PARTISAN!

The following is the second part of Loren Goldner’s 2016 article on the agrarian question and theoretical underdevelopment in the Russian Revolution. We hope that it is of use to comrades, as we puzzle through the agrarian question and its relationship to the struggle for socialism today. I will allow Goldner himself to speak on his project.

Only in 2010 did the world’s rural population drop below 50 percent of the total. The great majority of those remaining in the countryside are petty-producer peasants, artisans and rural proletarian laborers. Considering only India and China, with close to 40 percent of the world’s population between them, it is clear that the “agrarian question,” on a world scale, remains central to any possible creation of a renewed communism. This is all the more urgent in light of the one million people a day who arrive from the countryside in the world’s cities, as capitalism increasingly makes their way of life unviable and draws them into a dubious future in the world’s shantytowns or China’s 270 million migrant workers.

To reconnect with the political and social realities of the world’s rural population, both historically and for today, in a project to create a viable, non-developmentalist Marxism for the world after Stalinism, Maoism and Third Worldism, also takes us back to another largely forgotten dimension of Marx: the critique of the separation of city and countryside as a fundamental alienation, the separation of the producers from their means of production in the 16th and 17th century as “the ” original alienation to be overcome in a future “activity as all-sided in its production as in its consumption,” Marx’s call for the “more even distribution of the population around the earth’s surface” (Communist Manifesto) when cities, owing their existence to the centralization of capital, can be superseded, and finally, and hardly last, the ever more pressing question of the environment.

Comrades in the Revolutionary Communist Organisation and elsewhere would do well to study the agrarian question today, beginning with an account of how the Marxist position on the agrarian question developing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

– Edith Fischer, Content Editor

Karl Kautsky’s 1899 book The Agrarian Question set down the “official Marxist” position on that subject for the world socialist movement prior to World War I. It is symptomatic of a whole, industry-centred sensibility that the book was largely forgotten within a decade, despite Marx’s earlier extensive comments on the agrarian world in volumes I and III of Capital and in Theories of Surplus Value, especially on the question of ground rent, and his insistence (against common coin on the left to this day) that there were three classes in society: capitalists (who live from profits), proletarians (who live from wages) and landlords (who live from ground rent). For Marx, as indicated in our preface, the violent separation “in fire and blood” of the English peasantry from its means of production, in the process of primitive accumulation, was the original separation to be overcome in communism, and the “more equal distribution of the population over the surface of the earth” (Communist Manifesto) would be the overcoming of the fundamental (and also largely forgotten) alienation between city and countryside.

Kautsky’s book was, among other things, a polemic (without mentioning names) against some right-wingers in the SPD such as the Bavarian members David and Vollmar, who already in the early 1890s (following the re-legalization of the party in 1890) were calling for a peasant program.

Kautsky became known as the “Torquemada” of the SPD on the agrarian question, whose message was that the workers’ movement had nothing to say to petty bourgeois peasants, a class doomed to disappear into the polarisation of a rural bourgeoisie and rural wage-labour proletariat. Peasants could at best look forward to being integrated into cooperatives after the working class seized power. A significant part of small peasant produce was for family consumption, and the sector was an important source of primitive accumulation for the system as a whole. In his early formulations, Kautsky strongly argued that in agriculture as in industry, bigger was better, and discounted the survivability of highly productive family farms. The task of socialists was to neutralise the peasantry as a social force, not to mobilise it.

Interestingly, the factions within the SPD on the question of a peasant program were not aligned in the typical left-to-right spectrum that emerged at the end of the 1890s in the “revisionism” debate or later. Left-wingers Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht both sided with Vollmar in advocating an agrarian program at the 1895 party congress, but the party supported Kautsky. Ferdinand Lassalle’s old formulation that all classes except workers are “one reactionary mass”—a view attacked in Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program —was also a backdrop to the discussion.

In the long run, Kautsky’s view of the inevitable disappearance of the smallholder peasant was refuted in the prospering modern farms of countries such as Austria and Denmark. It was far more problematic when Lenin applied it to Russia.

In the 1890s, Lenin shared Kautsky’s views on the peasants (and just about everything else). This is particularly curious, since he spent the years 1887–1893, (after his older brother’s execution for involvement in a plot to assassinate the Tsar), in several provincial towns where apparently the last survivors of the Populist and terrorist group Zemla i Volya (to whom Marx had been sympathetic in their years of peak activity 1878–1881), and Marxists mingled in rather comradely form. (It is significant that at this time, the term “Narodnik,” which later came to be known strictly and pejoratively as the term for a pro-peasant and subjective romantic, idealizing the commune and downplaying the advance of capitalism in Russia, originally meant anyone concerned with the affairs of the common people; only after the polemics of the last phase of Populism did it acquire its negative overtones.) Lenin, opposing even his mentor Plekhanov, distinguished himself during the famine of 1891–92 by his attacks on humanitarian attempts in “progressive” circles to help the stricken peasantry, reaffirming the supposedly Marxist position that the peasantry was a doomed social class and its disappearance should not be hindered, so that capitalism could complete its work.

