Abstract
This chapter examines Marxist efforts to extract the kernel of peasant democracy from the husk of populist ideology and traces the connection between ‘Bolshevism’ and the emergent Marxist engagement with peasant political agency. These efforts are traced back to Marx and Plekhanov but it was the young Lenin who, analyzing in detail the painful process of division of the peasantry into incipient peasant bourgeoisie and a class of poor, semi-proletarian peasants still tied to the land, would identify a force in the countryside capable of following the political lead of the urban workers. The turn of the century saw Lenin diversify the analytical framework through which he viewed the Russian countryside, distinguishing two social struggles, not only between agricultural proletariat and bourgeoisie but also between the peasantry as a whole and the landlords. This facilitated rethinking, in light of the upheavals in the countryside of 1905–1907, the agency of the peasantry as a whole and the Marxist project of proletarian hegemony.
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Notes
- 1.
Lenin, 1912, p. 359.
- 2.
Zasulich, 1881, p. 98.
- 3.
Marx, 1881b, p. 124.
- 4.
Marx, 1881b, p. 124.
- 5.
See Walicki, 1969, p. 189; Wada, 1983, p. 69.
- 6.
Marx, 1881a, p. 108.
- 7.
Marx, 1881a, p. 109.
- 8.
Marx, 1881a, p. 109n.
- 9.
Marx, 1881a, pp. 109–110.
- 10.
Marx, 1881a, p. 111.
- 11.
Marx, 1881a, p. 110.
- 12.
Marx, 1881a, p. 102.
- 13.
See Walicki, 1969, p. 189.
- 14.
Plekhanov, 1883, p. 104.
- 15.
Plekhanov, 1895, pp. 678–681.
- 16.
Plekhanov, 1885, p. 309.
- 17.
Plekhanov, 1885, p. 241.
- 18.
Plekhanov, 1885, p. 240.
- 19.
Plekhanov, 1901, p. 686.
- 20.
Plekhanov, 1888, p. 359.
- 21.
Plekhanov, 1888, p. 359.
- 22.
Plekhanov, 1896, p. 203.
- 23.
Cited in Keep, 1963, p. 21.
- 24.
Plekhanov, 1888, p. 361.
- 25.
See Plekhanov, 1888, p. 361.
- 26.
Lenin, 1894a, pp. 264–265.
- 27.
Lenin, 1894b, p. 438.
- 28.
Lenin, 1894b, p. 372.
- 29.
Lenin, 1894a, p. 197.
- 30.
Lenin, 1894a, p. 291.
- 31.
Lenin, 1894a, p. 299.
- 32.
Lenin, 1894a, p. 279.
- 33.
Lenin, 1894a, p. 289.
- 34.
Lenin, 1894a, pp. 292, 293. Instructive in this regard is Lenin’s response to the formation in 1893 of the short-lived Narodnoe pravo party (Party of the People’s Right). Subordinating the theme of Russian exceptionalism to the struggle against the autocracy, the Narodopravtsi managed to avoid the direct departures from democracy characteristic of legal populism ; though retaining a social-revolutionary idiom, they were critical of populist apoliticism and accorded primacy to the struggle for political reforms and liberties. While greeting their manifesto, Lenin held that the advance it represented underscored the inherent inconsistency of all populist democracy. The ideological insistence of the Narodopravtsi upon the participation of the masses of the people themselves in the struggle for democracy was defused and contradicted by their abstract notion of the “people,” unrelated to definite social relations of production. In Lenin’s view, their desire for a fusion of all revolutionary elements in the common struggle for political rights could draw force from nothing but such abstractions, in naïve disregard of the material conditions and interests from which alone the political engagement of the masses could proceed. The combination of real revolutionary forces is “much better achieved by the separate organisation of the representatives of the different interests and by the joint action of the two parties in particular cases” (1894a, pp. 330–331).
- 35.
Marx and Engels , 1848, p. 494.
- 36.
See Treadgold, 1976, p. 79.
- 37.
Lenin, 1901, p. 423.
- 38.
Lenin, 1901, p. 424.
- 39.
Lenin, 1903, pp. 444–445.
- 40.
See RSDLP, 1904, pp. 249–295.
- 41.
Krupskaya, 1930, p. 110.
- 42.
Lenin, 1905b, pp. 247, 248.
- 43.
