread than casual labour [avventizio ]. Their psychology is therefore, with all due exceptions, the same as that of the farmer and the smallholder. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 465

Categorization

• DEFINE: Gramsci defines the agricultural labourer category precisely for analysis: landless peasants, not industrial-style farm workers, whose psychology matches the smallholder’s.