¹ Such exceptions, written mainly by political sociologists and political scientists rather than by specialists on communism include: Burks, R. V., The Dynamics of Communism in Eastern Europe (Princeton: University Press, 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tarrow, Sidney, Peasant Communism in Southen Italy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar; Allardt, Erik, “Social Sources of Finnish Communism: Traditional and Emerging Radicalism,” International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 5 (1964)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dogan, Mattei, “Political Cleavage and Social Stratification in France and Italy,” in Lipset, S. M. and Rokkan, Stein (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Richard, Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Thomas H. Greene, “The Communist Electorate in France: Testing the Protest Hypothesis,” unpublished manuscript.

² Stimulating as it is, Adam Ulam‘s attempt to explain Marxism as the “natural ideology” of a society in transition from a pre-industrial to a modern state, provides scant help in explaining the uneven distribution of communism in the developing countries. See Ulam, Adam, The Unfinished Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1964)Google Scholar, particularly chapter 1. The same is true for concepts such as that of “mass society” popularized by William Kornhauser.

³ Obviously the mere act of voting for the Communists does not by itself signify that the individual peasant is prepared to launch a guerrilla war or to engage in acts of violence. In some cases, and in some areas of India, a vote for the communists may merely indicate a protest against other parties. Nevertheless, the rural areas of India in which the Communists are strong are precisely the areas in which, during the past two years, land seizures by poor peasants are increasing.

⁴ The accuracy of Indian census data has been questioned by some writers, most vigorously by Daniel, and Thorner, Alice in Land and Labour in India (London: 1962)Google Scholar. Nevertheless, there is rather broad agreement between the Thorners' classification of all Indian districts into economic regions and that classification scheme adopted by the former Indian Census Commissioner, Asok Mitra, whose categories are employed here. See Mitra, A. (ed.), Levels of Regional Development in India (New Delhi: Government of India, 1961), Vol. I Google Scholar, Part I-A (ii) of Census of India, 1961. Mitra followed, and to some extent relied on, similar attempts by others, notably Spate, O. H. K. and Learmonth, A. T. A., India and Pakistan, A General and Regional Geography (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1954)Google Scholar. There is, in fact, a surprisingly large amount of agreement between a number of geographers and economists on which Indian districts should be included in which economic regions. Thorner himself calls attenton to the “striking similarity of the three sets of regions” as defined by the Indian Government‘s Rural Credit Survey, an unpublished monograph by Chen Han-seng and the 1951 Census. See Land and Labour, op. cit., p. 41.

⁵ A characteristic of many area specialists is an overemphasis on cultural variables in explaining political or social phenomena. One satisfactory attempt to develop a mode of analysis that combines both cultural and socioeconomic perspectives is “cultural ecology”: see Steward, Julian, Theory of Culture Change (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1955)Google Scholar; and Geertz, Clifford, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968)Google Scholar, particularly chapter 1. The attempt is to disaggregate “global” cultural variables and to locate the “cultural core,” that is, those aspects of the culture “in which functional ties with the natural setting are most explicit….” Geertz, op. cit., p. 7. Similarly, there must be an attempt to locate those selected features of the setting which have functional significance for human adaptation.

⁶ Of the 60 districts in India with the highest percentage of agricultural laborers, 30 are in South India, none are in North India and only one is in Central India. Of the 60 districts highest in “pure” tenancy, the South has 19, a distribution not equaled in any other region. Of the 60 districts which have the largest numbers of owners holding less than one acre of land, the South has 21, the North has only three and the West has only two. The average size of a cultivated holding in Kerala is 1.8 acres, in Rajasthan 16 acres, and in the Punjab 13.8 acres.

⁷ I want to acknowledge the advice and help of Joseph Lopatin in preparing my data for computer programming and for advice in interpreting the results.

⁸ See in particular Linz, Juan, “The Eight Spains” in Merritt, Richard L. and Rokkan, Stein (eds.), Comparing Nations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

⁹ The size of Iandholdings by district can be found in the Household Economic Tables, Part III of the 1961 Census. Data on wage earners and on the total numbers of agricultural laborers can be found in General Economic Tables, Part II-B (ii). Figures on landvalue were kindly furnished to me by P. S. Sharma. It should be noted that figures on agricultural laborers are not the same as those on “hired attached workers” in the statistical volume edited by Mitra, Levels, op. cit. For the total number of agricultural laborers, “casual” laborers must be added to “attached” laborers. The study by Morris-Jones and Das Gupta apparently uses the figures for “attached” laborers only. Also their data does not include figures for holding less than one acre or for land-value, neither of which are included in the volume edited by Mitra. The results of that pioneering study in the ecological analysis of Indian electoral data are therefore unfortunately not comparable with those reported here. See Morris-Jones, W. H. and Gupta, B. Das, “India‘s Political Areas: Interim Report on an ecological investigation,” Asian Survey (June 1969)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ For a stimulating discussion of the importance of a “natural basis of respect” for the landowner, see Moore, Barrington Jr., Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), particularly pp. 470–471 Google Scholar. On the importance of a knowledge of alternatives, and for many other shrewd insights into peasant political behavior based on the interpretation of a large amount of voting data, see the unpublished manuscript of Juan Linz, “Patterns of Land Tenure and Division of Labor and Politics,” undated.

