Note C Marx, Engels and the Peasant

NOTE C MARX, ENGELS AND THE PEASANT T HE attitude of Marx and of Marxists towards the peasantry has been the subject of a vast amount of controversy and misunderstanding. Thc core of Marxism was the analysis of the transition from capitalism to socialism. Capitalism was the crcation of the bourgeoisie, theruling dass of capitalist society; the socialist revolution which would be primarily the work of the proletariat would usher in a future society in which all dasses would hc merged and finally disappear. The peasantry as a dass was, on the other hand, a characteristic social form of the feudal order, and belonged neither to the world of bourgeois capitalism nor to that of proletarian socialism. When Marx, in the first volume of Cal'ital, embarked on his analysis of the capitalist order, using what was admittedly an abstract model and not the picture of any existing society, he found no place for the peasant or the small craftsman: these were not typical figures of capitalism, but incidental survivals of an obsolete or obsolescent social order. It was an essential part of this view that the peasantry, hearing the stigmata of its feudal origin, was a hackward element in contemporary society - back ward in relation not only to the capitalist bourgeoisie, hut also a fortiori to the proletariat. It followed that, where capitalism was most advanced, the peasantry as a dass was already in decay. In thc Commllnist Ma7'ifesto Marx, thinkillg primarily in terms of western Europe, treated the peasantry as doomed, Iike other petty bourgeois groups (he lumped together CI the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan and the pe asant "), to disappear in the advancing torrent of large-scale capitalism. In the meanwhile all these groups were con servative, even reactionary, trying .. to roll back the wheel of history " : If by chance they are revolutionary, they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future, interests; they desert their own stand point to place themselves at that of the proletariat. Flocon had warned Engels that II million small French farmers were CI passionate property-owncrs" and sworn enemies of anything that smacked of communism.1 The diagnosis of the conservative and I Marx i Engels, Sochintni)'a. xxi, 91. 385 THR RCONOMIC ORDER PT. reactionary character of the peasantry seeme'd to be confirmed every where in western Europe, and notably in France, by the experience of 1848, when the peasants either remained passive spectators of the revolution or actively assisted the I!.uthorities to crush the revolt of the . proletariat. In eastern Europe(Germany occupying an intermediate position between west and east) the peasantry was in a still less advanced stage of the historical process. Down to 1848 its feudal status remained almost intact; and the bourgeois revolution which would sweep away the last strongholds of feudalism stilllay in the future. But here a grave dilemma arose. This revolution could not hope to succeed if the brunt of it fell exclusively on the bourgeoisie and proletariat, which became weaker and less numerous the further one went east; it could not hope to succeed unless it were also an agrarian revolution and were actively supported by the peasants. In the Communist Manifesto Marx's vision. was concentrated mainly on western Europe; but in the short last section devoted to the relations of the communists to CI various existing opposition parties ", communist support was offered both to the " agrarian reformers" in the United States and to the Polish party which CI insists on agrarian revolution as the prime condition of national emancipation". A few months later Marx stated the principle still more clearly: The great agricultural countries between the Baltic and Black Seas can save themselves from patriarchal-feudal barbarism only by way of an agrarian revolution which would convert the serf or bonded peasants into free proprietors - a revolution precisely similar to that which occurred in 1789 in the French countryside. 1 Thus, where the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, severally or jointly, were too weak to complete the bourgeois revolution and the overthrow of feudalism, it was legitimate for communists to give their support to peasant parties making the revolution in the name of individual peasant ownership, even though this remained .. an agrarian form seemingly opposed to any kind of communism ".