Marxism and the Agrarian Question
The leading thinkers of Marxism stressed how important it was to govern in partnership with the peasantry. When communist states imposed collectivization by force, the results were disastrous.
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels didn’t have much to say about agriculture in The Communist Manifesto. And what little they did say has often led to confusion. Take one famous passage from the opening section:
The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
That final biting phrase, drawn from Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation, has long since taken on a life of its own. But as Hal Draper pointed out, it was based on a mistranslation of the German term idiotismus: “In the nineteenth century, German still retained the original Greek meaning of forms based on the word idiotes: a private person, withdrawn from public (communal) concerns, apolitical in the original sense of isolation from the larger community.”
In this original sense of the term, Draper noted, what the rural population had to be saved from was not a state of abject stupidity but rather “the privatized apartness of a life-style isolated from the larger society: the classic stasis of peasant life.” Whether or not this was an accurate depiction of the peasant’s condition, it certainly wasn’t meant to be an insult.
Toward the end of the Manifesto’s first section, Marx and Engels referred to the peasantry as one of the social groups doomed to disappear in the face of capitalist development:
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry. . . . If they are revolutionary, they are so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
Marx attached great importance to the concluding part of this passage. When the two factions of the German socialist movement united on the basis of the Gotha Program in 1875, he vehemently criticized a sentence in the program that claimed “the emancipation of labor must be the work of the working class, in relation to which all other classes are only one reactionary mass.” He reminded his German comrades of the Manifesto’s assertion that peasants and members of the lower-middle class could become revolutionary “in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat,” and he asked them pointedly, “Did we proclaim to the artisans, small manufacturers, etc., and peasants during the last elections: in relation to us, you, together with the bourgeoisie and feudal lords, form one reactionary mass?”
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his reflections on the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution in France from 1848 to 1851, Marx served up another memorable turn of phrase when he suggested that “the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of isomorphous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.” The line comes from a longer discussion of France’s rural population, which comprised the vast majority of those who lived within its borders. In England, the pioneer of industrial capitalism, two-fifths of the population already lived in towns of at least five thousand people by 1850; in France, the equivalent figure was less than 15 percent.
Marx believed that the social condition of the French peasantry, who had become smallholders in the wake of the revolution half a century earlier, prevented them from developing a sense of collective identity:
The small peasant proprietors form an immense mass, the members of which live in the same situation but do not enter into manifold relationships with each other. Their mode of operation isolates them instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. This isolation is strengthened by the wretched state of France’s means of communication and by the poverty of the peasants.
For Marx, this social landscape accounted for the landslide victory of Napoleon III, nephew of the postrevolutionary emperor, in the 1848 presidential election. He did go on to qualify this description of the peasantry as a class that was fundamentally incapable of independent political action: “Three years of hard rule by the parliamentary republic had freed some of the French peasants from the Napoleonic illusion and revolutionized them, if only superficially, but they were violently suppressed by the bourgeoisie whenever they started to move.”
The Eighteenth Brumaire describes the economic forces bearing down upon the peasantry in the middle of the nineteenth century, as “the urban usurer replaced the feudal lord; the mortgage on the land replaced its feudal obligations; bourgeois capital replaced aristocratic landed property.” According to Marx, this meant that peasant interests were “no longer consonant with the interests of the bourgeoisie, as they were under Napoleon, but in opposition to those interests, in opposition to capital.” The French smallholders would now “find their natural ally and leader in the urban proletariat, whose task is the overthrow of the bourgeois order.”
Trains and Pushcarts
If this was the picture Marx painted of agrarian class relations in France, which had experienced sweeping land redistribution after the revolution of 1789, what about the countries where the big landowners still held sway? Marx and Engels took a particular interest in the land question as it overlapped with the two national movements for which they had the greatest sympathy: those of Poland and Ireland.
Speaking at a meeting in February 1848 to commemorate the Kraków uprising of 1846, Marx commended the Polish revolutionary leaders for recognizing that “there could be no democratic Poland without the abolition of all feudal rights, and without an agrarian movement which would transform the peasants from landowners forced to pay tribute into free, modern landowners.”
