The Difficult but Not Impossible Defeating of Right-Wing Populism and the Exploration of a Socialist Future

Both in the past and at present, pro-capitalist, right-wing or even fascist movements and political parties have often found support from rural communities. Yet there is nothing inherently conservative in rural politics: history has also shown how working people in the countryside—peasants, landless labourers, and others—joined the proletariat and other social forces at the barricades and in the trenches during anti-feudal or socialist revolutions, and anti-colonial national liberation struggles. Key questions that scholars have grappled with during the past century include how and why such radical transformations happened from one society to another, and with what implications, and which strata of the working people in the countryside were the most open to such revolutionary projects