This is especially significant because there is no doubt that Lenin had read deeply in the Russian Populist tradition, going back to the 1850s/1860s writings of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. According to different people who knew him personally, Lenin read Chernyshevsky’s proto-socialist realist novel What Is To Be Done? many times. The turgid, intentionally anti-aesthetic novel tells the story of young people of the generation of the 1860s who break with their bourgeois families to live communally, supporting themselves with Fourierist artisanal collectives. It inspired tens of thousands of readers to follow that model for their life choices in the stifling oppression of Tsarist Russia. Of further significance is the character Rakhmetov, a veritable prototype of Lenin, a full-time, austere revolutionary. The title of Lenin’s 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done? is an obvious homage to Cherneshevski’s book, however different the content.

Lenin spent several years in the late 1890s in Siberian exile, during which he wrote his first major work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which is often mistaken for his definitive views on the peasantry, whereas they later evolved considerably under the impact of events. Lenin in this book is at pains to show that, contrary to the lingering views of the Populists, capitalism had fully triumphed in Russia. The work is deeply flawed by a largely “market” (as opposed to value) view of what capitalism is. The mir, which at the time constituted four-fifths of all cultivated land in European Russia, is barely mentioned, since for Lenin it was merely a “juridical imposition” of the Tsarist state. The large foreign loans and rapid industrial development under the management of Finance Minister Witte are also unmentioned. Lenin winds up concluding that fully 51 percent of the Russian population consists of wage labour proletarians, and that the polarisation of rich peasant capitalists and rural labourers in the countryside is largely complete.

Lenin includes all peasants “almost” separated from their means of production in the category of poor peasants, meaning that any peasant with a tiny plot, owning a horse and a cow, barely supporting himself and his family, and elsewhere performing occasional wage labour a few months of the year, was a “proletarian.” The large estates, for Lenin, were rapidly becoming capitalist, when in fact the big landowners were alien to any idea of accumulation and profitability of capital. Lenin also sees “technological progress” where in fact the peasants were working with very simple, primitive implements long in use. If the manorial estates were largely capitalist, how to explain the restrictions on peasants’ mobility, tying them to one place, as had always been the case with serfs? Lenin’s view of capitalism was limited to the sphere of circulation alone. Already in his first text of 1893 (“New Economic Transformations in Peasant Life”) Lenin had asserted that the mir was no obstacle to capitalism:

We are in no way interested in the form of landed property among the peasants. Whatever the form, the relationship between the peasant bourgeoisie and the rural proletariat is always the same.

During this period, according to Chantal de Crisenoy, individual peasant plots were actually in decline and the communes retained all their importance.

As Crisenoy puts it:

By denying all specificity to the mir, Lenin shows himself more attached to preconceived ideas …than attentive to existing social relations… In his analysis, we find a total inversion of reality: everything that is a factor of primitive accumulation –mandatory services, taxes—is seen as a “survival” blocking the emergence of capitalism; everything that is an obstacle to the appearance of capital—the handicraft industries, the rural commune—is designated as being “its most profound basis.

In the 1897 article “What heritage do we renounce?” Lenin presents the mir as “a village of small agrarians”;

…when he wants to prove, against the populists, the existence of a working class in the midst of the obschina, he advances the concept of the “sedentary proletarian” and applies it to these same communal peasants… In 1899 he finds three times the number of wage workers generally accepted on the eve of 1914.

Lenin, however, was (with Trotsky) one of the few Russian Marxists who felt it necessary to devote any serious attention at all to the peasantry, against the dismissive attitude of Plekhanov. In 1902, several provinces rose up in response to famine, and Lenin at the same time drafted the first program addressed to the peasantry, “The Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy” adopted by the party in 1903. He remained ambivalent on the peasants’ future role, seeing them as either supporting a “revolutionary democratic” party or lining up with the “party of order.” Many Russian Social Democrats condemned the entire program, as Kautsky had done earlier in Germany. It called for cancellation of the debts from 1861, free use of land for the peasants, restitution to the peasants of the otrezki (choice strips of land that had been retained by the landowners in the 1861 reform), and cancellation of excessive rents and exploitative contracts. Lenin felt these changes would “expand the internal market,” and “raise peasant livings standards and hasten the development of capitalism in agriculture.

After the 1902 uprisings, Lenin wrote “To the Rural Poor,” still maintaining his earlier views on the dynamic in the countryside. But in the article, as Kingston-Mann points out,

the repartitional commune, which had provided the institutional framework for so many of the outbreaks, was completely ignored.

All in all,

Peasant action could only be ‘anti-feudal,’ and feudal survivals had to be the major concern of the Social Democratic agrarian program.

In 1903, the 2nd Party Congress adopted Lenin’s agrarian program, without any mention thus far of a “worker-peasant alliance.” Lenin warned against such an alliance. To ally with the proletariat, in his view, the peasants must give up “their own class viewpoint” and adopt “that of the proletariat.”