26.07.2000

Land and Bolshevism - part two

In the first part of this article we discussed the land question in Russia with the specific intention of casting a broad historical and political light on recent events in Zimbabwe and the different positions taken by various socialists and communists.

We emphasised the huge inequality that characterised the Russian countryside. The nobility owned vast, albeit unproductive, estates. White-owned capitalist farms in Zimbabwe can therefore be viewed as the same in terms of scale, but different in economic performance. Like those in Zimbabwe poor peasants in Russia eked out a living from tiny subsistence plots. But they were traditionally allotted to them by the village commune. The Russian peasant was, moreover, under a legal obligation to perform all manner of serf-like labour services for the landlord.

As a result of the pre-capitalist features of the Russian countryside Lenin believed that the peasantry could be won to accept the leadership of the nascent working class - if it boldly fought for the correct agrarian programme. After 1905 the Bolsheviks insisted upon the nationalisation of the land in the event of the tsarist state being successfully overthrown.

Here, in part two, I shall examine the political and socio-economic criteria Lenin adopted in evaluating the possibility of maintaining small-scale agriculture. The Bolsheviks, it will be shown, did not take a stand against the division of the landlords' estates per se. They wanted to do away with the whole system of primitive agriculture prevalent in Russia, both of the landlord and the peasant type. Nationalisation of the land, as opposed to its municipalisation (favoured by the Mensheviks), will be further elaborated upon in terms of its place in Marxism, along with the dispute over land and the danger of counterrevolutionary restoration which bitterly divided the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks even at their 1906 'Unity' Congress in Stockholm.

1. Dividing the land

From the standpoint of the democratic revolution against Russian tsarism there lay every reason to transform not only the country's Asiatic agricultural class relations, but in turn its Asiatic agricultural techniques. Old "conservative, barbarous, ignorant and pauper methods of economy" on peasant allotments has to be "transformed", states Lenin in 1907 (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p289). He never exhibited much fondness for the speculation indulged in by Marx and Engels in their 1882 preface for the Russian edition of the Communist manifesto. The two great men had mused about Russia bypassing capitalism. Non-capitalist development was possible, they suggested, through using the village commune as a "starting point for a communist development" - if the Russian revolution "becomes a signal for proletarian revolution in the west" (K Marx, F Engels CW Vol 24, Moscow 1989, p426).

Russia lagged at least 100 years behind the advanced countries. Its peasants still sowed by hand from wooden baskets and reaped with the sickle, as they had from time immemorial. All the while American capitalist farmers were busily introducing chemical fertilisers and tractors, soon combine harvesters. However, as far as Lenin was concerned, Russia was already in the 1890s following the evolutionary path taken by the west. Eg, The development of capitalism in Russia, written during the exile years of 1896-99. Village communes were suffering visible decay. The growth of capitalist "factory industry" and an industrial proletariat was undeniable (VI Lenin CW Vol 3, Moscow 1977, p550).

Class relations and production technique are closely related. Hence the Menshevik's 'pessimistic' plan for the division of the landlord's estates in the event of inauspicious circumstances, ie, if the revolution failed to achieve a decisive victory - would perpetuate, perhaps reinforce - backwardness. It would add to the number and extent of the individual peasant plots farmed according to the rules of the primitive village commune. Thereby half of the Asiatic system survives and is moreover generalised. Doubtless the reader will recall the SWP's co-thinkers in Zimbabwe, the International Socialist Organisation, who praise traditional subsistence farming in "Africa and Asia" as the "mainstay of agriculture" (Socialist Worker Zimbabwean version May).

Admittedly division of the land "might" be progressive if it consolidated modern techniques and swept aside the old. But - Lenin insisted, as the main spokesperson of the Bolshevik faction at the 1906 'Unity' Congress - there can be no "impetus" to progress if it is "based on the old system of allotment ownership" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p289). Did that stance maintained by the Bolsheviks imply a degree of sympathy with Stolypin's efforts to quicken the break-up of the village communes so as to spur agricultural growth and bring into being a class of conservative rich peasants? Not at all.

Stolypin - the tsar's prime minister - might be destroying the archaic village commune. Yet that was solely in order to ensure the triumph of landlord progress. Those bewitched by the spell of economic growth for its own sake might countenance Stolypin's package of reforms. But in the interests of the class struggle Bolshevism favoured neither the generalisation of the village commune nor landlord progress.