~ The distinction between the policies to be followed in countries where the bourgeois revolution had already been achieved and in countries where it had still to be achieved was perfectly logical. But it was not free from embarrassment when it involved offering to the peasants of eastern Europe the privileges of peasant ownership which the peasants of western Europe were descrihed as CI barbarians " for seeking to defend. I Karl Marx - Friedrich Engels: Historisch - Kritische Gesamtausgabe, I" Teil, vii, 302. j IbM. vi, 12. IV MARX, ENGELS AND THE PEASANT It was against this difficult I:>ackground that the notion of a revolu tionary alliance between proletariat and peasantry first began to take shape. Engels ended a long article of 1850 on the German peasant war of 1525, fuH of implied and explicit analogies, with a description of the fate of the German petty bourgeoisie in 1848: The rnass of the nation - the pett)' bourgeoisie, craftsmen and peasants - was left to its fate by its hltherto natural ally the bour geoisie, as being too revolutionary, and in places also by the proletariat, as not being yet sufficiently advanced; shattered in its turn into fragments, it was reduced to nullity and stood in opposition to· its neighbours on both Right and Left. 1 This passage plainly suggested that the peasantry, deserted by the bourgeoisie, would advance towards alliance with the proletariat: it also contained the germ of the idea, later to bear fruit, of a split between those peasants who would ding to the bourgeois alliance and those who would join the proletariat. Marx and Engels never abandoned their belief in the large-scale organization of production, in agriculture as in industry, as an essential condition of socialism; and it followed that the peasants could become the allies of the proletariat in the socialist revolution only when they· had been weaned from their faith in peasant ownership. In Germany this stage had not yet been reached. A much quoted passage of a letter to Engels of 1856, in wh ich Marx wrote that everything in Germany turned on being able " to back the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the peasant war ",2 ~hows that he still reckoned Germany among the predominantly peasant countries of eastern Europe, where the bourgeois revolution against the feudal order had not yet been completed, and where the proletarian minority might thus lend temporary tactical support to a programme of peasant pro prietorship.3 Marx and Engels passed the remainder of their Iives after 1850 in the one country where the peasant question had lost its acuteness with the process of wholesale industrialization and the conversion of what I Marx i Engels, Sochineni)'a, viii, 197. I Karl Marx - Friedrich E",el,: Historisch - Kritische Gt,amtaul,abe, 111· Teil, ii, 131-132 (the wordl quoted are in English in the original). J On the large Prussian eltate. cultivated by agricultural labourers in semi serf conditions thc situation was once again different jEngels wrote in a letter of 1865 that" in such a predominantly agricultural country as Prussia, it is mean to attack the bourgeoi.ie exc1usively in the name of the industrial proletariat and at the same time not to say a single word about the patriarchal big-stick exploita tion of the agricultural proletariat by the big feudal aristocracy .. • Here Engels al ready makes the jump from the feudal exploitation of serfato the capitali8t exploitation of a rural proletariat of wage-Iabourers (Marx i Engel., Sochin",;ya, xxiii, :&39). THE ECONOMIC ORDER PT. was left of the peasantry into a rural proletariat. Nor did practical possibilities of revolution in Europe arise to compel them to reconsider the tactical issue. The two decades which separated the final extinction of the conflagration of 1848 from the Paris commune registered no change in tI!eir attitude to the pe asant ; nor did the heroism of the Paris commune inspire the peasant rising wh ich alone might have saved it from defeat. But the impulse to a reconsideration of the peasant question in the last decade of Marx's life ca me from a more remote and unexpected source - Russia. It was towards the end of the eighteen-sixties that Marx and Engels became interested in Russian affairs, and learned the language in order to read Russian economic literature. The moment was an important turning-point in Russian history. In the eighteen-fifties a new current of thought - for the narcd1/iks were a group of intellectuals rather than an organized party - had arisen in Russia, combining the belief of the Slavophils in the peculiar destiny of Russia and her röle as a bringer of light to Europe with western socialist doctrines, mainly of a somewhat utopian brand. The most eonerete item in the narodnik crced was the conviction that the Russian peasant eommune with its system of communal ownership was essentially socialist and eapable of forming the basis of a future socialist order, so that Russia might indeed lead the rest of Europe on the road to socialism. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 did not destroy this belief. This measure was inspired by the impulse to modernize the Russian economy after the disasters of the Crimean War and, Iike the English enclosures, by the need to create areserve labour army for the industrialization of the eountry.

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