Globalization and the Peasantry in the South

The first Sam Moyo lecture was delivered in Harare, Zimbabwe, on 16 January 2018, in the course of the Annual Agrarian Summer School organized by The Sam Moyo African Institute of Agrarian Studies and the Agrarian South Network. The lecture addresses the character of the peasantry under contemporary imperialism and the challenges it faces against the on-going primitive accumulation of capital. It is argued here that a modified definition of the peasantry is necessary today, as well as a new approach to development that guarantees decent work and access to social services, while also promoting peasant cooperatives towards autonomous industrial development. This, in turn, requires an understanding of capitalism as obsolete and a national project of delinking from globalization, in the transition to socialism