¹¹ This important insight I first came across in Stinchcombe, Arthur, “Agricultural Enterprise and Rural Class Relations,” in Bendix, Reinhard and Lipset, S. M. (eds.), Class, Status and Power (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

¹² See Moore, op. cit.

¹³ Stinchcombe, op. cit.

¹⁴ For much interesting information on tenancy and land patterns in India, as well as for a discussion of what classifications were used in the 1961 census, see Sharma, P. S., “A Study of the Structural and Tenurial Aspects of Rural Economy in the Light of 1961 Census,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics (New Delhi, Oct.-Dec. 1965)Google Scholar; also by the same author, “Patterns of Land Concentration,” The Economic Weekly (Bombay: Dec. 11, 1965)Google ScholarPubMed and “Agricultural Working Force and Cropping Pattern in the Light of 1961 Census,” Agricultural Situation in India (New Delhi: 1963)Google ScholarPubMed. Tenants in India can be divided into several categories. There is, first of all, an important distinction between “occupancy” and “nonoccupancy” tenants, depending on whether they have permanent and heritable rights to the land at one extreme or are tenants “at will” on the other who negotiate yearly agreements with the owners, often orally, and so have little protection against eviction. Tenants can also be divided into share or cash tenants depending on whether they pay their rent in kind or in cash. Generally, occupancy tenants pay cash rents and nonoccupancy tenants are sharecroppers. See Kotovsky, G., Agrarian Reforms in India (New Delhi: People‘s Publishing House, 1966), p. 136 Google Scholar. Finally, according to Sharma‘s work on tenancy, op. cit., the 1961 Indian Census, which he helped prepare, divided tenants into “pure” and “mixed” tenants, the distinction being that “… in the case of pure tenancy holdings, the cultivated area is held from private persons or institutions whereas in the case of mixed tenancy holdings, it is partly owned or held from Government and partly from private persons or institutions.” Throughout the text of this article I make little distinction between sharecropping and other forms of tenancy because sharecropping—or nonoccupancy tenancy—is the predominant form of tenancy in India and because no numerical breakdowns distinguishing sharecropping from other forms of tenancy are available.

¹⁵ The extent of absentee ownership in India is a matter on which no statistical data is available. It is my impression, and that of several informed observers to whom I have talked, including Gunnar Myrdal, that absenteeism is considerable.

¹⁶ Stinchcombe, op. cit., Linz, Patterns, op. cit., and Hamilton, op. cit., all present a variety of evidence from voting studies and historical surveys to suggest that sharecropping is the most conflict-ridden form of land tenure. Dogan‘s work on the Italian Communist Party shows that two-thirds of the tenant farmers in Italy are concentrated in three regions—Emilia, Tuscany, and Umbria—and these three regions give the Communist and socialist parties more than half their votes (Dogan, op. cit., p. 146). According to consider able data in Linz, op. cit., the French left also obtains a disproportionately large share of its votes from sharecropping (metayage) regions. And, as I shall suggest further on, one common denominator of communist strength in India, the Philippines and Indonesia, is tenancy in densely populated rural areas.

¹⁷ Eric Wolf argues that in situations where owners maximize monetary returns not by improving the process of production but by collecting rent and interest payments from the poor peasants, such a system “quickly leads to attempts to turn the various titles to income into debt titles.” Wolf, Eric, Peasants (New York: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966), p. 55 Google Scholar. He calls this “rent capitalism.” Stanislav Andreski has something very similar in mind when he speaks of the “parasitic involution of capitalism” in areas where the owner derives his income from leasing land to tenants. This, he contends, discourages structural breakthroughs in productivity. See Andreski, Stanislaw, Parasitism and Subversion (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966)Google Scholar, and The Uses of Comparative Sociology (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965)Google Scholar. On the other hand, Stanislaw Wellisz, an economist at Columbia University, contends that such arguments make little economic sense because rent is capitalized.

¹⁸ Tawney, R. H., Land and Labor in China (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Linz, op. cit., cites a study by Diaz del Moral which observes that the most politically conscious laborers in Cordoba, Spain during the 1930s were those laborers who were also small holders and thus had a minimal amount of economic independence. Petras and Zeitlin also report that in Chile it was the “free laborers” not directly attached to the land, and consequently less directly under the dominance of the landowners, who were one of the most radical groups in the countryside. See Petras, James and Zeitlin, Maurice (eds.), Latin America, Reform or Revolution (New York: Fawcett, 1968), p. 240 Google Scholar.