Later that year, Engels made the same argument during a debate on Poland in the Frankfurt assembly:
The vast agricultural lands between the Baltic and the Black Sea can only be freed from patriarchal-feudal barbarism by an agrarian revolution which will transform the serfs and the peasants owing compulsory labor services into free landed proprietors, a revolution which will be identical with the French revolution of 1789 in the country districts.
Writing in 1870, Marx spoke about the urgent need for an agrarian revolution in Ireland, where “the land question has up till now been the exclusive form which the social question has taken.” He believed that it would be much easier to strike a blow against Britain’s landed aristocracy in Ireland than on its home turf, since the ownership of land was “a question of existence, a question of life and death for the majority of the Irish people,” as well as being “inseparable from the national question.”
The “agrarian revolution” that Marx and Engels considered vital for Poland and Ireland would not be a socialist one, although Marx did hope that Irish independence and its impact on the aristocracy would precipitate the overthrow of the social order in Britain. What role did they expect peasants to play in the transition from capitalism to socialism? When the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin accused him of being hostile to the peasantry, Marx responded in a set of notes on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy that he drew up in 1874:
Where the peasant exists in the mass as private proprietor, where he even forms a more or less considerable majority, as in all states of the west European continent, where he has not disappeared and been replaced by the agricultural wage-laborer, as in England, the following cases apply: either he hinders each workers’ revolution, makes a wreck of it, as he has formerly done in France, or the proletariat (for the peasant proprietor does not belong to the proletariat, and even where his condition is proletarian, he believes himself not to) must as government take measures through which the peasant finds his condition immediately improved, so as to win him for the revolution; measures which will at least provide the possibility of easing the transition from private ownership of land to collective ownership, so that the peasant arrives at this of his own accord, from economic reasons.
Marx insisted that it was vital not to “hit the peasant over the head” — for example, by “proclaiming the abolition of the right of inheritance or the abolition of his property.” Such measures would only be possible in a situation where “the capitalist tenant farmer has forced out the peasants, and where the true cultivator is just as good a proletarian, a wage-laborer, as is the town worker.” Although he warned against any move to deprive the peasants of land they already possessed, Marx also rejected “the enlargement of the peasant allotment simply through peasant annexation of the larger estates, as in Bakunin’s revolutionary campaign.”
By 1894, Engels was keen to address the land question as a problem for the rising socialist movements in France and Germany. Like Marx, he emphasized the importance of avoiding coercion in dealing with the small peasant, who he defined as a farmer in possession of “a patch of land no bigger, as a rule, than he and his family can till, and no smaller than can sustain the family”:
When we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation), as we shall have to do in the case of the big landowners. Our task relative to the small peasant consists, in the first place, in effecting a transition of his private enterprise and private possession to cooperative ones, not forcibly but by dint of example and the proffer of social assistance for this purpose.
Engels assumed that peasant agriculture was doomed in the face of capitalist development, as big farms would be more efficient and make better use of technology. The socialist movement should, he argued, offer them “the opportunity of introducing large-scale production themselves” instead of seeking to preserve the current pattern of landholding: “Capitalist large-scale production is absolutely sure to run over their impotent antiquated system of small production as a train runs over a pushcart.”
Peasants and Revolution
Marx and Engels made these comments in short polemical articles or in works that were primarily concerned with other issues. It was the so-called pope of Marxism, Karl Kautsky, who published a full-length book named The Agrarian Question in 1899. As he discussed the development of farming under capitalism, Kautsky raised doubts about the idea that small-scale production was necessarily doomed: “After a certain point, the advantages of the larger farm begin to be overtaken by the disadvantages of distance, and any further extension of the land area will reduce the profitability of the land.” Although he still believed that big agricultural units could, as a general rule, make better use of technology, he painted a picture of mutual interdependence between small and large farms, with the latter relying on the former as a source of labor power.
When the first English translation of The Agrarian Question finally appeared in 1988, sociologists Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin praised Kautsky for recognizing the ways in which the capitalist system could incorporate forms of peasant production that long preceded it, “even though he seemed to be troubled by the ambiguity of a phenomenon which was part of capitalism without being fully capitalist.” However, they argued that Kautsky had been mistaken in the long run when he spoke about the typical benefits of large-scale farming. Due to subsequent developments, it was no longer necessary to deploy teams of farm laborers in order to take advantage of modern agricultural techniques: “A family farm is not necessarily at any advantage over a large enterprise, but nor is it debarred from utilising new technology.”
