We can acknowledge that the majority of the world’s population may still be peasants and in those countries where they do make up the majority of the population perhaps recognize them as the main force for revolution if not the leading force. This doesn’t make them proletarian.
Terms like “proletarian” and “peasantry” aren’t just arbitrary terms, they’re scientific ones that correspond to the relationship of a social class to a particular mode of production.
The peasantry is a pre-capitalist social class that has survived into the modern day. Though the peasantry is often extremely poor, they are defined by access to their own means of production, even if these are very meager.
The proletariat on the other hand is a class completely stripped of ownership to the means of production, completely expropriated, and reduced to a mere part of another’s means of production. This is why Marx said that the proletarians “have nothing to lose but their chains.”
The proletariat depends on the sale of its labor power to survive, while the peasantry depends on its own means of production.
There is also a semi-proletariat: a transitional class that sells its labor power part time but still retains partial access to its own means of production. This class is growing as the capitalist relations of production become more established in the developing world.
Defending the meaning of these terms isn’t chauvinism against the world’s peasant masses, it’s defending the science of Marxism against very aggressive revisionist attacks against it that seek to redefine what social classes even are as of late.
