Marxism and the Relation Between Proletarian and Peasant Revolution

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In 1881 Vera Zasulich asked Marx what the Russian Marxists should do until capitalism had prepared the conditions in Russia for a proletarian revolution. This is what Zasulich wrote:

"If on the other hand the village commune (the Russian mir) is doomed to destruction then the only thing that remains for a socialist as such is to seek more or less well-grounded measuring sticks for determining roughly for how many decades the land of the Russian peasant will pass into the hands of the bourgeoisie and how many hundreds of years will elapse before capitalism in Russia attains the same level of development as Western Europe. In that case the socialist should carry on propaganda only among urban workers, who would constantly be swamped by the mass of peasants thrown onto the streets of the large cities in search of a wage, driven there by the disintegration of the village commune" (excerpt from Zasulich's letter to Marx of February 16, 1881, from the Russian book Emancipation of Labor Group, second collection of writings, p. 222).

What is most remarkable in this quotation is that the socialist revolution is separated from the democratic transformation by several centuries. To representatives of the post-October generation this will seem monstrous. But in fact that point of view unquestionably predominated among Russian Marxists until 1905 and to a significant extent until 1917 as well. Of course, not everyone measured the distance to the socialist revolution in centuries. Here Zasulich was simply looking at the history of England as though it were a mirror for the more backward nations. But the main idea, that first there must be a bourgeois-democratic revolution, then the productive forces must develop for a period of unspecified length on capitalist foundations, and only after that would come the age of socialist revolution in its own right – that idea was the prevailing one, as the proceedings of the Bolshevik Party conference of March 1917 show. All of its participants, without exception, viewed things from the angle that the democratic revolution must be completed, not that the socialist revolution must be prepared. Those who after October tried in any way to make a critical assessment of their attitude toward the February revolution openly admitted that they were heading for one door but ended up at another. Here, for example, is what Olminsky wrote on this subject in 1921. "The coming revolution must be only a bourgeois revolution. … That was an obligatory premise for every member of the party, the official opinion of the party, its continual and unchanging slogan right up to the February revolution of 1917, and even some time after."

What was involved was not at all that the revolution must first carry out the democratic tasks and only on that basis could it grow over into a socialist revolution. None of the participants in the March conference had the slightest inkling of such an idea before Lenin's arrival. At that time not only did Stalin never refer to Lenin's article of 1915 but he warned against frightening off the bourgeoisie in exactly the same spirit as Zhordania. The conviction that history dare not leap over a stage dictated by some philistine prescription was already firmly implanted in his skull. There were three stages: first the democratic revolution, carried through to the end; then a period of the development of capitalist productive forces; and finally the period of socialist revolution. The second stage was conceived as quite a prolonged one, measured, if not in centuries as Zasulich did, then certainly in multiple decades. It was assumed that a victorious proletarian revolution in Europe might shorten the second stage, but in the best of cases this factor was included only as a theoretical possibility. According to this stereotyped theory held by Stalin and prevailing [in the party] almost totally, the position of permanent revolution, which united the democratic and socialist revolutions within the framework of a single stage, was absolutely inadmissible, anti-Marxist, monstrous.

And yet in the general sense the idea of permanent revolution was one of the most important ideas of Marx and Engels. The Communist Manifesto was written in 1847, several months before the revolution of 1848, which has gone down in history as a partial, unfinished, bourgeois revolution. Germany at that time was a very backward country, thoroughly fettered by the chains of feudalism and serfdom. Nevertheless Marx and Engels did not by any means develop a perspective involving three stages. They regarded the coming revolution as a transitional one; that is, it would begin by carrying out a bourgeois-democratic program but would be transformed by the inner mechanics of the forces involved and grow over into a socialist revolution. Here is what the Communist Manifesto says on this point: "The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and of France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution in Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution" [The Communist Manifesto, New York: Pathfinder, 1970 p. 44].

This idea was not at all accidental. In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, in the thick of the 1848 revolution itself, Marx and Engels put forward the program of permanent revolution and Marx even wrote an article with that phrase as the title.