²⁰ Rice and cotton are the only two crop areas of India in which the proportion of agricultural laborers to cultivators exceeds 40%.

²¹ Linz, Patterns, op. cit.

²² Landsberger, Henry, “The Role of Peasant Movements and Revolts in Development: An Analytical Framework,” Reprint Series, No. 236, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1968)Google Scholar.

²³ Siegfried, André, Tableau Politique de la France de l'Ouest sous la Troisième Répubiique (Paris: A. Colin, 1913)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Mitchell, Edward J., “Some Econometrics of the Huk Rebellion,” this Review (December 1969), pp. 1159–1171 Google Scholar.

²⁵ See an unpublished paper by Swanke, Wayne, “The Origins of Unrest in Central Luzon: a Case Study of Pampanga” (Columbia University: May 31, 1967)Google Scholar.

²⁶ Mitchell, Edward J., “The Significance of Land Tenure in the Vietnamese Insurgency,” Asian Survey (August 1967)Google Scholar; and “Inequality and Insurgency: A Statistical Study of South Vietnam,” World Politics (April 1968)Google ScholarPubMed.

²⁷ Both in analyzing the base of the Huks in the Philippines and in analyzing the base of the Viet Cong, Mitchell places an inordinate emphasis on the importance of coercion.

²⁸ Stanford Research Institute, Land Reform in Vietnam (Menlo Park, California: 1968), four volumesGoogle Scholar. For analyses based on the data, see Bredo, William, “Agrarian Reform in Vietnam: Vietcong and Government of Vietnam Strategies in Conflict,” Asian Survey (August 1970), 738–750 Google Scholar. In the same issue, see also Prosterman, Roy L., “Land-to-the-Tiller in South Vietnam: The Tables Turn,” pp. 751–764 Google Scholar.

²⁹ Prosterman, op. cit., p. 753.

³⁰ Bredo, op. cit., pp. 744, 739.

³¹ Prosterman, op. cit., p. 755.

³² Bredo, op. cit., pp. 743–744.

³³ Prosteiman, op. cit., pp. 755–756.

³⁴ Geertz, Clifford, Agricultural Involution (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 37 Google Scholar.

³⁵ Ibid.

³⁶ Sharma, “Patterns of Land Concentration,” op. cit.

³⁷ Geertz, op. cit., pp. 29–32.

³⁸ Clark, Colin and Haswell, M. R., The Economics of Subsistence Agriculture (New York: St. Martins Press, 1967)Google Scholar, chapter 16.

³⁹ The Indian economist Amartya Sen has proposed on theoretical grounds a connection between fertility, dense rural populations, and small holdings. The more fertile areas, because they have dense populations, have smaller-sized holdings. This observation seems borne out in India, as Table II indicates. In most regions of India, the largest size holdings are negatively correlated with irrigation and the smallest holdings are positively correlated. In the South and Center, there are very high correlations between irrigation and holdings less than 10 acres. In the North, there is a correlation between irrigation and holdings less than 15 acres. In all four of these regions, moreover, there is a high negative correlation between irrigation and holdings of more than 50 acres.

⁴⁰ The major peasant uprising in India during the past 25 years, that in Telengana, also took place in a “feudal” area, the former princely state of Hyderabad. At the time of the uprising in 1946–48, Telengana was ruled by an autocratic Nizam in alliance with Muslim feudal lords. Most of the underlying peasantry were Hindus. In the critical post-independence years, the Nizam maneuvered to avoid absorption into the new Indian union and this provided the Communists with the opportunity to lead what was in part a struggle of Hindu and Muslim peasants against Muslim overlords, and in part a struggle against the Nizam for accession of largely Hindu Hyderabad to largely Hindu India.

Until mid-1948, the Communist-led peasant movement supported accession to the new Indian Union in defiance of the Nizam. At that time, the peak of its popularity, during which the Communists claimed control of 2000 “liberated” villages, the Telengana movement was, therefore, in large degree a national movement as well as a peasant uprising. The pro-Indian, “national” aspect of the uprising was crucial. Proof of this was the quick collapse of the movement once the Indian army moved into Hyderabad in 1948 and the Communists moved into an alliance with the Nizam against both accession and the new government of India. Once the Communists became “anti-India,” they quickly faded. Nevertheless, as a result of their earlier leadership of the peasant movement in Telengana, the Communists have to this day retained a strong traditional base in that area. It is my impression, however, that that base is not growing as speedily as the Communist base in the deltaic, coastal and irrigated areas of India. In any case, all this suggests that even in areas of large “feudal” owners, mobilization of the poor peasantry by the Communists is possible if there is a combination of deep-seated grievances against the big landowners and a “national” issue.