[1][2] Murray reports Brass as being "dismissive of the cultural turn in peasant studies" and the rise of post-modern perspectives and his notion that this has been a conservative process and that it has lent support to neoliberalism.
[3] Born on 3 March 1946, Tom (Thomas Ferdinand Norman) Brass was educated at boarding schools run by the Dominicans (Blackfriars, Llanarth and Laxton), studied social sciences (sociology, anthropology) at the new universities (Essex, Sussex) and then taught these same subjects at the old ones (Durham, Cambridge).
3, 2013, p. 434) as ‘one of the United Kingdom’s leading Marxist scholars’, much of what Brass has published deals with two contentious and much-debated issues in the area of development studies: the link between unfree labour and capitalism, and the political impact of the ‘new’ populist postmodernism.
According to Brass, the ‘new’ populist postmodernism recuperated a specifically cultural dimension of ‘peasant-ness’, a discourse associated most powerfully with the Subaltern Studies project, formulated initially in the context of Asian historiography and latterly with regard to Latin American history.
For this reason, postmodern interpretations of agrarian mobilisations in Latin America and India nowadays insist that these are ‘new’ social movements, the defining characteristic of which is the non-class identity (religion, ethnicity, gender, regionalism, nationalism) deployed by their participants.