Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2015
The characterization of agrarian structures in contemporary underdeveloped countries has been haunting social scientists for a long time. As in Latin America and India, from the late sixties onwards a strong controversy emerged among Marxists in Turkey concerning the question of why capitalism had not transformed rural structures in Turkey (J. Harris, 1982; R. L. Harris, 1978; Aydın 1986). The question of capitalist transformation of the countryside occupied the minds of classical Marxist thinkers like Kautsky, Lenin, Luxembourg at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.