19.07.2000

Land and Bolshevism - part one

Robert Mugabe's terror campaign against the Movement for Democratic Change and the seizure of white-owned farms have been greeted by some leftists as a blow against imperialism. The programme of Bolshevism surely contains many lessons for Zimbabwe

For communists here in Britain the countryside is no longer primarily a matter of mobilising the rural population alongside the urban working class as allies. Unlike France, let alone tsarist Russia or present-day Zimbabwe, there is no class of peasant farmers in Britain. The percentage of the working class that finds a living through agriculture is tiny; perhaps less than three percent. The vast mass of workers are urban and have been so throughout the 20th century. Consequently the land question in Britain has two main aspects. Firstly, there is the price, availability and quality of food we, the urban population, purchase and consume. Secondly, it concerns democratic access to, and control over, the countryside.

Communists have minimum demands which include the right to freely roam, and envisage a socialism which sees the abolition of the distinction between town and country and a radical redistribution of the population. A purely urban existence in sprawling conurbations stunts the full potential of the human personality.

However, the purpose of this article is not to deal with Britain. No, my aim is to contribute to the discussion we have sparked vis-à -vis the land question in Zimbabwe by bringing into play the programme and polemics of the Bolsheviks up to and immediately following the October revolution of 1917. For example, Munyaradzi Gwisai, the International Socialist Organisation's MP in the Harare parliament, thinks that Weekly Worker writers are "wrong" on the issue of the Zanu-PF-sponsored land seizures (July 6). Moreover the ISO writes favourably about the virtues of "small-scale farmers" who are celebrated as the "mainstay of agriculture" throughout Africa and Asia (Socialist Worker Zimbabwean version, May).

Where the ISO rightly wants to "support the struggles of the peasants", Jim Blackstock and other CPGB comrades have, I believe with equal justification, placed their emphasis on the totally cynical nature of Mugabe's land invasions headed by his war veterans. Mugabe's anti-white populism was integral to a campaign of mass terror directed against the working class in general and the Movement for Democratic Change in particular.

Either way, though the peasants overwhelmingly voted Zanu-PF, there appears to be a spontaneous element to the land invasions. Has Mugabe triggered a movement he can no longer rein in? The key to the situation is surely working class political independence and a worker-peasant alliance. This revolutionary alliance must supersede the state-peasant alliance of Zanu-PF and at the same time the bourgeois-worker alliance called the MDC.

Of course no study of Bolshevism and Russia can speak concretely about Zimbabwe in terms of its specific circumstances. Nor can it furnish the exact slogans and tactical manoeuvres that are necessary or advantageous for the ISO and other such comrades. They know the conditions and the mood of the masses there far better than any of us. They, after all, are on the spot.

Nevertheless I am convinced that such an outline, no matter how sketchy, will at least present some useful material which will put our debate on firmer foundations and hopefully provide food for thought. The Russian revolutions of 1905 and February and October 1917 certainly offer the international working class movement a vast amount of accumulated experience concerning the significance of the peasant hunger for land.

1. The peasants

Before 1917 Russia was politically ruled over by an hereditary autocracy which stood at the apex of a highly centralised bureaucratic-military state. Moreover, tsarist Russia could only be characterised as economically tardy and culturally backward. As a mode of production Russia stood somewhere midway between Europe and Asia. The east gave Russia an Asiatic form of exploitation, or surplus extraction, upon which, it should be noted, European capitalist features had been artificially grafted both by an imperial state worried by foreign rivals and an influx of British, French and German investors greedy for profits.

The result of what Trotsky called "combined development" is the skipping of a whole series of intermediate stages, as undertaken by a path-breaking England/Britain, and therefore a mix of the woefully primitive and the latest in capitalist industry and technique (L Trotsky History of the Russian Revolution Vol 1, London 1967, p23). Socially this meant that the small Russian proletariat laboured in huge, modern factories surrounded by a sea of peasant agriculture which owed more to the 17th than the 20th century.

The revolution in Russia against tsarism fundamentally relied on the revolt of the peasant masses against landlordism. Without that there could be no hope of the socialist working class taking power and keeping it for any length of time. By themselves the proletariat of St Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev and Warsaw would suffer the same tragic fate as the Paris communards in 1871.

That basic strategic understanding proved pivotal for Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders. Hence the class struggle and the desire to increase the overall mass and energy of the revolution motivated and shaped the Bolshevik agrarian programme. They had no concern with petty bourgeois notions such as 'abstract justice' or liberal bureaucratic concerns with 'practicability' from the point of view of the exploiters and the state.

