From the resilience of commons to resilience through commons. The peasant way of buffering shocks and crises

Abstract

We investigate if and how commons helped peasant societies when confronted with uncertainty, shocks, and crises in this special issue. Peasants have been defined as primarily small-scale agricultural producers who control the means of production and who use these means directly to provide for their own subsistence. Their activities were often integrated into the (commodity) market economy, but not dependent on (factor) markets.1 If the (large) majority of households can be conceived as peasants, we can speak of peasant societies. For a long time, peasant societies were conceived as antagonistic to capitalism: the commercial farmer would eventually replace the peasant. However, from a world-historical perspective, peasant societies were not simply replaced by capitalist farming systems; they were gradually integrated in a globalised capitalist economy.2 As a result, even today a large part of the global population still qualifies as ‘peasants’. Even though the definition is quite clear, the persistence of peasant communities throughout the ages remains enigmatic. When exposed to extreme events, crises and shocks, peasants have been portrayed as both extremely vulnerable as well as highly resilient. In Poverty and Famines, Amartya Sen showed that peasant farmers were among the worst hit in the different famines under consideration.3 Yet according to Vander Ploeg, the very fact that some of the most hazardous regions in the world are dominated by peasants also indicates that they have the capacity to cope with shocks and hazards, while more commercial enterprises are pushed out.4 Rosset et al. give the example of Cuba, where peasant smallholders practicing agroecological farming and mutually cooperating bounced back much faster than large private or state-owned holdings after a hurricane, losing less of their harvest.5 These different outcomes are for a large