The revolution of 1848 did not grow over into a socialist revolution. But it was not completed as a democratic revolution either. For an understanding of historical dynamics the second fact is no less important than the first. 1848 showed that if conditions were not yet ripe for a dictatorship of the proletariat, there was no room either for a genuine completion of the democratic revolution. The first and third stages turned out to be inseparably connected. In this fundamental sense the Communist Manifesto was absolutely right.

Did Marx ignore the peasant question and the task of eliminating all the feudal rubbish in general? It's absurd even to ask the question. Marx had nothing in common with the idealist meta-physic of Lassalle, who thought that the peasantry in general embodied reactionary principles. Of course, Marx did not consider the peasantry a socialist class. He evaluated the historical role of the peasantry dialectically. Marxist theory as a whole not only speaks with full eloquence on this score but also and in particular the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 1848.

After the victory of the counterrevolution Marx had to make several adjustments, postponing the day when the revolution could be expected to come again. But did Marx admit an error? Did he come to the realization that you can't leap over stages? Did he at last grasp that there were precisely three such stages? No, Marx proved to be incorrigible. At a time of victorious counterrevolution he outlined the prospects for a new revolutionary upturn and once again tied the democratic, above all the agrarian, revolution together with the dictatorship of the proletariat, using the knot of permanency. This is what Marx wrote in 1856: "The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War. Then the affair will be splendid" [Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, Moscow, 1969, p. 529].

These words have been quoted frequently but, as the disputes and writings of the past few years have shown, their fundamental meaning remains totally misunderstood. To back up the dictatorship of the proletariat with a peasant war means that the agrarian revolution is carried out, not before the dictatorship of the proletariat, but through that dictatorship. Despite the lesson of 1848 Marx did not adopt the pedantic philosophy of three stages, a philosophy that in fact represents the immortalization of a poorly digested understanding of the experience of England and France. Marx held that the coming revolution would bring the proletariat to power before the democratic revolution had been carried through to completion. Marx made the victory of the peasant war dependent on the coming to power of the proletariat. He made the durability of the dictatorship of the proletariat dependent on whether it rose and developed in parallel with, and simultaneously with, the development of the peasant war.

Was Marx's orientation correct? In answering this question today, we have much richer experience than Marx did. He was relying on the experience of the classical bourgeois revolutions, above all the French revolution, and made his prognosis of permanent revolution on the basis of the changing relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Engels in his Peasant War in Germany demonstrated that the peasant war of the sixteenth century was always led by some urban faction, that is, by one wing of the bourgeoisie or another. Proceeding from the fact that the bourgeoisie as a whole was no longer fit for a revolutionary role, Marx and Engels came to the conclusion that the leadership of a peasant war must be taken over by the proletariat, which would draw new strength from the peasant war, and that the dictatorship of the proletariat could during its first and most difficult stage find a strong base of support in the peasant war, that is, in the democratic agrarian revolution.

1848 provided an incomplete and solely negative confirmation of this view. The agrarian revolution did not lead to victory and the proletariat did not develop in full or come to power. Since then, however, we have had the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the experience of the Chinese revolution. Now Marx's conception has been decisively, indestructibly confirmed: a positive confirmation in the Russian revolution and a negative confirmation in the Chinese.

The dictatorship of the proletariat proved possible in backward Russia precisely because it was backed up by a peasant war. In other words, the dictatorship of the proletariat proved to be possible and durable only because none of the factions of bourgeois society proved capable of assuming the leadership in resolving the agrarian question. Or to put it more briefly and precisely, the proletarian dictatorship proved possible for the very reason that the democratic dictatorship proved impossible.

In China, on the other hand, an attempt to solve the agrarian problem through a special democratic dictatorship backed up by the authority of the Comintern, the Soviet Communist Party, and the USSR, led only to the defeat of the revolution. Thus Marx's fundamental historical blueprint stands totally and completely confirmed. Revolutions in the new historical era will either combine the first phase with the third or they will roll back from the first phase itself.