Kautsky’s theoretical analysis of agriculture was rather more subtle than the political conclusions he drew from it. Like Engels, he rejected the idea of appealing to smallholders with a promise to maintain their position: “Nothing could be more dangerous and cruel than to awaken illusions amongst them as to the future of the small peasant farm.” Kautsky insisted that Social Democracy would at heart always be “a proletarian and an urban party, a party of economic progress” that could only aspire to obtain the neutrality of peasants rather than their active support in the struggle against capitalism.
Looking ahead to the period after taking power, he followed Marx and Engels in stressing the need for a socialist party to govern the countryside by consent:
In view of the interest which a socialist regime will have in the uninterrupted continuation of agricultural production, in view of the high social importance which the peasant population will attain, it is inconceivable that forcible expropriation would be chosen as the means for educating the peasantry into the advantages of more advanced farming. And should some branches of agriculture or regions exist in which the small establishment remains more advantageous than the large, there will be not the slightest reason to force them to conform to the model set by the large farm.
In sketching out this political vision, Kautsky had in mind countries like Germany, where he was the principal theoretician of the Social Democratic movement. The importance of agriculture in the German economy was receding during the final decades of the nineteenth century, as it became a predominantly urban and industrial society. When Otto von Bismarck founded the German Empire in 1871, two-thirds of its population could be found in rural areas; by 1910, the figure was 40 percent.
In Russia, on the other hand, the vast majority still lived in the countryside, despite industrial growth in cities like Saint Petersburg and Moscow. When the first all-Russian census was conducted in 1897, less than 14 percent of the tsar’s subjects lived in towns and cities. The peasants of the Russian Empire, most of whom were grain producers, had only been liberated from serfdom in 1861.
In his later years, Marx discussed the idea that the rural commune, or mir, could supply the basis for a transition to socialism in Russia without a phase of capitalist development in the countryside. Marx believed that this might be possible so long as a Russian revolution converged with revolution in the rest of Europe. However, his Russian disciples, such as Georgi Plekhanov, insisted that Russia would have to become fully capitalist in town and countryside alike before socialism was on the agenda. The two factions of Russian Social Democracy, Bolshevik and Menshevik, both looked to the growing industrial proletariat as the main revolutionary force in Russian society, while the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs), descended from the populist movement of the late nineteenth century, had a stronger base among the peasantry.
The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 saw the biggest waves of rural unrest since the uprising led by Yemelyan Pugachev in the eighteenth century. In contrast with Pugachev’s rebellion, the challenge to big landowners and the Romanov state now converged with an urban revolutionary movement. It was this combination of social forces that brought down the tsarist regime in 1917. When the provisional government dragged its feet over land reform, it alienated the peasantry and opened the way for a second revolution in October of that year.
The Bolsheviks had no intention of making the same mistake and acted quickly to facilitate the redistribution of land. By 1919, eighty-one million acres — 96.8 percent of all agricultural land — had been transferred to peasants. About 86 percent, notes historian Ronald Grigor Suny, held middle-sized plots of roughly eleven to twenty-one acres. Fewer than 6 percent held plots smaller than that, while just 2 percent had bigger holdings.
The agrarian revolution destroyed the economic base of the old ruling class and won peasant support for the new government, at least temporarily.
Coercion and Calamity
Bolshevik popularity wouldn’t last for long. In May 1918, the Soviet government imposed what it called a “food dictatorship,” under which the agricultural surplus above a fixed level would be confiscated. In theory, the peasants were to be compensated in the form of money, goods, or credit; in practice, such compensation rarely materialized. Peasants often responded by hiding their grain or taking up arms. The Bolsheviks tried to mobilize poor peasants against richer ones, whom they referred to as kulaks, but to little avail.
When they took power in the final months of 1917, the Bolsheviks initially formed a coalition with the left wing of the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, the Left SRs left the government in the first half of 1918 because of their opposition to the Brest-Litovsk Treaty that ended the war with Germany. If the Bolsheviks had been able to preserve their alliance with a party that had stronger roots in the countryside, perhaps it would have served as a constraint on coercive methods that proved to be counterproductive even on their own terms.
