Stephen Kotkin

They're thrown out by the right.

And so the traditionalism of the peasants, where they believe in God, they believe in law and order,

is overriding because they already have a lot of the land in comparison to their Russian or Chinese counterparts.

And so they can be part of the forces of order.

And so you can get fascism in Central Europe, you can get the right-wing dictatorships in Central Europe, the forces of order destroying the left, whereas you get the leftist dictatorships in the giant peasant societies where you don't quite have...

the distribution of land.

Now, the peasants are complaining about land distribution in Italy and Germany, don't get me wrong, but relative to Russia and China, they're doing well.

So then you think about the Mexican case, the Iranian case, the Portuguese case, all of which are peasant societies as well.

So there's how you integrate farmers.

The whole world order rests on the back of farmers.

How much farmers till...

means how rich or poor your country is.

Whether you have a surplus, as we call it, that the farmers can sell on the market after they consume what they need for their family's purposes or not, tells you how much wealth you have to then build an army, build modern industry, etc.

So the world order rests on these hardworking farmers

predominant in the population peasantries, and in some ways the political system doesn't derive in deterministic fashion from them,

Politics still matters, and politics is never reducible to social relations.

But failure to master or mastery of the social relations of the peasant land question is fundamental in some of the political outcomes.

So the politicians have to be good at managing the peasantry's integration into that society where you're trying to get an order in the mass age of

You're beyond where just the court society at Versailles, the czarist court in St.

Petersburg.