Both the main wings of Marxism in Russia formally agreed at the 'Unity' Congress that the agrarian programme must map out the best way to destroy the old order in its entirety with a "decisive stroke". Furthermore there was no need to bind the Party to "any particular form of economy". Put another way - revolution disposes and revolutionary progress decides. Exactly why the Bolsheviks lambasted the Menshevik's best case scenario of 'municipalisation' of the land and their fallback position of 'individual ownership' in the event of the revolution stalling or being thrown back (see part one of this article Weekly Worker July 20). The Bolsheviks wanted the nationalisation of the land through the agency of revolution. That would put an end to the old order as a whole and allow full freedom for the new to develop. Let us leave no doubt about it: for Lenin the new explicitly referred to an influx of capital into the countryside and capitalist relations of production.

Lenin did not deny that tomorrow the "newly hatched" free farmer would in all probability raise the demand for "assured possession" of their farm (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p290). However, the key to unlocking the situation today was the virtual unanimity amongst elected peasant representatives and their parties around the demand for nationalisation. The real conditions of life in the Russian countryside confronted the peasant not with undertaking right away new, higher, forms of agriculture by dividing the land. Peasants in the here and now yearned for the destruction of the old system with its landlord power and survivals of serfdom. To fulfil that ambition the mass of peasants enthusiastically demanded land nationalisation. Ignore that and you closed your eyes to the concrete historical circumstances that prevailed, not least the fact that from 1905 onwards the revolutionary proletarian movement in the cities was accompanied by a revolutionary peasant movement in the countryside.

Under the inspiring impact of the 1905 revolution Lenin felt compelled to re-evaluate his previous perspectives. Firstly, he began to champion the nationalisation of the land. Eg, in his pamphlet Revision of the agrarian programme of the workers' party. To repudiate nationalisation of the land would be a "theoretical distortion of Marxism", he writes (VI Lenin CW Vol 10, Moscow 1977, p181). Secondly, he accepted the possibility that the confiscation of the landlords' estates and the nationalisation of land might be accompanied by the "renovation of small farming" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p292).

Instead of Asiatic methods of small-scale farming Lenin was prepared to countenance as a contingency the allocation of nationalised land between free peasant farmers if that served the interests of the revolution. He criticised the Menshevik 'divisionists' not so much because they advocated the division of confiscated land. They were wrong in "skipping" the peasant stage of the revolution encapsulated in the demand for nationalisation: ie, the smashing of the old system. Unless the working class took this on board there could be no hope of rallying the peasantry behind its "leadership" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p292).

Having said that, though the Bolsheviks were prepared to consider the division of land if it proved "unavoidable", it must be emphasised that division should not be one of the "aims" of the workers in the revolution against tsarism (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p293).

2. Nationalisation and theory

The mass of peasants had no concern whatsoever about the theoretical foundations of the demand for land nationalisation. Peasants eyed the latifunda of the nobility with envy. Their hunger for that land was born of historic oppression and grinding poverty, not some particular theoretical nuance or doctrine. They spoke vaguely about the land being given to the people. They dreamed of ending landlordism. Given the opportunity, the peasants would invade the land of the nobles - shades of Zimbabwe. Nevertheless, despite the socialistic rhetoric of the peasant parties, like the Socialist Revolutionaries, and the lofty slogans about equality and ending exploitation, what motivated the peasant was the base instincts of individual commodity producers.

In other words, the demands for nationalisation that came forth from the peasant parties expressed a negative attitude towards the landlord. Neither the peasants nor the peasant parties recognised the necessity of abolishing both the latifunda system and the peasant system of agriculture.

Peasant plots were not only tiny, but often scattered. This made efficient and rational agricultural production impossible. That is why Lenin stressed the necessity of abolishing the old system in its entirety. The fetters of both landlordism and fragmented peasant plots had to be removed. Nationalisation would provide the conditions for far more dynamic methods of production.

Unlike most of our contemporary leftists in Britain, Lenin and the Bolsheviks entertained no socialist illusions in nationalisation. They put no equals sign between nationalisation and socialism. On the contrary nationalisation of the land by the anti-tsarist revolution, as outlined by Lenin, represented for the Bolsheviks a capitalist, not a socialist, measure.