In the early part of the 20th century there were a mere 30,000 landowners in European Russia - mainly nobles, but also state agents. Their possessions covered nearly one third of all arable land. These estates depended economically on bondage, rack rents and winter hiring and other such labour services customarily exacted from the peasants since the formal abolition of serfdom in 1861. Productivity was appallingly low.

The 10.5 million households of poor peasants farmed between them virtually the same area of land. Hence, whereas the average holding of the poor peasant was seven dessiatines (one dessiatine equals roughly 2.7 acres), those of the big landlords averaged 2,333 dessiatines - a bald statistic which eloquently shows what the Russian revolution in the countryside was about. The poor peasants could double their land by parting the aristocrats from the latifundas. For the Bolsheviks this was the "ultimate point" of the peasants' struggle for land, according to Lenin's 1907 pamphlet the Agrarian programme of social democracy (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p227).

Within Russia there was broad agreement that something had to be done. Peasant poverty and pent-up rage was an explosion waiting to happen. The tsarist government wanted to create a whole new layer of rich peasant farmers. The liberal bourgeois Cadet Party talked vaguely about "allotting" land to the most "needy" peasants. As to the peasants' parties, they, most notably the Trudoviks, had long proposed to add to the lands of the poor peasants through a compulsory division of the latifundas. So where the parties and classes differed was on the target, scope and terms of transfer.

In Lenin's opinion two roads were objectively open to the Russian countryside. The first would see the latifunda remain intact and gradually become the basis for a capitalist form of production on the land. This "Prussian type" of agrarian capitalism consolidates the political and economic power of a "Junker" class and means oppression, degradation, poverty and illiteracy for the mass of peasants. A small minority of big peasants emerge as capitalist farmers, but the majority of the population is eventually evicted, as in 18th and 19th century Scotland. The productive forces in the countryside develop under this form of capitalism ... at a snail's pace.

The other road Lenin called the "American type" of agrarian capitalism. Revolution sweeps away the great landed estates. Agriculture is characterised by the free farmer. The productive forces move forward rapidly under conditions more favourable to the mass of the population. Inevitably there develops a rural bourgeoisie and an antagonistic rural proletariat. This is what the Bolsheviks sought and fought to achieve.

As is well known, Nicolai Bukharin proposed the continuation of the New Economic Policy in 1928 against Stalin's proposed drive for forced collectivisation on the basis of the "American" model (N Bukharin Notes of an economist Belfast 1980, p19). Whether such a course was compatible with the survival of a workers' state, especially one suffering from extreme bureaucratic deformations, is another matter. The point is that between 1921 and 1928 there existed a backward, semi-capitalist agriculture that could still look to the "American" road as something to emulate. Stalin's collectivisation represented, in comparison, economic regression. I have argued elsewhere that his collectivisation was dictated entirely by the needs of the state to politically control the peasants and their surplus-product. Anti-socialism triumphed in the name of anti-capitalism.

In pre-revolutionary Russia Lenin dismissed all lofty phrases about socialising the land that emanated from the forces of peasant socialism - Trudoviks, Social-Narodniks and Socialist Revolutionaries. They were in the last analysis an ideological cloak behind which stood peasant hunger for the land of the nobility. So there existed a progressive core in peasant socialism despite the utopian, nationalist and moralistic trappings. Lenin criticised those Marxists who refused to recognise the revolutionary impulse of the peasants' petty bourgeois struggle against landlordism. Their slogan for a "division" and "equality" of land holdings represented an inchoate striving towards a "consistent bourgeois revolution" against serfdom (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p237). Russia, Lenin insisted, could not positively transcend the law of value and commodity production without as a precondition a successful socialist revolution in western Europe.

2. Classes and their agrarian programmes

The various programmes of the contending classes and parties in Russia essentially reflected the two types of agrarian capitalism that presented themselves on the historical agenda. On behalf of tsarism and the landlord class, prime minister Stolypin came forward with legislation "permeated through and through with the purely bourgeois sprit" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p243). Stolypin proposed to break up the traditional village communes and hasten the expropriation of the peasant masses. His aim was a new class of bourgeois peasants employing capitalist methods. A stratum that would, Stolypin trusted, constitute a social bodyguard against revolution, and allow Russia to move ahead economically.

