Marx classified the peasantry as a backward class usable against socialist revolution.

Evidence

The fifth class was the peasantry. This was the class that came closest to the poor whites and Black workers of the antebellum period in terms of its systemic relationship to industrial capitalism, its social organization, and its historical origins. For Marx and Engels, the peasantry was a remnant of the precapitalist society. But unlike other residues from feudalism, for example, the clergy, the aristocracy, and the artisan-craftsmen, the peasantry continued to be of importance in capitalist society. Both the peasantry and the bourgeoisie had been negations of feudalism, however the peasantry’s “narrow-minded” self-interest had been intent on destroying feudalist relations by moving historically backward to small, individual land-holdings and away from the inclusive, nationally integrated economic structures for which the bourgeoisie aspired. In feudalism, the bourgeoisie had been a historically progressive contradiction, and the peasantry a historically reactionary negation. With the destruction of feudalism by capitalist forces, the peasantry became reactionary in a different way. The peasantry was now a potential ally of the bourgeoisie to be poised against the political force of industrial labor and the socialist revolution. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1100

Categorization

• DEFINE: Critical to why orthodox Marxism could not recognize the antebellum Black worker-peasant as a revolutionary subject.
• XREF: This is the theoretical ground on which Robinson’s entire Black radical tradition thesis hinges — Marx’s categories structurally excluded Black workers from the revolutionary narrative.