By removing landlord oppression along with the survivals of serfdom and the fragmentation of peasant agriculture a powerful impetus to commodity production would be given. Hence nationalisation for the Bolsheviks was a "category of commodity and capitalist society" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p296). The Bolsheviks sought to unleash capitalist economic growth in the countryside under the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry - a hybrid regime that could only endure for any length of time if the revolution in Russia quickly succeeded in sparking the socialist revolution in central and western Europe.

Nationalisation of the land has a threefold purpose. Firstly, it serves as a banner which rallies the peasantry to the working class. Secondly, nationalisation by the revolution sweeps away the old system of agriculture. Thirdly, in capitalist terms, it would, Lenin explained, speed up economic growth.

His reasoning around the third purpose for nationalisation of the land can be summarised as follows. Capitalist producers make a profit which tends towards an average established through competition within a given market. Rent in capitalist society is income derived from that part of surplus-value which remains after the average profit has been deducted. We will not concern ourselves here with a discussion of those capitalists who have 'territorialised' themselves and therefore pay no rent. The essential point is that nationalisation of the land under capitalist relations of production transfers rent to the state. The state substitutes for the landlord.

As the reader will probably know, Marx distinguished two forms of rent. Differential rent and absolute rent. Lenin proposed to abolish absolute rent through nationalising the land. Hence the Bolshevik programme of land nationalisation had nothing to do with populist demagoguery, let alone the notion that in and of itself nationalisation is a socialist measure.

Let us elaborate. Agricultural land exhibits different qualities. Some land is particularly fertile; other land exists in close proximity to the market, etc. There is better land and worse land. The best land alone cannot meet the demands of consumers. Differential rent has its source in the high productivity of the better land as compared with the worst land. Basically the more profitable the land, the more the rent. Differential rent therefore reflects competition.

Absolute rent too has its source in the excess of surplus-value over the average profit. However, absolute rent is a sort of tribute exacted on society as a whole due to the landlords' monopoly over the land. Absolute rent derives from the simple fact that land is finite and landlords have a monopoly over it as an economic object. Land cannot be churned out like cars, washing machine, CDs and other such commodities. Absolute rent is the result of scarcity and is therefore a monopoly price. It means less profit for the capitalist and higher prices for workers. Big holdings of rural property moreover hinder the flow of capital from industry to agriculture and thus the equalisation of profit rates between agricultural and industrial capital. The organic composition of agricultural capital is thereby lower. Competition between the different branches of production is impeded.

Through abolishing private ownership of land Lenin wished to abolish absolute rent and usher in a more dynamic and productive agriculture. If only differential rent is paid to the state, farmers get higher profits. Workers too benefit. Competition intensifies. Prices of agricultural products fall. Herein lies the twofold economic significance of the demand for nationalisation of the land.

3. Nationalisation and capitalism

Economically Lenin also attacked the Menshevik programme for the municipalisation of the landlords' estates. He did so on the grounds that, like the Zanu-PF break-up of white-owned farms, it would perpetuate antiquated methods of agriculture. In Zimbabwe, we note, bureaucrats decide who stays and who goes, and who cultivates what and where. Those so chosen and directed from above are left to manage as best they can without modern equipment or expert advice. Municipalisation was not dissimilar. The old commune system of land allotment continues and is to all intents and purposes generalised.

Of course the Mensheviks were a working class trend vying for Party leadership. As such, their programme had to be subject to withering criticism. It disarmed the workers' party in the face of the challenge from peasant socialism. Furthermore, because, in defence of municipalisation, some Mensheviks, notably Pyotr Maslov, handed over opposition to private ownership to the peasant parties, it was all the more necessary to establish the programme of land nationalisation on firm theoretical foundations. Peasant socialism in Russia equated nationalisation with the repudiation of capitalism. As Lenin bluntly remarked, this was "wrong" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p314).

Private landownership hinders the investment of capital in agriculture. Peasants and small farmers often find themselves falling into debt and at the mercy of loan sharks. On big estates the tenant farmer is naturally reluctant to invest capital. In the last analysis it is the landlord, not the tenant who benefits. Nationalisation of the land would therefore actually allow the development of the purest capitalism. By removing the fetters represented by mortgages and absolute rent capitalism and capitalist competition could freely develop (the democratic state would though impose tough controls against sub-letting land, or its transfer to anyone else besides the farmer, etc).