Amongst vulgar Marxists, who put the development of the productive forces before the interests of the class struggle, there was a weakness exhibited towards Stolypin's legislation. These productionists were closely associated with the Mensheviks who consistently argued that the task of the working class was to support the bourgeoisie in its struggle against the old order. The Bolsheviks for their part never denied the necessity of developing the productive forces in Russia. However, against Stolypin's "Prussian" path they advocated capitalist evolution of the "peasant type". The "Prussian" model implied the preservation of landlord power and the lowest level of economic development. That was not in the interests of the peasant masses nor the proletariat. The "American", or "peasant type", of evolution held out the promise of rapid development and the "best conditions" - under commodity production - for the mass of peasants. The Bolsheviks were determined to support not the liberal bourgeoisie, but the "fighting peasantry" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p244).

The party of the liberal bourgeoisie, the Cadets, vacillated between toying with the nationalisation of land and redistributing state land in order placate the peasantry on the one hand, and on the other Stolypin's plan to create a strong capitalist peasantry through the eviction of poor peasants, all the while leaving the landlords' estates intact. In other words the Cadets proposed to follow the road of landlord progress. Against this the Socialist Revolutionaries and other smaller peasant parties did not advance a consistent agrarian programme. Still, not surprisingly, they articulated the interests of the peasants against the landlords. Hence the slogan, 'All the land to all the people', and the demand for universal suffrage and the election of land committees which would oversee the division of the latifunda.

So for Bolshevism the contradiction in rural Russia did not run along a line between the landlords, their Octobrist Party, and the liberal bourgeois Cadets, as frequently assumed by Mensheviks and other such vulgar Marxists. The contradiction ran between the Cadets and the peasant parties and was determined by the two main classes in Russian society fighting over the land: ie, the landlords and the peasants. The Cadets advocated the preservation of landlordism and a rich peasant class built through the eviction of the mass of peasants. The Socialist Revolutionaries - and Bolsheviks - were for empowering the peasant masses over landlordism and peasant capitalist progress. True, the Socialist Revolutionaries dreamed of a peasant socialism. However, as the NEP was to prove, the Bolsheviks considered peasant commodity production and capitalist progress under the rule (ie, dictatorship in the Marxist lexicon) of the proletariat far more progressive than any such petty bourgeois schemes for quasi-socialism.

3. Development of the agrarian programme

The agrarian programme defended by communists in Russia, Lenin included, underwent definite changes. The programmes of 1895 and 1903 contained important mistakes. Mistakes which the Bolsheviks, the 'majorityists', sought to urgently rectify at the Unity Congress in 1906 - unfortunately they temporarily found themselves minorityists.

The first draft programme of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, published in 1895 by the Emancipation of Labour group, included the following passage: "A radical revision of our agrarian relations: ie, of the terms on which land is to be redeemed and allotted to the peasant communities. The right to refuse their allotments and to leave the commune to be granted to those peasants who may find it advantageous to do so, etc."

Obviously a very limited, albeit sound, formulation. Yet although the Party called for a "radical revision", as opposed to a non-radical revision, of social relations in the countryside, there was no grasp of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry - in mitigation Lenin pointed to the fact that the draft was published 20 years before the first really nationwide peasant outburst. Without such a truly mass experience, abstraction could not be avoided.

Despite that, Plekhanov was able to repeatedly herald the possibility of a "general redistribution" and the imminence of a peasant revolution in various articles and pamphlets published in the 1880s and 90s. Lenin too, in the paper Iskra, wrote of the cardinal importance of the peasant question and outlined a series of demands such as the restitution of cut-off lands: ie, common lands incorporated into the landlords' estates. His article, 'The workers' party and the peasantry', could be regarded as the first rough draft of the agrarian programme that was adopted by the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 as the official position of the Party (see VI Lenin CW Vol 4, Moscow 1977, pp420-28).

In this programme the whole struggle against tsarism is reduced to the contradiction between the bourgeois order and what Lenin called feudalism. The aim was to abolish the survivals of serfdom and to facilitate the free development of the class struggle in the countryside. Crucial is the demand for peasant committees. A militant slogan. Nonetheless it has to be admitted that during this period Lenin adopted an opened-ended, or even an equivocal, attitude towards calls for the nationalisation of land and "general redistribution". Indeed in 1902 he was of the opinion that the demand for "general redistribution" contained the "reactionary utopian idea" of generalising and perpetuating small-scale peasant production. There existed another side, however. The demand shows that the peasantry can "serve as a vehicle" of the "socialist revolution" in the desire to "sweep away" all remnants of serfdom (VI Lenin CW Vol 6, Moscow 1977, p139).

