Landowners’ tenure choices deliberately fragmented the peasantry into class allies

Evidence

Even in recent times, however, the existence of an acute problem of the agricultural labourers in the Po valley was partly due to extra-economic causes: 1. over-population, which did not find an outlet in emigration as in the South, and was artificially maintained through the policy of public works; 2. policy of the landowners, who did not wish to consolidate the working population into a single class of agricultural labourers and share-croppers [mezzadri ]; they alternated sharecropping with leaseholding, utilising this alternation in order to bring about a better selection of privileged sharecroppers who would be their allies: in every congress of landowners from the Po region, there was always a discussion on whether sharecropping or direct tenancy was more advantageous, and it was clear that the choice was made for motives of a socio-political character. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 468

Categorization

• XREF: A concrete mechanism of how an economic elite manages class composition politically - connects to hegemony/divide-and-rule dynamics that later readings on the construction of the Other will build on. — connects to: Moore explained regime change through agricultural class relations and contention — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 90; The rural poor split into day-labourers and property-owning smallholders with opposed interests — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1013