Consequently, Lenin argued, the abolition of private landownership is the "maximum that can be done in bourgeois society" for the removal of obstacles to the "free investment in agriculture" and the "free flow of capital from one branch of production to another". The "free, wide and rapid development of capitalism" creates the conditions for the "free development of the class struggle" and the disappearance of those features which make agriculture like a "sweated" industry - that is what nationalisation under capitalist relations of production immediately promised for the Bolsheviks (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p316).

Not that either the tsarist bureaucracy or the Russian capitalist favoured land nationalisation. Both were thoroughly counterrevolutionary. Neither the big capitalist manufacturer nor the middle class lawyer would gain anything from such a measure. They preferred the Stolypin road. More than that, nationalisation of the land, albeit economically rational and progressive, would send entirely the wrong signal. An attack on the private property of the landed aristocracy would endanger all private property. The socialist proletariat is emboldened. With the eating so grows the appetite.

4. Nationalisation and strategy

Debates on the agrarian programme at the 1906 'Unity' Congress focused in the main not on theoretical issues such as absolute rent. What occupied the delegates - gathered together in the bourgeois democratic safety of Stockholm - were strategic political considerations. Plekhanov - father of Russian Marxism and most prominent figure in the Menshevik faction - admitted that his advocacy of the municipalisation of the land was motivated by fear: "The key to my position is that I draw attention to the possibility of restoration." Plekhanov cited the English and French revolutions. After the revolution came restoration. Why should Russia be different?

Plekhanov determined to reduce the harm done by restoration to a minimum. The purpose of the Party's strategy must be to uproot tsarism in terms of its economic base. "Nationalisation of the land effected during the revolutionary period does not eliminate that basis." It followed for him that nationalisation had to be classified as an "anti-revolutionary demand".

The economic basis of tsarism, lay for Plekhanov, in the subordination of the land and the cultivators themselves to the state. Here the absolutism of old Russ had its origins. In the event of restoration, nationalisation of the land by the forces of a now vanquished revolution would, despite the intentions of Lenin, actually smooth the way for the old order to fully re-establish itself. (Plekhanov's warning could be said at first glance to anticipate Stalin's post-1928 collectivisation drive which effectively re-enserfed the peasantry - that is, if one forgets the untold human and economic cost of Stalin's counterrevolution within the revolution.)

How to blunt the impact of restoration? Plekhanov had his answer ready: "In the event of restoration" municipalisation "will not surrender the land to the political representatives of the old order" (quoted in VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, pp326-27). He even tried to field the Cossacks as a splendid example of municipalisation of land under tsarism. No one, he said, would dare take their lands from them.

Lenin hit back. Firstly, the fact that the Cossacks - the military backbone of tsarism - and their 'municipalised' land were playing a counterrevolutionary role surely spoke volumes about this Menshevik recipe for defeat. Its inherent regionalism bred counterrevolution, not revolution. Secondly, there is no guarantee against restoration. Thirdly, as to general municipalisation, why should it prevent the "surrender of the land"? All that stands in the way of the counterrevolutionary state is the law of a defeated revolution. The new-old state will enact new-old laws. And in terms of peasant defence of the land they cultivate why should municipalisation put them in a stronger position than nationalisation?

Lenin inexorably pressed home the logic. The sole "absolute" guarantee against a counterrevolution in Russia is the "socialist revolution in the west". That could not be called forth at will. But a "relative and conditional" guarantee "lies in carrying out the revolution in Russia in the most far-reaching, consistent and determined manner possible". The more far-reaching the revolution, the more difficult becomes counterrevolution. And in the event of counterrevolution, the more far-reaching the revolution, the more difficult is the re-establishment of the old order.

Due to its deepness the English revolution of 1642 produced a shallow restoration of the Stewart dynasty in 1660 and in due course 1688. There was not, and nor could there be, a return to feudalism. Agrarian capitalism continued its dynamic course. A similar pattern can be observed with the French Revolution. There were many shallow restorations, and many more revolutions. But the Bourbons recognised the code civil and the revolutionary land settlement. Louis Phillipe was a bourgeois royal. Napoleon III sponsored state capitalism, not feudalism.