Lenin, 1905e, p. 312; see Lenin 1905b, pp. 249–250.
- 44.
Lenin, 1905c, pp. 49, 56.
- 45.
Lenin, 1905c, p. 48.
- 46.
Lenin, 1905c, p. 55.
- 47.
Lenin, 1905c, pp. 50–51.
- 48.
Lenin, 1905c, p. 51.
- 49.
Lenin, 1905c, pp. 51–52.
- 50.
Lenin, 1905c, pp. 56–57.
- 51.
Lenin, 1905c, pp. 47, 58.
- 52.
Lenin, 1905c, p. 60; emphasis added.
- 53.
Lenin, 1905b, p. 250.
- 54.
Lenin, 1905a, p. 233.
- 55.
Lenin, 1905f, p. 443.
- 56.
Lenin, 1905g, p. 177.
- 57.
Lenin, 1905e, pp. 307, 308.
- 58.
Lenin, 1906a, p. 177.
- 59.
Lenin, 1907, pp. 291–292.
- 60.
Lenin, 1907, p. 239.
- 61.
Lenin, 1899, pp. 172–187, 191–251.
- 62.
See Lenin, 1899, pp. 185–186, 207–208, 210.
- 63.
In the course of the debate on the agrarian question at the Second Congress of the RSDLP , one of the delegates, Gorin, did draw a contrast between two “methods” of transition from feudalism to capitalism , either direct or through petty proprietorship. He did not, however, draw any political implications from the contrast and if he exhibited any preference for one of the methods, it was for the former, roughly corresponding to Lenin’s “Prussian” path. He did not, in any case, envisage the distinction as a focus of social and political struggles (see RSDLP 1904, pp. 277–278). For Marx ’s discussion of the forms of transition to capitalist agriculture, see Marx , 1894, pp. 782–813.
- 64.
Lenin, 1907, p. 292.
- 65.
Lenin, 1907, p. 346.
- 66.
Lenin, 1906a, p. 180.
- 67.
Lenin, 1905b, pp. 249–250.
- 68.
Lenin, 1907, p. 277.
- 69.
See Marx , 1894, pp. 614–781, especially 640–647 and 748–772. The theory of ground rent is also the subject of the greater part of Marx , 1968. Lenin’s discussion of Marx’s theory, while polemical, is accurate; it also draws upon the account in Kautsky, 1898, pp. 101–120.
- 70.
Lenin, 1907, pp. 295–316.
- 71.
Lenin, 1907, pp. 323–325.
- 72.
See Baron, 1963, pp. 265–267; Lenin, 1906b, pp. 283–284; Lenin, 1906c, p. 331.
- 73.
See Ascher, 1976, pp. 64–65.
- 74.
Lenin, 1906b, p. 281. Despite his estimate of the economically progressive character of nationalization, Lenin rejected its use as a revolutionary slogan throughout 1905. Considered in abstraction from his re-evaluation of Russian peasant ideology, itself intimately bound up with his reassessment of rural social relations in light of the experience of the peasant movement, Lenin’s reversal on this question is incomprehensible, as is the politico-strategic significance he would come to assign to nationalization.
- 75.
Lenin, 1907, p. 424.
- 76.
Lenin, 1906b, p. 286.
- 77.
Stalin, 1906, p. 240.
- 78.
Lenin, 1906b, p. 287.
- 79.
Lenin, 1906c, p. 345.
- 80.
Lenin, 1906b, p. 287.
- 81.
Cited in Lenin, 1909, p. 401. Lenin comments that “the conditions of life of the Russian peasantry being what they are, its bourgeois-democratic revolutionary spirit could not be ideologically expressed otherwise than in the form of ‘belief’ in the sovereign virtue of land equalization … Our Mensheviks have never been able to understand these words of Engels . While exposing the falsity of the Narodnik doctrine, they closed their eyes like pedants to the truth of the contemporary struggle in the contemporary bourgeois revolution, which is expressed by these quasi-socialist doctrines.”
- 82.
Lenin, 1906c, p. 345.
- 83.
Lenin, 1905d, pp. 214, 215.
- 84.
See Gramsci, 1926.
- 85.
Lenin, 1912, p. 359.
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Shandro, A. (2018). “Extracting the Democratic Kernel”: Lenin and the Peasants. In: Rockmore, T., Levine, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_13
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