Rural proletariat

The rural proletariat, often referred to as the peasantry is the portion of the proletariat which lives outside urban areas.

Lenin's analysis of the Russian peasantry
According to Lenin, writing in 1905, there was a stratum of rich peasants that he characterized as the peasant bourgeoisie:"...in European Russia proper there is an entire stratum of well-to-do peasants (one and a half to two million households out of a total of about ten million). This stratum controls no less than half of all the implements of production and all the property owned by the peasants. It cannot exist without employing seasonal and day labourers. It is certainly hostile to serfdom, to the landlords, and to the bureaucracy, and is capable of becoming democratic, but still more certain is its hostility to the rural proletariat. Any attempt in an agrarian programme or in an agrarian policy to tone down or ignore this class antagonism is a conscious or unconscious departure from the socialist point of view."

"There can be only one solution to this problem: with the peasant bourgeoisie against all manner of serfdom and against the serf-owning landlords; with the urban proletariat against the peasant bourgeoisie and every other bourgeoisie—such is the “line” of the rural proletariat. and of its ideologists, the Social-Democrats. In other words: to support the peasantry and urge it on even to the point of seizing any seigniorial “property”, no matter how “sacred”, insofar as this peasantry acts in a revolutionary-democratic manner; to be wary of the peasantry, to organise separately from it, to be ready to combat it, insofar as this peasantry acts in a reactionary or anti-proletarian manner. Or, to put it still differently: aid to the peasant when his struggle with the landlord contributes to the development and strengthening of the democratic forces; neutrality towards the peasant when his struggle with the landlord is merely a matter of squaring accounts between two factions of the landowning class, a matter to which the proletariat and the democrats are indifferent."

Between the rich peasants and the landless rural proletariat dependent on selling their labour was a middle peasantry.

Globalization
Demand for biofuels, fiber, and food in the global economy has resulted in corporate efforts to expropriate land throughout the undeveloped world. In much of the undeveloped world the rural proletariat has no title, or weak title to the land they live on. Often title is in the state or in absentee landlords.