Nationalisation of the land in Russia under a worker-peasant republic is a more profound political break with tsarism than local administration of the land. The former requires, and calls forth, "greater revolutionary energy, intelligence and organisation". The former creates popular institutions and a democratic culture which is difficult, though as Stalin showed not impossible, to eliminate.

Economically nationalisation of the land destroys the whole of the old order. Both the latifunda and the tiny peasant plots are cleared away in favour of a form of organisation conducive to farming techniques using scientific methods and machines.

To return such land to the system prevalent in tsarist Russia - ie, subsistence agriculture on the peasant plots and the use of semi-serf labour on the estates of the nobility - would be a massive regression in terms of productivity. Millions of new, efficient farms must be destroyed. Furthermore, surely the new class of farmers will tenaciously resist. As essentially a reorganisation, and thus a continuation, of the old commune system, municipalisation presents no such social barrier to counterrevolution. All that is required is a change in the law. Lands owned by "municipality X is transferred to the noble landlords Y, Z, etc" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p328). Instead of paying rent to the municipal authorities the landlords again collect.

Local democracy along the lines recommended by the Mensheviks can hardly provide the most powerful democratic safeguard against counterrevolution. Nor could it consolidate the gains of the revolution, as they claimed. Semi-anarchist moonshine. The Mensheviks recoiled from the idea of a centralised state and sought refuge in localism. They were haunted by the autocratic tsarist state. Soon renewed faith in the revolutionary, or failing that the reformist, potential of the liberal bourgeoisie would further disorientate them.

Lenin for his part had little problem in countering the Mensheviks' muddle. The most effective barrier to reaction is found in the class consciousness and organisation of workers and peasants. Basic stuff. Naturally, if conditions allowed, their organisations of struggle must be taken to the qualitative summit where they constitute a centralised revolutionary authority established on the ruins of the old order and continued as a centralised state so as to guard against counterrevolutionary restoration. Lenin's guiding slogan could be paraphrased as 'centralism, centralism, centralism': "Without a centralised peasant movement, without a centralised nationwide political struggle of the peasantry led by a centralised proletariat, there can be no serious 'revolutionary gains' worthy of consideration; there can be no bulwark against reaction" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p332).

No one, not least Lenin and the Bolsheviks, were rejecting local self-government and democracy. However, they saw this rounding out and extension of mass democracy as dependent on the destruction of tsarism and as a component part of a centralised state authority, not a substitute for it. Disunity, localism, parochialism are no way to fight a revolution nor combat counterrevolutionary attempts by reaction.

True, Lenin was convinced that Russia had only two paths before it historically. Evidently he was wrong in terms of prediction. But simply to dismiss his writings circa 1907 from the 20x20 Olympian heights of the 21st century is to miss the fundamentally correct class analysis he put forward.

Russia could evolve in an 'American' manner through a peasant revolution and a proletarian-led state which looks to the socialist revolution in the west. Remember the NEP experiment lasted till 1928. What was the other road? It was Stolypin's landlord progress on the model of Prussian junkerdom and a capitalism least favourable to the forces of democracy and socialism.

Despite this insightful but flawed 'either-or' reasoning, Lenin nevertheless rightly concluded that the Party had to embrace the peasants' revolutionary determination and hunger for land. Plekhanov's suggestion that the peasants represented a reserve force for Asiatic reaction ought to be dismissed. To his everlasting credit Lenin fully grasped the fact that the only radical bourgeois element in Russia was not the Mensheviks' cultured liberal, but the ignorant muzhik, "who is being driven into his grave by the old Russia", yet "is capable of striving for the complete renovation of the system of landownership" (VI Lenin CW Vol 13, Moscow 1977, p322).

Before the revolution against tsarism the peasantry as a whole supports the proletariat as the most determined and most capable fighter for land nationalisation, said Lenin. After the revolution the rich peasant, or what is now the farmer, must be drawn towards a certain degree of restoration by their desire to secure larger and larger holdings and a legally binding right over the land. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks the proletariat alone is the truly revolutionary class in modern society because uniquely it seeks to abolish all private property.