As Steve Smith observes, there were still hard limits on what was possible under the circumstances:
Even if the Bolsheviks had not taken a single pud of grain from the peasants, the latter would still have had little incentive to produce more than was necessary for subsistence, since there were no manufactures to buy and money had become almost worthless. Even in Siberia, where Kolchak’s [counterrevolutionary] regime had far greater surpluses at its disposal and where there was no forced requisitioning, lack of manufactures, inflation, and chaos in the monetary system led peasants to withhold grain and to cut back their sown areas.
Smith notes that, in spite of peasant hostility toward the Bolsheviks, they were still “certainly seen as the lesser of two evils” in comparison with their White opponents, who wanted to roll back the land seizures of 1917 and after: “Indeed it was the willingness of the rural population to swing behind the Bolsheviks whenever a White takeover threatened which meant that so long as the civil war lasted, endemic rural unrest did not pose a serious threat to Bolshevik power.”
After the defeat of the Whites, the Bolsheviks faced more than fifty major peasant uprisings from Ukraine to Siberia. They suppressed the uprisings by force, but this rural unrest was one of the main factors prompting them to adopt the New Economic Policy in 1921. Vladimir Lenin defended the policy of grain requisitioning as an unfortunate necessity, “forced on us by extreme want, ruin and war,” but insisted that a new approach was required as the Soviet system consolidated itself:
We are still so ruined and crushed by the burden of war (which was on but yesterday and could break out anew tomorrow, owing to the rapacity and malice of the capitalists) that we cannot give the peasant manufactured goods in return for all the grain we need. Being aware of this, we are introducing the tax in kind, that is, we shall take the minimum of grain we require (for the army and the workers) in the form of a tax and obtain the rest in exchange for manufactured goods.
Broadly speaking, this gradualist thinking guided Soviet agricultural policy until the late 1920s, when Joseph Stalin imposed a drastic change of course after defeating his opponents in the Bolshevik party. The sudden rush toward collectivization led to famine in Ukraine and Kazakhstan that claimed the lives of millions. It depressed agricultural production and living standards in the countryside for a generation, entrenching peasant hostility to the Soviet state and its collective farms. Yet it was this calamitous model that Stalin offered to the international communist movement as the only viable path toward agricultural transformation. In Eastern Europe, Soviet-backed regimes embarked on schemes of coercive collectivization from the late 1940s on, many of which were subsequently abandoned.
Rural preponderance in China at the time of the 1949 revolution was even greater than had been the case in Russia three decades earlier, with less than 10 percent of the population living in towns and cities. The Communists came to power by organizing a peasant-based army to fight their Nationalist opponents with the promise of land redistribution as the key enticement. They kept their promise after the revolution, but the land reform program had barely been completed when Mao Zedong pushed for a crash industrialization drive to be funded by exploitation of the countryside. The result was another catastrophic famine. After Mao’s death, China also moved away from the Soviet-inspired agricultural model.
The experiments in farming launched by Stalin and his disciples were a case of throwing away the baby while gulping down the bathwater. They took from classical Marxism the assumption that large-scale farming was necessarily more efficient but disregarded all the warnings from Marx, Engels, and Kautsky about the need to win over the peasantry instead of relying on brute force.
An Urban World
Since the first half of the twentieth century, there has been a profound shift in the balance between town and countryside around the world. Now 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a figure that the United Nations expects to rise to 68 percent by 2050. Urbanization is no longer confined to regions like Europe and North America; two-thirds of China’s population is urban, along with almost nine in ten Brazilians. Africa is expected to be more urban than rural by 2033.
While peasant revolutions of the kind that took place in China or Vietnam during the twentieth century are no longer on the agenda, this does not mean that struggles on and over the land have lost their political significance. Since the turn of the century, the coca growers’ union in Bolivia, Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, and the Indian farmers who pushed back against Narendra Modi’s neoliberal farm laws have all demonstrated the continued vitality of social mobilizations in the countryside.
If there is any contemporary lesson to be drawn from the history of Marxist thinking about the land question, it is surely to remember the vital importance of properly studying what is happening in the countryside instead of trying to impose abstract formulas on it, and of listening attentively to the demands and needs of the people who actually live there.