Events themselves - above all the revolution of 1905 - were to highlight the inadequacies of 1903 agrarian programme. The peasants stepped forward as revolutionaries, not conservatives. Rightly the Bolsheviks recognised the necessity of amending the agrarian programme. They wanted to put in a declaration to "support peasant demands, up to and including confiscation of all the landed estates" (VI Lenin CW Vol 8, Moscow 1977, p235). They succeeded at the Stockholm Congress. But, having done so, new divisions arose between those who favoured the division of the landlords' estates as private property, those who wanted it "municipalised", and those - ie, the Bolsheviks - who demanded the "nationalisation of all land".

The Bolsheviks were out-voted. The agrarian programme agreed in 1906 contained limited measures of nationalisation, such as of confiscated lands, forests and zones marked out for colonisation. It also included a plan for the "municipalisation" of land in the event of the "victorious development of the revolution". In "unfavourable conditions" it favoured the principle of "dividing" the land seized from the landlords as "private property". Lenin attacked what he saw as an eclecticism born of fear.

The Menshevik wing of the Party worried about alienating the peasantry with demands for the nationalisation of land. Here is their rapporteur, "comrade John": "If the revolution were to lead to an attempt to nationalise the peasants' allotments, or to nationalise the lands confiscated from the landlords, as comrade Lenin suggests, such a measure would lead to a counterrevolutionary movement, not only in the borderlands, but also in the central part of the country.

We would not only have a Vendée, but a general revolt of the peasantry against attempts by the state to interfere with the peasants' own allotments, against attempts to nationalise the latter."

Lenin easily countered such arguments. The elected representative of the peasants themselves in the tsar's parliament favoured the nationalisation of land. So did all the peasant-based parties. There was no danger of a Vendée (the royalist-peasant revolt against Paris during the French Revolution centred on the Loire region). The Russian peasantry and the French peasantry occupied different social positions in relationship to the state, which produced different political responses. The French peasantry managed to secure a hold over their land against the resistance of the feudal nobility with the direct aid of the autocratic state in the late medieval period. The result of this "peasant conquest" was to block capitalist development and reinforce the power of an overarching state which reproduced itself through extracting surplus product from the peasantry via the system of taxation (R Brenner, 'The agrarian roots of European capitalism', TH Aston and CHE Philpin [eds] The Brenner debate Cambridge 1995, p253). As a consequence the French peasant became the bedrock of conservatism. Plans for general nationalisation, or any encroachment on their land rights, inevitably provoked a fierce reaction. As grippingly told in Emile Zola's Earth, the peasant farmer would commit murder in order to keep his land. To the Russian peasant, general nationalisation represented not a threat, but by far the best way to secure and extend their holdings.

The Mensheviks' 'optimistic' alternative to the nationalisation of the land was 'municipalisation', or 'localisation'. The essential difference between nationalisation and municipalisation lay in the class struggle. Plekhanov and the Mensheviks drew up their agrarian programme not so as to vigorously push through the struggle against the survivals of serfdom, not so as to clear the way for capitalism, but in Lenin's words in a "pitiful philistine" attempt to combine "harmoniously" the old with the new: ie, the traditional peasant commune system and the revolutionary seizure of the landlords' estates (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p166).

Lenin showed that the commune system, via which peasant plots were regularly distributed and redistributed, was dying throughout Russia. Municipalisation would not liberate the peasant, but reinforce the commune system - which in Lenin's view retarded economic development. It was therefore reactionary, along with proposals to divide the land on the basis of private ownership. Nationalisation would abolish the obsolete village commune and sweep away all other vestiges of serfdom, crucially the latifundia. Division of the land need not be ruled out. That would create a new class of free farmers. For Lenin no bad thing. The task of Marxists "is to help the radical bourgeoisie" - ie, the peasantry - in eliminating to the greatest degree possible all survivals of serfdom (VI Lenin CW Vol 15, Moscow 1977, p168). That in turn would ensure the rapid development of a capitalism most conducive to socialism.

As for the Mensheviks, they might denounce peasant socialism and its demand for equal land, but as we have seen they failed to locate its rational core. In so doing they fell into doctrinarism, which blinded them to the peasant revolution. Because of this they stood nearer to the liberal landlordism of the Cadets than peasant revolutionism. Obviously, such a stance is alien to the revolutionary essence of Marxism.