Final answer:
The text primarily discusses the peasantry's class consciousness and their political representation challenges within various socio-economic contexts. It traces the evolution from traditional peasant society through to the complexities introduced by globalization and industrialization, highlighting how these factors impede their political unity and representation.
Step-by-step explanation:
The excerpt discusses the incapacity of peasantry to assert their interests as a unified class due to the lack of a common bond and political organization. Peasants, often owning small plots of land and engaging in subsistence farming, rely heavily on urban markets to sell their surplus and are typically traditional in their social practices. The concept of peasants as a class has evolved from Robert Redfield's 'little tradition' to Eric Wolf's 'closed corporate communities', and now to what some scholars refer to as a 'post-peasant class', indicating rural cultivators who migrate to urban areas while retaining traditional values.
Furthermore, globalization has further complicated the lives of peasants by integrating them into larger structures of trade and government, requiring them to sell surpluses for cash to meet taxation and purchase necessities like seed and fertilizer. In such a system, they can be easily exploited by urban elites, making their political representation challenging. This precarious position is underlined by historical figures like Mao Zedong, who incorporated the peasantry into his revolutionary strategy by framing their struggle as a class conflict with the landlord class.
In a broader socio-economic context, the transformation of labor from direct access to means of production to wage labor under capitalism has implications for class identity and representation. The idea of class categories and the political power embedded in the capability to define these categories has been a contentious topic traversing Marxist theory and the historical development of class struggles.